To Trollope-l
November 26, 2001
Re: An Eye for an Eye, Chs 13-16: A Fallen Woman; Great and Terrible is the Power of Money
What impressed me reading these four chapters once again is how central is Kate's "fall:" once she gives in to Fred, there is a striking permanent shift in his attitude towards her and towards whether he will marry her.
This change is dramatized and commented on by Trollope several times. It begins with the paragraph after which Chapter 13 is named:
"From bad to worse! Alas, alas; there came a day in which the pricelessness of the girl he loved sank to nothing, vanished away, and was as a thing utterly lost, even in his own eyes ..."
The narrator takes the attitude that Kate succumbed because her relatives didn't protect her; he says that she yielded all to him because he was all-in-all to her,
"godlike, noble, excellent, all but holy. He was the man whom Fotune, more than kind had sent to her to be the joy of her existence ... Not to believe in him would be the foulest treason! To lose him woudl be to die! To deny him would be to deny her God! She gave him all -- and her pricelessness in his eyes was gone for ever."
In the next paragraph his treatment of her is swiftly changed to "rougher", more careless:
"It was absurd he thought to stand upon any ceremony with her. He was very good to her, and inteneded to be always good to her, but it was esentially necessary to him to know the truth. He was not aware, perhaps, that he was becoming rougher ..."
And now she is all "awe", all "obedience", and eager to tell him whatever she knows about her father. He seems to think that now he's had her nothing can make any "difference" between them; ironically, there is now real difference between them of a sort very painful: he is far more valuable to her than she is to him because they cannot escape the way the outside world views their behavior and status (Oxford An Eye for An Eye, ed Sutherland, Ch 16, pp. 108-9).
When the marriage comes up now, he backs off; he is certain he can't: he looks at her mother when she comes to demand he marry her daughter now that she's pregnant and thinks how she is "unfitted"; the narrator talks of how he has "dishonoured this woman's daughter" (pp. 126-7). It is a continual refrain.
There is some interest here in comparing this to what happens to Lily Dale. There Trollope is far more enigmatic and ambiguous and we are never sure. If she and Adolphus did after that kiss lay down in the grass, she did not get pregnant. It did not go on and on repeatedly. The situations are the same in a central way: both girls regard the young man as their bethrothed and talk about him as if he were their husband. Lily says she is Adolphus' wife; Mrs O'Hara says to the Father she can do nothing to stop the meetings, as now Kate regards him as her husband ("She regards him as her husband before God", p. 107).
Stone talks of how engaged couples were allowed enormous freedom and how the record and attitudes towards engagement suggest that depending on the individual couple's circumstances and religion, they often did consummate their love.
The difference is Lily is English and whatever occurrred is therefore not repeatable. In Lily's case the men of the family confront Adolphus. And she doesn't drop out of the text. Upon Kate giving herself wholly to Fred, she begins to disappear. We hear no more from her. She is in another room. It reminds me of how Trollope treated Lady Fitzgerald in Castle Richmond. Nowadays we are so alive to silences, to what ought to be in a text and suddenly vanishes. Kate becomes the polluted sacred object as Lily does not -- except in her own troubled mind. Kate is now "abject" and then upon becoming pregnant is in a desperate situation.
Biographers, critics and readers all alike have speculated on the autobiography of the scene which obsessively repeats in Trollope's fiction: the young man is in his "lair" (office, barracks) and to him comes this harridan of a fierce woman and demands he do justice to her daughter. He is mortified. In An Autobiography Trollope suggests such a scene did occur but also insinuates his relationship with the girl was not so far gone (full sexual intercourse) as to demand he make reparation; also that she was beneath him in class. In the "Introduction to An Eye for an Eye Sutherland wonders how much Trollope has softened the reality: perhaps the girl did get pregnant; at least it seems to Sutherland the strength of intensity, the passion and repetition suggests that Trollope certainly "had" the young woman fully.
Sutherland says these scenes in An Eye for an Eye were among the most explicit anyone in Victorian fiction ever wrote for the bourgeois reader, and he was castigated for them. He kept the manuscript in his desk for 7 years :).
Trollope does present Father Marty sympathetically: Marty was taking a chance; he could not foresee that Fred would betray his word; he knew that Kate had little chance to meet someone who would be emotionally and intellectually her equal; he hoped even if she emerged "scorched" she would survive the blow (p. 115). He didn't foresee how deeply the love-making would go; the pregnancy and especially the father.
It is left ambiguous what Mrs O'Hara knew about her husband. There seems to be enough there to suggest she had no evidence he was dead; she just hoped it. She is not surprized to see him turn up. He really is a sleaze, a man without a drop of self-respect, a desperate remittance man. Oddly enough Fred can cope in the way society wants in this respect: the double code (he is not polluted apparently), his sense of himself as an aristocrat (thus he is "above" his de facto or prospective father-in-law, though his conduct has been in some ways worse -- the Captain married Mrs O'Hara); and of course money. He has money.
These four chapters contain one of those resonant lines of Trollope's fiction and like the others it is so simply stated:
Great and terrible is the power of money
Imagine had Kate had a fortune of her own. She would not have been living on that isolated cliff. I don't find Fred admirable when he takes command because he didn't earn that money. It's just another aspect of the savagely unjust social arrangements laid bare before us in these Victorian novels.
Ellen
To Trollope-l
Re: An Eye for an Eye, Chs 13-16: The Captain: A Version of Fred without Rank and Money
November 28, 2001
Todd wrote:
I think it is interesting to think about Fred in relation to the character of Captain O'Hara, who appears on the scene in this week's chapters. From Father Marty we learn that however disreputable he may be now the captain, like Fred, had been well born. Father Marty points out, however, trying to give Fred a warning, that the captain wasn't a gentleman - "because he ill-treated a woman." Knowing what we know about Fred, we know that he follows the captain in this particular, too. We also learn that the captain had been involved in "a swindling operation" in Bordeaux. This is perhaps a lower form of what Fred had planned for himself and Kate when he considered continuing his adventures in some "sunny distant clime." He would swindle Kate out of her rightful place as his wife. Eventually he gives up even that (bad) idea and, in short, plans to do to Kate what Kate's father had done to her mother - i.e., desert her. Ironically he thinks of using the captain - the fact that he's disreputable and has been in jail - as the means of his own escape from his marriage obligation. When the captain shows up in the cottage, looking very bad, Fred is disgusted, but what he really sees is a version of himself.Todd
Yes. What Fred sees is a version of himself without money. The great irony of the scene is that Fred rises above the Captain and thinks he is so very much better, but the reason he rises above is he is his uncle's heir, and what has he done to earn this? Not even been able to refrain from betraying Kate when his uncle had specifically and in the most humane terms prayed him not to.
I am wondering if there is any other hero whom Trollope is so frank about and provides a double for. There are a number of them who are equally ambiguous: I mentioned Adolphus Crosbie, Frank Tregear (who is rewarded -- no poetic justice there), Frank Houston (ditto just the monetary gain is less), but none that I can remember is presented as a parallel to the several older men in the novels whom Trollope presents as ultimate sleazes (e.g., the fathers in The Bertrams, The Vicar of Bullhampton, Phineas Redux).
Ellen
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001
Re: An Eye For an Eye: Generation to Generation
Dear all
Todd (also) wrote:
I think it is interesting to think about Fred in relation to the character of Captain O'Hara, who appears on the scene in this week's chapters. From Father Marty we learn that however disreputable he may be now the captain, like Fred, had been well born. Father Marty points out, however, trying to give Fred a warning, that the captain wasn't a gentleman - "because he ill-treated a woman." Knowing what we know about Fred, we know that he follows the captain in this particular, too. We also learn that the captain had been involved in "a swindling operation" in Bordeaux. This is perhaps a lower form of what Fred had planned for himself and Kate when he considered continuing his adventures in some "sunny distant clime." He would swindle Kate out of her rightful place as his wife. Eventually he gives up even that (bad) idea and, in short, plans to do to Kate what Kate's father had done to her mother - i.e., desert her. Ironically he thinks of using the captain - the fact that he's disreputable and has been in jail - as the means of his own escape from his marriage obligation. When the captain shows up in the cottage, looking very bad, Fred is disgusted, but what he really sees is a version of himself.
This hadn't struck me at all until I read your post, Todd, but it seems just right, and was surely intended by Trollope. Fred is all too ready to condemn others for not being quite good enough for him, without realising that he himself is dismally failing to live up to the standards he sets for them. I think your point ties in with the discussion of Mrs O'Hara and Lady Scroope, whose experiences are also echoed by the younger generation. Both of them are in a way trying to live their lives again through younger women, Kate and Sophie respectively. Mrs O'Hara was deserted by her husband. This makes her determined to ensure that her daughter will not be abandoned by her lover - she will make sure he does not escape, at whatever cost. As her fierceness grows, it is hard to see whether she is really thinking of her daughter or of herself, or if she is making any distinction at all between the two. She is determined to take her revenge on the younger man for the way in which she herself was treated by her husband.
Similarly, it seems as if Lady Scroope is determined to play out her own youthful life again through Sophie. The lady of the house has always been obsessed with her noble birth and married for status rather than love - in the first chapter of the novel comes this chilling passage: "But she would have wedded no commoner, let his wealth and age have been as they might. She knew Lord Scroope's age, and she knew the gloom of Scroope Manor; and she became his wife." To me somehow this passage seems to suggest the couple's loveless sex life without actually stating anything about it, just in the telling phrase "She became his wife". Lady Scroope herself made a suitable match, so Sophie must do the same. She did not allow herself the luxuries of romantic love or sexual attraction, so the younger generation cannot be permitted to indulge in these things either. One reason for her fierceness against Kate - a girl she has never seen - is surely that Kate has done just what she herself never had the chance to do, and chosen a young mate for herself. Although Kate and Fred's relationship might be unsuitable socially, it is far more suitable in terms of mutual attraction than the Scroopes' eminently respectable, sterile marriage.
We've had some discussion of Fred's passion for shooting birds and seals, and I feel this is very much linked with his pursuit of Kate. He comes to the wild coast not just to admire the beauty he finds, but to possess it, and destroy it in that act of possession. He shoots the birds and seals, and he seduces Kate - then he casts them all aside. The shot birds and seals are only any use for their feathers and skins, no longer things to marvel at. Similarly, when he seduces Kate, she instantly loses all her worth in his eyes, and it becomes impossible to consider marrying her. I'm reminded of Ophelia's rhyme in 'Hamlet': "Quoth she, before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed. And I would have done, by yonder sun, Hadst thou not come to my bed." Just how far back does this strange idea go, that a woman becomes morally unfit to marry a man by having sex with that very man?
I've just finished reading Richardson's 'Pamela', which is centred on the same idea - Pamela bravely defends her virtue against Mr B, and as a result he marries her. 'Virtue Rewarded' is the subtitle of the novel. His former lover, Sally Godfrey, succumbed to his advances and bore his child, so therefore became impure and had to be shipped off to the West Indies, to find a husband who did not know about her past.
I think An Eye for an Eye brilliantly questions this double standard and makes it clear that Trollope saw it for just what it was. For me, one of the most powerful things about this novel is Fred's obtuseness, the way his thoughts go round and round in circles. Other characters can explain things to him until they are blue in the face, but he still continues to ignore the reality around him and think that a morganatic marriage might be possible. He still continues to think that Kate and her mother should be grateful for whatever he is prepared to spare from the rich man's table.
The strangest thing perhaps is how little Fred seems to care about his own child. As he tries to break free from the mother, all he is concerned about is ensuring that the unborn baby cannot inherit. He too is planning to punish the next generation, it seems.
Bye for now
Judy Geater
Re: An Eye for an Eye: Generation to Generation
This is in response to Judy and Kristi,
Kristi's metaphor seems to sum up what is deeply awry in the societies (two of them, linked but separate) that Trollope pictures for us:
"I'm not sure it is always, actually, a question of morality, however it may be rationalized by the man in question. I think it is the old, ugly, question of 'why buy the cow when the milk's free'?"
Indeed it is not a question of morality. It is not even a question of sex. Towards the end of her posting Judy suggested it is strange that Fred cares so little for his coming child. In a way it's not strange at all; it fits in. In the folk saying quoted by Kristi, she captures the explanation: in this novel Trollope dramatizes for us everywhere Kant's observation that the kernel of amorality and the banal everyday cruelties of our world, which include forcing upon people decisions that will make them personally unhappy for life is that people use one another as things. Kant puts it that instead of interacting with people for their own sake, valuing them, they become instruments to us, means to a end which serves our appetites.
I just finished reading La Princesse de Clèves, probably for the umpteenth time. Like An Eye for an Eye it is short but is not the less significant for that, perhaps more graphic. I also for the first time read what was written by those people who lived at the time it was written in angry protest at it. They said the heroine was "unbelievable." Why? In the story the heroine falls in love with a man who is not her husband; in her efforts to stay chaste and to remain close to her husband utterly, she tells her husband of this love. What the people at the time were protesting again was their disbelief that this woman could treat her husband as an aspect of herself instead of someone she is endlessly to manipulate for their own ends. Even in marriage, we are not to confide in the other person trustingly; we are to see them as "the other" who we are using. They were angry because the story presented the heroine as admirable and loving for telling the husband.
Fred cares not for the child as he cares not for anything other than ultimately as it is useful to himself. People are "its". The Countess of Scroope behaves the same way towards others.
Judy brings out a latent element in Todd's astute observation that Fred is another Captain -- to which I added with the difference he's got money. She suggests that the older generation are living out their own hatreds and resentments through the younger one. This sounds Lacanian: people again don't look at one another as they really are, but as figures in our minds that mirror our angers, desires, resentments, longings, and this mirror shapes their reality for us.
Lacan can be seen as a development out of Kant. Lacan explains how it is that people continually treat one another as instruments (as cows, as purses, as titles to be applied) and yet live with themselves comfortably. They see the others through a mirror of their own mind. They even let that mirror image control their behavior: they imagine this other person is feeling this or that as a result of their own predilections and then they allow this perception of the other to control them. The ending of Lady Anna shows us the Countess of Lovel living a life which is the product of just such a delusion: it is really childish because it depends on overestimating your importance to others. The reality is others didn't give a damn about the Countess for real -- except as gossip with which to bind themselves to a community defined by what they are not (in this case the Countess). Trollope's use of the letters in the novels shows us how gossip works, and how we distort everyone else by what is in our mind.
I am not sure though that we should go too far over the Countess's response to Kate or Kate's mother's response to her. I can't see that the Countess is jealous of Kate for living as she's never lived. I believe all I have said above is in Trollope's text. There is nothing in Trollope's text to suggest the Countess ever wanted to have a full sex life, or to live vitally; she sees Kate from afar as simply inferior, as a thing, a category, a low class Irish girl who is "easy". She does identify with Sophie but on a class level. The Countess's appetites are for title, money; she has never opened herself up to anything but a kind weak old man who seems never to have awakened her to anything beyond physical comforts of rank and unpleasant easy conversation. It's not irrelevant that the Countess never got pregnant even though she was old when she and the Earl married. Trollope makes her dried up.
Similarly I am not sure we should see Kate's mother as behaving destructively towards Kate. The destructive behavior was in not preventing the young man from coming in the first place, though I think Trollope works hard to make that understandable. Kate was so isolated; she had nothing; she was hungry for life. The mother couldn't deny her; she hadn't the unkindness, the hardness. It would have had to be prudential: and perhaps like the father she hoped for better. After all Fred came in a polite way, kept coming, in words engaged himself. Many another of Trollope's heroes would not have done this at all; they would have taken what they could and left. Fred dies, as I suggested, because he is not ruthless enough. He does have a heart. I can imagine that had he lived to see the child it would have hurt him to see it grow up without education, rank, title. He is not the sleaze Jack de Baron nor the fathers we meet in The Bertrams. He is just weak and ultimately stupid, not perceptive enough.
And yes Trollope's novel brilliantly questions the double standard but as I say he goes beyond this: he places the sexual exploitation and Fred's sudden dismissal of Kate as an object he no longer respects and has used to his satisfaction in a text where everything is so regarded, where people altogether twist one another as instruments for their ends. The reason Richard Holt Hutton's critical essay on this book is so good is he sees this larger true moral:
Of all the strange perversions of which the moral nature of men is capable, probably none is stranger than the tendency of certain so- called 'social obligations' to over- ride entirely the simpler personal obligations in certain men's breasts, and yet to work there with all the force of a high duty ..."
Readers of La Princesse de Clèves said it was her duty not to tell her husband as it had been her duty to marry a man she didn't love to aggrandize her relatives' power. We call using others as means to an end "social obligations".
I would like though to bring up a counter view: I wonder what would happen to society if people's appetites didn't even have this control. The shared, agreed-upon selfishness of the strong to exploit and despise the weak is what society is partly built on. It's called mutual self-interest and we say it's the parents' duty to teach children to behave this way to protect themselves. My point is An Eye for an Eye finally an idealised book. It shows people trying to be good, kidding themselves. My experience teaches me the world is filled with people who don't kid themselves, or only half-kid themselves. It doesn't take much to get them to wink at you, suddenly make some comment which reveals they are playing games in order to feed their appetites whatever these may be. Richard's presence on this list makes me think of this because it makes me remember Stevenson whose view of the world is much darker than Trollope's -- at least as seen in some of those by Stevenson I've read and in most of Trollope's books.
Cheers to all,
Ellen