Anthony Trollope's "The Mistletoe Bough"

Written 1861 (4 August)
Published 1861 (21 December), The illustrated London News, Christmas Supplement
Published in a book 1863 (February), Tales of All Countries: Second Series, Chapman and Hall

To Trollope-L Reply-To: "Robert Wright"
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997

It is snowing hard here in London as I write this-which is pretty unusual and adds to the feeling of Christmas coming. The fire is burning brightly in the hearth and I am tucking into a mince pie with melting brandy butter over the top. The oldest pillar box in the World is just around the corner, where I have just posted the last of my cards (as invented by Trollope of course). Dickens used to live nearby, and in fact exiled his poor wife to a house in Gloucester Road 5 minutes walk away (if it was not snowing).

Just thought I would get you all into the right spirit for "The Mistletoe Bough" ...

From: hansenb@frb.gov
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997
Subject: Short Stories: "The Mistletoe Bough"
To: trollope-l@teleport.com

First I want to thank Jill Spriggs for causing us to read this story for Christmas week! Gads - another two-tissue affair!

Early on we see that Elizabeth's two younger brothers are at school, but she is not. Trollope sees no reason to comment overtly on this.

I have to admit to bringing a whole lot to this charming story, as someone about to go on half-pay like the major, with three children two of which are today coming home from being away at school, and being possessed of a wife deserving of bright sunshine.

Are we to consider Isabella Holmes as a kind of chorus in the story? She, perhaps more than Bessy's mother, helps the latter work out her feelings. On p. 370 (OUP), Isabella lays it out for Bessy - 'If you like a young man, and he asks you to marry him, you ought to have him.' Luckily for her, Bessy more than just likes Godfrey, and is able to overcome her 'reverence for martyrdom.' Given our current reading of the trials of Mary Lowther, this little nutshell of the problem is interesting, although one might disregard the French business in that paragraph. Trollope never gives the cause for Bessy's shipwreck; could it be the too close reading of novels?

Bart hansenb@frb.gov

December 25, 1997

Re: Short Story: "The Mistletoe Bough"

Having just read Jill's lovely piece on the "Two Heroines" and today being Christmas day, I thought I'd respond in kind with talking a bit about "The Mistletoe Bough."

There are writers (as there are people) who genuinely seem to believe in and vividly live through some uplifting experience at Christmas time, something extra meaningful which they convey through an intense sense of poignant joy in Christmas stories. In the piece from his Autobiography I quoted in my posting on "The Widow's Mite," Trollope suggests Dickens was one of these, and he was not.

Let us think of Christmas at Dingley Dell. Or Fezziwig. This feeling is captured in Alistair Sim's film beautifully Who can deny the pull in the tone of Tiny Tim's "God bless us, every one"? Not even Scrooge. Jill told the story of the Heroines which is not a story about Christmas, though Trollope produced it for Christmas. This is typical of his Christmas stories. Sometimes they convey the spirit of charity, of warm belief in something good in people, of cheer, gaiety, and or, as in "The Widow's Mite" an appropriate moral; but most of the time the events happen to occur around Christmas. "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is about getting to Thompson Hall; once we are there and Christmas is about to begin, the story ceases.

Perhaps because "The Mistletoe Bough" is a rare story to bring in the festivities of a country Christmas (including what is important for Trollope, the going to church, and the mistletoe which is however used symbolically to stand for Elizabeth's desire to withdraw from sexual fulfillment), we can see how Trollope is not one could can lend himself to suffused sentiment. Thoughout the story we get a sense of now people are still awkward, uncomfortable, working at their daily tasks, still caught up in their needs, still cold when they have to wait around, and liable to get irritated or fall into misunderstandings when everyone is trying hard not to. Let me quote this as a key paragraph to Trollope's realism about Christmas:

"The morning of Christmas-day passed very quietly. They all went to church, and then sat round the fire chatting until the four-o'clock dinner was ready. The Coverdale girls thought it was rather more dull than former Thwaite Hall festivities, and Frank was seen to yawn. But then everyone knows that the real fun of Christmas never beings til the day itself be passed. The beed and pudding are ponderous, and unless there be absolute children in the party, there is a difficulty in grafting any special afternoon amusements on the Sunday pursuits of the morning. In the evening they were to have a dance;--that had been distinctly promised to Patty Coverdale; but the dance would not commence till eight. The beed and pudding were ponderous, but with due efforts they were overcome and disappeared. The glass of port was sipped, the almonds and raisins were nibbled, and then the ladies left the room. Ten minutes after that Elizabeth fond herself seated with Isabella Holmes over the fire in her father's little book-room. It was not by her that this meeting was arranged, for she dreaded such a constrained confidence; but of course it could not be avoided, and perhaps it might be as well now as hereafter" (Sutherland ed, pp 365-6).

Maybe it's the reference to the necessity of having "absolute children" that gives Trollope's own lack of a child-like lift away most.

The focus of story itself has nothing necessarily to do with Christmas. It's about a young woman's awakening into womanhood. The quarrel between Holmes and Elizabeth is left vague, but it has strong sexual overtones. He has asked her to show more love for him than she felt able, to yield more absolutely than she could; she too is wondering if life doesn't hold more than simply marriage to a man. We are suddenly into the terrain of woman's roles in the world, a woman's nature, and a certain intense presentation of love. I find very powerful the metaphor Trollope reaches for when he describes how Elizabeth feels now that she has deprived herself of Holmes's love and yet must meet him somewhat lovingly, as a cousin:

"the Spartan boy who held the fox under his tunic. The fox was biting into him,--into the very entrails; but the young hero spake never a word. Now Bessy Garrow was inclined to think that it was a good thing to have a fox always biting, so that the torment caused no ruffling to her outward smiles. Now at this moment the fox within her bosom was biting her sore enough, but she bore it without flinching" (p 363).

It also shows how Trollope is simply a great novelist or writer of psychologized pictorial narrative. I thought the paragraph describing Thwaite Hall in its setting in Cumberland lovely; it drew me in; I could see the place, walk about in it, smell it: I refer to the second full paragraph on p 360, beginning "Thwaite Hall was not a place of much pretension... " Trollope always dislikes places of much pretension in his heart.

A lovely story, but not one overbrimming with "Christmas cheer" except as setting, as the uncomfortable meeting the two cannot get out of, reminding me of relatives we wish we didn't have to see but can't escape once a year. Of course in the story the enforced meeting brings the love story to its crisis and apparent happy solution. But note again, the happy ending is muted. It's something we expect in the future, something we hope for.

Ellen Moody

The year previously I got into a strong debate with Elvira Casal; unhappily I do not appear to have saved hers but can at least make my replies which contain some of her argument available:

January 3, 1996

Re: A Christmas Story: "The Mistletoe Bough"

I thought I'd add some comments to Elvira's perceptive commentary on the above short story in which I have a different take on the story, but come to a similar conclusion that the story is unsatisfactory or unsatisfying.

In brief, I suggest that Trollope's own Victorian puritanism is paradoxically at work in a story written to counter what Trollope saw as a the sexual puritanism of his day--what he'd think of our own it's hard to day. I suggest no-one in any office today would suggest putting a mistletoe anywhere; it's asking for a lawsuit. To this point have we come.

The puritanism I see in Trollope himself comes from his not telling us what happens to break up the love affair between Elizabeth Garrow and Geoffrey Holmes. Since in his Autobiography Trollope says the novelist must convey clearly to the reader's mind what he wants the reader to know, and since in his other stories, he has no trouble explaining what happened, the mystification is deliberate.

The story opens with Elizabeth Garrow very upset because her brothers want to put up a mistletoe bough; she becomes positively distressed when she is called "a Puritan." Gradually it is revealed that she was engaged to one Geoffrey Holmes, and this was suddenly broken off. A bit later we travel back in time to this brief engagement, but the paragraph which explains what broke them off is deliberately circuitously, enigmatic, remains on the level of psychological and moral interpretation:

"Elizabeth Garrow was very good girl, but it might almost be question whether she was not too good. She had learned, or thought that she had learned, that most girls are vapid, silly, and useless,--given chiefly to pleasure-seeking and hankering after lovers; and she had resolved that she would not be such a one. Industry, self-denial, and a religious purpose in life, were the tasks which she had set herself; and she went about the performance of them with much courage."

Thus far we know that Elizabeth thought she ought to do something more useful and less selfish with her life than spending time with her engaged beloved; she wants something to do. We are left to imagine what this might be. In our own time people would say ah ha she wants to get a college degree, and get a degree in pharmacology and help sick people. Elizabeth has less options. But the idea is at any rate clear even if the embodiment of it is left vague.

But then we come to what went wrong as a result of Elizabeth's dissatisfaction with her role as bethrothed bride and then wife. Trollope agrees that Elizabeth was not wrong for looking for something beyond love; he says: "When Elizabeth Garrow made up her mind that the finding of a husband was not the only purpose of life, she did very well. It is very well that a young lady should feel herself capable of going through the world happily without a man." But one result of this feeling was Elizabeth's sudden discomfort with something Trollope calls "the natural delight of a lover:

"But in teaching herself this she also taught herself to think that there was a certain merit in refusing herself the natural delight of a lover, even though the possession of a lover were compatible with all her duties to herself, her father, and mother, and the world at large. It was not that she had determined to have no lover. She made no resolve, and when the proper lover cam he was admitted to her heart."

So it's okay to have a boyfriend as we might say. She accepted this. Trollope goes on:

"But she declared to herself unconsciously that she must put a guard on herself, lest she should be betrayed into weakness by her own happiness. She had resolved that in loving her lord she would not worship him, and that in giving her heart she would only so give it as it should be given to a human creature like herself. She had acted on these high resolves, and hence it had come to pass,--not unnaturally,--that Mr Godrey Holmes had told her that it was 'her fault.' (Sutherland, Early Short Stories, pp 362-3).

What had come to pass? Trollope is capable of graphic dramatic narrative. Are we to suppose Mr Holmes simply in words demanded she submit to him? This would be silly and counterproductive to say the least. He's not an idiot. Had she held back emotional comitment? If so why not show it. I suggest Trollope hints Holmes wanted to go into the kind of physical relationship Lily Dale entered into (not losing virginity, somewhere beyond hand-holding and heavy petting to be explicit) with the man who betrayed her, Crosbie. Now here I have to have recourse to a brief quotation from Jeanne Peterson's _Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen_ . Some months ago this book was discussed and described in Victoria (wonderful these lists) and I took down one passage where Peterson wrote: "extensive physical intimacy was a respectable and acceptable part of Victorian engagement. Indeed, such intimacy may have been thought of as moral (as well as normal)."

That sexual intimacy is implied is suggesed by Elizabeth's hyper response to the mistletoe bough. It's just that she's embarrassed because he is her ex-lover; it has associations which distress her and this the other characters intuitively pick up, as when her brother says, "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (p 359).

As Elizabeth sits and contemplates the coming of this ex-lover to her house, Trollope uses an effective metaphor from hunting: Elizabeth was like

"the Spartan boy who held the fox under his tunic. The fox was biting into him,--into the very entrails; but the young hero spake never a word. Now Bessy Garrow was inclined to think that it was a good thing to have a fox always biting, so that the torment caused no ruffling to her outward smiles. Now at this moment the fox within her bosom was biting her sore enough, but she bore it without flinching" (p 363).

A little later in the story when Bessy is straining against acknowledging any previous love relationship with Geoffrey, does not want to hear his name, and refuses to discuss what happened to break up the relationship with Geoffrey sister, the sister says, and they discuss her brothers' teasing about the mistletoe, and she reacts with intense anger, and says she will leave the house (as indeed she thinks to do, the sister says: '"Are you so bad as that,--that the slightest commonplace joke upsets you/"" (p 370).

I read this story as Trollope arguing against thinking sex is some "fiery furnace of trial" (again he is enigmatic with his metaphors whenever he brings up what happened between Geoffrey and Bessy) ; it is something natural and good. I can see how in our own time the story may be read as a group of people forcing a girl to become sexually involved when she doesn't want to. But I suggest the meaning is she does. It's a story about a girl's awakening into womanhood, a story on behalf of natural pleasure.

In his Trollope and Comic Pleasure Christopher Herbert argues a central theme or thread running through all Trollope's books is an argument on behalf of what we might call a sane or sensible hedonism in life. Herbert connects this theme to Trollope's many sardonic portraits of religious hypocrisy and bigotry (especially in low church men and women). I remember in Phineas Finn how one thing that damns Mr Kennedy is he won't let poor Laura even read a novel on Sunday.

Yet let us note that Trollope himself shies away from depicting what is the issue and leaves us without sufficient clues to understand him. His Victorian reader who would be offended would then read for surface, or whatever it is that people read for when they accept their is something left unexplained, and maybe interpret it in whatever way is most congenial. Elizabeth learned her lesson to accept a mistletoe bough. He is certainly aware of the need to place and sell the story and that editors don't want to offend. But he has gutted his own message. And we may ask if he wasn't himself unable to to really imagine the scene for a scene of sex demanded and sex refused is not a pleasant one--and then his message would a real irony in it which is a bit rougher than Herbert's Trollope is for pleasure. Pleasure is not simply an easy, or natural thing for a complex creature like a human being. It does imply giving up of the self and leaving the self open to vulnerability, hurt, and so on. I suspect he knew the scene would not be pleasant, but by not dramatizing it he does not "think" through his story sufficiently. And thus this story is unsatisfactory I would aver.

January 6, 1996

R: A Christmas Story: "The Mistletoe Bough"

Here I am worrying this poor little story again. It is probable, as Elvira says, that she and I agree more than we disagree about this story, and maybe the differences between us are more a matter of a way of talking about texts or our emphasis on this or that, but I think not in this sense: that finally I am not so much dissatisfied with Trollope's final attitude toward Elizabeth Garrow in general as that I think he could have argued for his attitude more effectively had he dramatized or imagined the sexually based quarrel which caused the couple to break up because had he done so his argument for yielding to the natural impulses of the body and heart would have been more ambivalent, more ambiguous. We are drawn to his presentation of Lily Dale because her case is ambiguous, deeply seen, deeply felt, imagined through.

How does a novelist learn? how grow? how mature? We all know there is a mighty difference between the Shakespeare who wrote the Henry VI plays and Hamlet. What has happened between the plays is that Shakespeare has through his own imagination experienced and felt and thought penetratingly and originally about many facets of experience and art. Trollope too grows and matures and learns. There is a difference, though not as great, between his early books and his middle and his later ones. I suggest the difference is not as great because Shakespeare came before the public eye when he was yet a young man, early in his life, and, so to speak, learned in front of us. Trollope's first published work, The Macdermots was not his first written work at all. As An Autobiography suggests, and as the stories in An Editor's Tale confirms, Trollope wrote for himself and for publication for years before he got into print; he also dreamt vigorously and kept his dreams vividly up for years. Ever thinking, ever meditating, ever seeing more deeply.

Had Trollope been able to present the full reality of sexual encounter, he might have seen all its risks, costs, and the inevitable losses it inflicts on a woman. I am more in agreement with Elvira's interpretation of the story than AC Plath-Moseley. I think Trollope has many portraits of women who seek roles well beyond that of wife, mother, and lover. In this story we are told: "When Elizabeth Garrow made up her mind that the finding of a husband was not the only purpose of life, she did very well. It is very well that a young lady should feel herself capable of going through the world happily without a man." Trollope does envisage lives for women as people in their own right as well as members of a family or wives or mothers. What he fails to do though-- and here I'm in agreement with Elvira again--is really see or experience or imagine both sexual experience and the woman's case sufficiently empathetically to himself understand there is a downside for women in marrying and having children. In the case of the first he was hemmed in by his time, his audience, his own mores. The problem in HKHWR_ is he can't take us up to Louis and Emily Trevelyan's bedroom. All he can do is hint that the failure and hatred, jealousy on the one side, and cool disdain on the other, began there. As to the second, Trollope does not fully enter into many of his women sufficiently, especially when they are seen by him as "good" or "sweet" or young and unmarried, the upright middle class English woman type who throws herself into her mother's lap and weeps and blushes. He does enter into the case of a Glencora Palliser, Alice Vavasour, Madame Max, into his less conventional, ambiguous, and sometimes by him condemned female characters. He is in the case of Elizabeth Garrrow the older man looking from the outside at a young girl and sees her as needing to grow up, as fearing adulthood.

There is a difference between Elvira and my views then, and it's only fair to bring it out. I agree with her that he simplifies and does not seem to understand that sex for Elizabeth here (and for many women and many men to, come to that) involved far more than pleasure and fulfillment. It involves pain, capitulation (as Elvira puts it), risk, loss of freedom (for a women turning one's body over to natural forces when one is pregnant and having to endure childbirth). Because one has "legitimate concerns" does not necessarily mean ones turns away or says no. I wish he had included an understanding of loss, of pain, of vulnerability, of a ruined and desperate life of frustration (though Elizabeth is not a deeply enough seen woman to take such a burden; for a start she's too young). But had he done so, I would then have had no quarrel with the idea that despite this or maybe because of it (to quote Elvira's words) Elizabeth "will find completeness, in marriage, in acceptance of the "natural" pleasure of sexuality." Life is pain, life is risk. Really to live we must also experience our bodies to the fullest. Trollope does "fail to recognize complexity of the dilemma," but had he recognized it and through this recognition presented a mature case for the splendor of a yes, he would have written a deep and great story.

I do believe we learn a great deal when we debate these questions seriously and thoroughly not only about Trollope but about ourselves. I have often thought we can learn more about a period from its minor artworks than its major ones, and sometimes as much about an author through what he fails to do (a minor work, a failed or unsatisfying one) than what he succeeds in doing.

Ellen Moody

And two years before this I wrote:

November 26th, 1994:

Re: The Engaged Couple in Trollope

Some time ago there was a discussion on our list about Lily's Dale's refusal to marry after her engagement to Crosbie ended. Kirsten Herold quoted Jeanne Peterson's Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen to the effect that "extensive physical intimacy was a respectable and acceptable part of Victorian engagement. Indeed, such intimacy may have been thought of as moral (as well as normal)."

As I read another short story by Trollope, a Christmas story, "The Mistletoe Bough" it seemed to me there was a quiet or veiled joke in it I wasn't sure about (and am still not). The story opens with Elizabeth Garrow very upset because her brothers want to put up a mistletoe bough; she becomes positively distressed when she is called "a Puritan." Gradually it is revealed that she was engaged to one Geoffrey Holmes, and this was suddenly broken off. Now he too is coming for Christmas, and the mistletoe is beyond Elizabeth's strength (or so she tells her mother). Early in the story Trollope has a number of thematic teasing comments such as "Kissing, I fear, is less innocent now than it used to be when our grandmothers were alive ..." Characters quote the old French "Honi soit qui mal y pense."

I cannot tell the ending since I have gathered people seem to disapprove of this (something which still puzzles me), but I can say the reason for the breakup of the engagement remains obscure. Elizabeth says "I am sure I like him, but I know that I should not make him happy as his wife. He says it is my fault. I, at any rate, have never told him that I thought it his." Trollope here says this comment shows "the confidence between the mother and daughter was very close." Then: "Elizabeth Garrow was very good girl, but it might almost be question whether she was not too good." He also says that what went wrong with the engagement (over a summer) stemmed form Elizabeth telling herself "unconsciously that she must put a guard on herself, lest she should be betrayed into weakness by her own happiness. She had resolved that in loving her lord she would not worship him, and that in giving her heart she would only so give it as it should be given to a human creature like herself." ( I am not sure what exactly is meant here: is it physical or simply psychological total engagement?) Now that the engagement is broken off Trollope tells us in one of the best passages in the story (I think anyway) that Elizabeth was like "the Spartan boy who held the fox under his tunic. The fox was biting into him,--into the very entrails; but the young hero spake never a word. Now Bessy Garrow was inclined to think that it was a good thing to have a fox always biting, so that the torment caused no ruffling to her outward smiles. Now at this moment the fox within her bosom was biting her sore enough, but she bore it without flinching."

Is the half-kind joke here (because of the ending which I refrain from giving away further) one which depends on our understanding that Elizabeth has refused to become "physically intimate" with her young bethrothed? Is it that she must learn the "mistletoe" is not some trial or "ordeal" (later Trollope, again, says "girls are getting to talk and think as though they were to send their hearts through some fiery furnace of trial before they may give them up ..."), but something easy, pleasant, natural?

At one point in the story Bessy is told she is getting "so bad ... that the slightest commonplace joke upsets you ..." If I am reading the story aright, this moral lesson in a joke in a story is not irrelevant to our time. Two months ago the day arrived when my husband and I had now been married 25 years. That evening when the children asked what were we going to do in honor of the great occasion he said, "well, I think I'll take your mother out, get her very drunk and then take advantage of her." There was a moment's silence; my 10 year old daughter looked horrified and began to recite some solemn stuff about drink learned doubtless in that period it seems all too often when material which goes under the rubric of family life is impressed on children; the 16 year old too began to talk seriously about disgusting males and oppression of females &c. It was an affectionate joke. It seems the mistletoe is much frowned upon in our world again.