Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 19:18:55 -0000
From: "Catherine Crean"
Subject: [trollope-l] The women of Framley Parsonage

From: "Catherine Crean"

I have enjoyed all the posts on Framley Parsonage almost as much as the book itself. In particular, I agree with Ellen's comments about the friendships between women in the novel. Lucy and her sister in law have a lovely relationship. The scene where Lucy confesses her love for Lord Lufton (down to describing on which flower of the carpet each of them had stood) moved me to tears. What special pleasures there are in close friendships between women! Like Ellen, I also enjoy the diplomatic relations between Lady Lufton and Mrs. Grantly. This is a delightful subplot in the novel. Most of all, I would like to second Ellen's opinion that Mrs. Crawley is the true source of strength in the Crawley household. That she really loves her difficult husband is evident, but she her suffering and endurance has an ennobling quality that is different from the typical "Angel at the Hearth" - Esther Summerson variety. I wonder if Framley Parsonage was so popular because women readers appreciated the wonderful women of Framley?

From: "Catherine Crean"
Reply-To: trollope-l@onelist.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Griselda in motion

From: "Catherine Crean"

I also loved Griselda Grantly. She is one of Trollope's delightful recurring characters. Her marboreal beauty, her perfect selfish possession, and her utterly empty head make her comical in the extreme. One thing I wonder though. Griselda is described as being "like a statue" and, in Lady Lufton's mind, an ideal of vis inertiae. It seems like a contradiction when Trollope mentions how adept Griselda is as a dancer. She really "cuts the rug" on the dance floor. Didn't she snap her marriage proposal from Lord Dumbello while the two of them were waltzing? For a woman of stone, she is light on her feet!

Catherine Crean

From: "Catherine Crean"
Reply-To: trollope-l@onelist.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Women who kick against the pricks

From: "Catherine Crean"

Ellen, I was indeed the one who said that Trollope admired women with "a little spunk" - a spot of rebellion. But these women in the end, stuck to their duty. The phrase I'm thinking of is the Trollope liked women "who kick against the pricks." (For those of you on the Victoria-L list, here is another horse/sex analogy!) Trollope also had a need for his spunky heroines (Glencora, Alice Vavasor, e.g.) to submit to their husbands almost masochistically. On the other hand, Trollope wrote about sexual incompatibility quite frankly. He does have cases where a woman leaves her husband, but she leaves in retreat, a defeated person, shunned by society. Trollope's ambivalence is appealing to me. He doesn't create any Esther Summersons that's for sure. When Lucy Robarts is being an Angel at the Hearth she plies her needle, but she doesn't rattle any baskets of keys. For a Victorian Angel, Lucy is down to earth and resourceful. Just comparing Lucy Robarts to Esther Summerson reminds me of the reasons that I like Trollopes women so much.

Catherine Crean

To Trollope-l

Re: Framley Parsonage: Iron Blondes and Joanna Trollope Ah yes Joanne Trollope. Dagny and Catherine's posts remind us how many sequels -- in effect -- there have been to the Framley Parsonage set. Jill is on an Angela Thirkell list. Popularity has its dangers or risks: among them, careless mischaracterisation meant to make the work appear yet more popular. Joanna Trollope's description of Griselda Grantly as a 'dumb blonde' may be understood as an attempt to make Framley Parsonage seem readily available to the the least subtle of the modern TV audience, but it erases the actual experience of Trollope's text.

By using such reductive language Joanna Trollope performs the function of throwing into high relief the actual psychological persuasiveness of Trollope's portrait of Griselda. I thought of how steely cold she is, and how as the world understands these things, anything but dumb: she is cunning on behalf of her own interests, shrewd and smart. Griselda enacts that kind of meanness which resides in appearing obtuse about the feelings or intangible needs of others when they don't serve her interests: she gets away with this because she knows how to point out to those she finds herself allied with that paying attention to such things doesn't serve their interests either. In Griselda's exchanges with Mrs Grantly and one remarkably efficient letter, she makes Mrs Grantly seem one of the more tenderly humane and decent characters in the book. Even Dr Grantly appears weak and sentimental in comparison. A blonde who has iron rather than blood and calcium running under her flesh, one with big breasts that make her attractive to mindless men that's how I suggest Trollope wants us to see Griselda.

One of the great ironies of the portrait is caught up in the character's allegorical-resonant name: Griselda knows how to play the apparent role of submissive fecund woman to get what she wants. In her set-to with her husband in The Small House, she manipulates conventional virtue (apparent sexlessness, strict faithfulness to her stick of a husband) to prove to us once again (we learned this in Dr Thorne) the truth of Ambrose Bierce's definition that duty is 'that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire'.

PS: The new Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope includes an entry for Joanna: Born in 1943, she belong 'to a branch of the family, the "Westminster Trollopes", who descend from one of Anthony's great-uncles'. Alas, we are not told which one.

Ellen Moody

-- "I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever" ----Elizabeth Gaskell

To Trollope-l

February 28, 2000

Re: Framley Parsonage: Lucy and Josiah

We have not talked enough about Lucy and Josiah. Trollope got a great kick out of having Lucy replace Mary Crawley in the Crawley household; thematically the scenes between them may be read as so much Angel in the House, but the tone is one of touching cordiality as this Insignificant Woman shows herself to be the only person in the novel to take over Crawley and make him do her bidding or just sit quietly, viz.,

In truth, in these days, he had given himself over to the dominion of this stranger; and he said nothing beyond, 'Well, well', with two uplifted hands, when he came upon her as she was sewing the buttons on to his own shirts -- sewing on the buttons and perhaps occasionally applying her needle elsewhere -- not without utility (Penguin FP, ed DSkilton, Ch 43, p 500).

That last enigmatic reference is actually quietly risqué. Lucy is sewing Josiah's underwear. Today we look upon sewing as a powerless activity; not in the days before sewing machines became available to the average woman or were to be found in thousands of rows in factories, not in the days before department stores. Sewing was serious work.

Have others noticed how often when Crawley is brought forward he is presented in terms of a bare yet pastoral landscape? In this he resembles the Rev Samuel Saul in The Claverings. The two men are much alike: Saul seems to be a younger version of Crawley, surrounded by thousands of books falling on his head in a house which is socially unacceptable (no rugs, no tableclothes), unmarried, deeply serious: in those scenes in The Claverings where he appears we have our few notes of summer landscape and comic romance:

It was now the middle of May, and the spring was giving way to the early summer almost before the spring had itself arrived. It is so, I think, in these latter years. The sharpness of March prolongs itself almost through April; and then, while we are still hoping for the spring, there falls upon us suddenly a bright, dangerous, delicious gleam of summer . . .

'But, Mr Saul -- ' [the heroine] began again, and then feeling that she must go on, she forced herself to utter words which at the time she felt to be commonplace. 'People canot marry without an income. Mr Fielding did not think of such a thing until he had a living assured to him'.

'But, independently, of that, might I hope?'

She ventured for an instant to glance at his face, and saw that his eyes were glistening with a wonderful brightness' (Oxford Claverings, ed DSkilton, Ch 43, pp. 238 & 241)

Framley Parsonageis not just sweet stuff: remember Chaldicotes, the Duke, Sowerby, the lawyers, Fothergill, Mr and Mrs Harold Smith. Crawley's landscape is natural and captures something of his touching nature, but is shot through with bareness, a sense of something still chill in the air that makes me think of spring in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale:

he walked alone thinking of the general bitterness of his lot in life, began to move slowly along the road in front of his house. He did not invite the other [Arabin] to walk with him, but neither was there anything in his manner which seemed to indicate that he had intended to be left to himself. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, at that delicious period of the year when summer has just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness ... [all fragrant, all sweet, the cuckoo, apple blossoms, sweet May hedges and yet] the leaves did not hang heavy in masses, and the bend of every bough and the tapering curve of every twig was visible through their light green covering ... (Penguin FP, Ch 36, p 429).

What saves the portrait of Crawley and Lucy is the quiet bareness and undercutting (as I've argued). In a later novel (The Last Chronicle) Trollope will pick up the subject of the man's intelligence, nobility of aspiration, and the reality that most people despised him all the more for that as it made his lack of status and money all the harder to bear. It is also saved by the comedy of Lucy's power over him. After all he is easy to stifle, easy to bully. That is why he has failed in the world.

There are the quiet ironic contrasts. The portrait of Lucy and Josiah at home occurs in the chapter called 'Is She Insignificant?' Lady Lufton says so, and Lord Lufton blurts out noises in response against her words, but no reasoned argument. The argument is in the dramatization of Lucy's behavior at Hogglestock, and in how she enables Lady Lufton (like Crawley in this) to remain apparently in charge at the close of the book.

I like Lucy and find her another strong character in the book. A kind of Dorothea Brooke without the density of intellectual endeavour. Probably one reason I strongly prefer Lucy Robarts -- as well as Mary Thorne and Lucy Morris -- to some of Trollope's other virginal heroines is I can't stand sexless female characters who are coy. I also find her impressive as a lover. She and Lufton's courtship is believable; Lucy is made of flesh and blood, and it's clear she is physically attracted to Lufton -- as he is to her smallness :). There is some remarkably subtle writing in the scenes between Fanny Robarts and Lucy when Lucy confesses her love too. One line I liked especially: 'Oh Fanny, is it his legs, think you, or is it his title?'

Again the surface or thematically we may say Lucy fits the stereotypical thinking of her day and probably partly our own too, but when you look into the details of the presentation well beyond the Victorian attention to rank, money and obedience to the dense because it's the prudent thing to do. A different aristocracy is suggested: one of the spirit, of integrity, of kindliness and sensitivity. In such a world Crawley would do all right. That is why he and Lucy are linked in FP. Their opposite number is Griselda Grantly, and we should not miss her going as prize to Lord Dumb-bell who of course all the world conspire to tell us is significant. Perhaps he is -- it depends what you value, what you want out of your life. None of the charcters are real people. I know that it's so common for readers to say is this a character I would like to have dinner with. But that is to pull them out of their design and start to talk about how many children they have we haven't been told about. They are all rhetorical shaped presences, believable enough, put into a design meant to speak to us about our choices and our chosen constraints.

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

To Trollope-l

February 28, 2000

Re: Framley Parsonage: Lucy Robarts, Heroine

In response to Rory, yes Lucy is brave because she risks her life. This point is made many times in the fiction: when the Crawley children are sent to the Robarts parsonage, they are kept in quarantine first; several of the characters point out Lucy's danger, including Crawley himself; immediately upon accepting Lucy and Lufton's engagement, Lady Lufton acts to remove Lucy because this is a serious illness. It's hard to tell what the illness is because the 19th century did not share our understanding of disease and etiology, but certainly typhoid fever would fit.

I alsoe Lucy Robarts -- and Mary Thorne, and Lucy Morris -- because they are the underdogs of this world. Yes they are. Powerless on their own. Very like Crawley again. When I am asked to care about the great troubles of some of Trollope's chaste exemplary heroines and I see how upper middle class they are, how protected and sheltered, and find their big decision of whether they should marry this equally privileged gentleman or that is supposed to be taken by me as of earth- shaking importance, I can't identify. Nor with their troubles. What troubles? I guess I often talk about this because this kind of sheltered heroine whose choice of a husband is supposed to be so important occurs frequently not only in Trollope's but other Victorian novels. This because such women when they are young were an important part of Trollope and other middle class Victorian novelists' readership.

Trollope has a peculiar and ambivalent attitude towards his chaste heroines. Speaking sexually, he says it is attractive to gentlemen to have as wives women who have this 'shine' of unshaken self-pride and self-possession. It increases his appetite: he finds it piquant. I believe Catherine Crean spoke of this earlier this week. It is also a way of increasing their self-respect: look I have this hard-to-get and therefore trustworthy woman. Lucy doesn't have the punctilio and hard pride of an Eleanor Bold. Trollope also often shows dislike and fear of the older woman who is not chaste. His heroes see these women as fearful and untamable. I see this as a failure of the imagination on Trollope's part. And naivete and class prejudice.

Yet he dislikes the coy, the prurient and the cold. He dislikes the way Griselda uses her sex and coldness to sell herself. Lucy declares she does not love Lufton because she needs protection against her love for him and his power and wealth, not because she thinks being stand-offish is a way to show the world how valuable she is. We are supposed to find her appealing because of this, and I here do. I suppose it's a relief to read a novel where I can like the heroine Trollope means me to like. I'll add a few more I like: Nina Balatka, Marie Bromar, Florence Burton, Alice Vavasour & Lily Dale (though these last 2 are both such complicated figures I suppose they ought not to be categorised with the type I am referring to)

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Reply-To: trollope-l@onelist.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Victorian Novels: Women Have Died for Many Things, but how often for Sexual Love?

March 1, 2000

From: Ellen Moody

I wrote:

"What I was getting at was the importance in some of the books about which young man the chaste relatively comfortable heroine would marry."

To which Rory replied:

"But isn't that what makes the story? One could ask who, that considers marriage seriously, does not agonize over such a decision on their own account?"

I replied: When it is the whole of the story, it is inadequate -- and in a number of the subplots of Trollope's novels it is handled fatuously. I'd go farther and say one problem with the Victorian English novel is that it is primarily often a love story. People still marry far more for position a nd a hope of large income, and that is but one element in a larger picture. One reason I like Shakespeare is most of his plays keep loves stories in their place.

Trollope does have a novel which he makes 'minced meat' of the love decision: Ayala's Angel, except of course if the reader is so disposed she can fall for the false dream again. Don't get me wrong: were it true that people did and do marry for love, die for it -- and a very few do -- I could see it. But not the pretense. And certainly not the pretense when it is presented in such as way as to emasculate the reality, which is a foundation in sex, physical appetite and all the psychological joy and corrosion that goes with it.

To put it bluntly, it's the phoniness I object to. The lies in these stories. And the puffing up of the presumed virginal middle class woman reader to think what she does in this area is so very important in the schemes of the world.

[Gentle reader, I did not write but thought of writing the followng:

Who could endure it who has lived in the real world? The next thing someone will be telling me is these heroines are "precariously privileged". Spare me.]

Ellen

To Trollope-l

February 23, 2000

Re: Framley Parsonage: Chs 47-48: Happily Ever After?

What saves this book from becoming pabulum at the close is the continual ironic undercutting and Trollope's own insistence on its fictionality. Trollope has been castigated for his refusal to take the stance of a historian/biographer by many a literary critic and practitioner of the realistic novel. They are simply wrong because we all know we are reading a book as we read and Trollope is merely exploiting this second sense of ourselves as readers in chairs while we imagine we are in Barsetshire. By taking the stance of a storyteller, he reminds the reader that such poetic justice only occurs in fiction, and saves the vision of the novel from the charge of fatuous complacency at its end. We are his "dear, sympathetic, affectionate readers" and the happy ending is attributed to our very desire to be moral, to be good, to see all happy who deserve it and all unhappy who don't. As you frame yourself, so others will understand you. So Trollope frames us as moral, and insinuates idealism into the fiction event's without requiring us to believe such things regularly happen.

The continual ironic undercutting is to be found in the telling of each character's story. There are continual hints that this is real life and while much was from now on enjoyed, there was also much compromise and much to be endured. This note is solidly struck in the concluding couple's marriage. What less fairytale like than to present Lucy and Lufton's marriage as disillusion?:

But it was October before Lord Lufton was made a happy man; -- that is, if the fruition of his happiness was a greater joy than the anticipation of it. I will not say that the happiness of marriage is like the Dead Sea Fruit, -- an apple which, when eaten turns to bitter ashes in the mouth. Such pretended sarcasm would be very false. Nevertheless, is it not the fact that the sweetest morsel of love's feast has been eaten, that the fairest, freshest blush of the flower has been snatched, and passed away, when the ceremony at the altar has been performed ,and legal possession has been given ... (Penguin FP, ed DSkilton, Ch 48, p. 558)

I remember reading how G. H. Lewes and his Polly (aka George Eliot) took this passage of irony as the prime message of this close and objected.

Not content with this version of Balzac's 'Le dégoût, ce'st voir juste. Après la possession, l'amour voit juste chez les hommes", Trollope throws us back in time to a scene where Lord Lufton insists on Lucy admitting to him that she loved him when he first asked her to marry him. Why does she feel this demand that she reveal her need for him thus early in their relationship to be a sort of punishment, a revenge? Because one element in love is that of triumph and control and power; we want the beloved to admit they want to be ours. Such vulnerability is dangerous, unsafe -- and therefore delicious. 'Le frisson de l'amour' always has its masochistic/sadistic streak. The narrator pictures Lucy as laughing for after all she is the winner as he himself has just defined it: the man about to be married in Trollope's fiction is the captured, the tamed. Still he also insists: 'she was now in his power, and he had his revenge'. A playful one, but still ....

And then he ends on Lady Lufton's not really yielding her place to Lucy at all, but all conspiring to pretend she has so as to keep up those important appearances which so soothe pride.

We learn that another function of hauling in Mrs Proudie as malicious clown was to forever cast some doubt on Lord Dumbello's motives. The narrator concedes that it cannot be denied that Dumbello went to Paris, and suggest Mrs Proudie is not wrong to surmize it in Archdeacon Grantly's character to have chased the young man down to Paris and brought him back. Then the irony with which the ceremony at the Parsonage is described. The Hartletopians certainly didn't want it there; what joy is there in Griselda's four words and her one parting adieu: "'Mamma", she said, "I suppose Jane can put her hand at once on the moire antique when we reach Dover'" (p. 556). The momentary sense of something hollow, empty at the center of it all is disspelled when the marriage is seen to be such a success because, forsooth, Griselda is significant. She looks right; she awes. The irony here has been provided by the debate over Lucy's insignificance.

I thought also suggestively charged the final comment we have on this happy pair. Griselda "sees all that she ought to see, and nothing that she ought not to" (p. 556). If only all of us could come up to that, we would know similar happiness.

The "ordeal" (Trollope's word) of the marriage of the Ticklers needs no words from me to bring out the lack of real cheer or any kindness here. I could only think poor Mr Tickler except anyone who could chose to marry into the Proudie must deserve them. Poetic justice, once again :).

We do have Dr Thorne and Miss Dunstable's marriage. It is presented with the least irony. We are told the lawyers must work hard because the lady is so rich: presumably they are protecting her money against any unfair inroads by him. We are told that they do follow different schedules, and she spends part of her year in the city. He remains master in the country. Many couples today take separate vacations. Good for the marriage. The paragraphs are also given a curious tone by the continual quoting of Mrs Smith's response to the marriage: she sees little difference outwardly. Her presence reminds us that her brother had to vanish to make our friends Dr and Mrs Thorne of Chaldicotes and Mrs Smith's hypocritical grief at looking at the oaks her brother no longer has the right to walk in and her wish to see them cut down therefore elicits the quiet mockery of Miss Dunstable: "'Well, my dear, what can I do?" said Mrs Thorne, 'I can't cut them down; the doctor would not let me'" (p. 558).

P. D. Edwards is one among a number of critics to agree with those of us who see the marriage of Dr Thorne and Miss Dunstable as a patched- up deal, a kind of violation of what the original conceptions of the characters meant. He does have a couple of interesting passages on their marriage: like Mrs Proudie who in this book 'tends to become more of a caricature ... the more we see of her', Miss Dunstable

is suddenly plucked back [from sordid dealings and the corruption and pettiness and spite of the Chaldicotes set] just as she seems about to tumble headlong in the mud. Her closest attachment, it is insisted, has always been to the "old" Barset personified by Frank and Mary Gresham and Dr Thorne. Her relish for fashionable frivolities, such as the puerile baiting of Harold Smith and the endless jokes at the expense of the Proudies, belongs only to the more superficial and impressionable side of her nature. In reality she finds exchanging dull pleasantries with Frank and Mary much more congenial, and eventually, for no discernible reason except that she must be rescued from descent of Avernus somehow, she is made to marry Dr Thorne. But such is the hold the worldly pleasures of London have gained on her that she makes it a condition of the marriage that she be allowed to spend a part of the year among them --- with or without her husband. This suggests that, even to Trollope's mind, the couple are less than perfectly matched ... It is evident, however, that Trollope means the marriage to be a happy fulfillment for two characters whom he admits he is very fond of and who represent -- though Miss Dunstable in her best qualities only -- the values of good sense, simplicity and respect for (but not worship of) money that the novel prizes most highly (PDEdwards, AT: His Art and Scope, Univ of Queensland Press, 1977, pp. 39-40).

Edwards goes on to insist on the inequality of the match, and how all the matches at the close of the book are presented emphatically as unequal in important ways to the outside world. He does not make much of this, but I think we may take this pattern of unequality as important to the novel's unifying ideas. Although on the surface Barsetshire seems endlessly stable with barriers of rank and the countryside untouched, when we look closely we see fluidity, risk, and change. That is perhaps the serious message of Mark as tempted son: had there not been a fairytale Lord Lufton to come in and pay the people off, the parsonage itself would have been revealed as no citadel (to use Edward's language) against the amoral money culture of the world.

Money, in other words, rules this world as sternly as it does The Way We Live Now for those who look beneath the apparent kindly and civilised manners, at who is riding the horses across its countryside.

We may note also that the Rev Josiah and his Mary Crawley are nowhere to be seen in this chapter. But their presence is not forgotten and their significance in the novel's patterning will come out when Trollope returns to the ecclesiastical bunch of this book for the The Last Chronicle.

Tomorrow more on Lucy Robarts on whom I would like to expend a few more electrons. She is, like Mary Thorne and Lucy Morris, one of the interesting very good heroines of Trollope's fictions.

Ellen Moody

Subject: [trollope-l] Framley Parsonage: Chs 47-48: As You Frame Yourself

From: "R J Keefe"

Brava, Ellen! Ellen Moody has I think most beautifully expressed the relation between Trollope and his reader and also the relation between Trollope and his purpose as a novelist all in one fine sentence: "As you frame yourself, so others will understand you." Where is it - in An Autobiography? Elsewhere? - that Trollope compares himself to a preacher in his pulpit? While his persona suggests rather a drawing-room fireside and comfortable chairs, Trollope does dispense parables rather like a genial vicar.

Because he's so candid about what he's dispensing, I resist the notion of 'continual ironic undercutting.' The literary critics and practitioners of realistic novels are right: Trollope's up to something else. To rephrase something I posted yesterday, Trollope's rendering of specific social encounters is so true to life that the plots in which these scenes are arranged are as boxes to chocolates.

RJ Keefe

Reply-To: trollope-l@onelist.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Trollope did NOT go on writing

From: "Catherine Crean"

Framley Parsonage forever." What an post script Ellen wrote to our last reading schedule! When you think about it, it is probably a good thing that Trollope didn't go on writing FP. What would his career have been like if he had? He may have had more popular success but at what cost? I have to admit, although it almost pains me to do so, that I agree with Ellen's devil's advocate post about Framley Parsonage where she asked the question "Is it too good to be true?" (Or rather I should say that my answer is "Yes.") FP is a typical "cozy" Trollope novel. Every one has his place in the world Trollope created and "all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds" to quote Dr. Pangloss. Pots of marmalade are smuggled in to the Crawley children, bailiffs turned away from the Robarts' house by a kindly Lord's intervention, and the plain but spunky heroine wins the handsome hero. This is not to say that FP is not a wonderful book -- it is. But it's a "safe" book also. We know that we are in the hands of a writer who will not upset us. In his later books, Trollope had the same kind of relationship with his reader, and went so far as to articulate the "hand-in-hand" nature of his relationship with his readers. However, as Trollope develops as a writer, we see less coziness and less comfort. Read a book like He Knew He Was Right and you see the difference.

Another point that Ellen brought up ties in with the above remarks. Ellen asks about our perception of Trollope as we read through the Barsetshire novels in sequence. In The Warden there are some clumsy passages, notably the attempted satire on Dickens and Carlyle. Trollope more fully creates the his little world in Barsetshire Towers but as enjoyable as the book is, it seems to sprawl a bit. In Framley Parsonage Trollope is in full control of his characters and the world he puts them in. The story seems to flow at a steady deliberate speed -- in spite of the fact that people say the book "has no plot." I can see why readers enjoyed the novel when it was serialized. I do hope we can discuss Trollope's evolution as a writer. The problem is, I get so caught up in the wonderful little world that Trollope creates for me that I have trouble getting perspective.

Catherine Crean

Catherine had the last word.