To Trollope-l

November 29, 2000

Re: Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

This week's chapters bring us the climax of the book which comes in two connected incidents, the highly dramatic roughing up of the Marquis by the Dean, and the revealingly undramatised separation of George and Mary. There is much strong incisive writing throughout. All the characters are presented in lights which show us how they regard themselves and make us see how their perspective has merit; they are all at the same presented in ways that subject them coolly and at a distance to assessments which make us see their spite, selfishness or narrowness, and rather callow or cavalier approach to the views of the others. This posting surveys the climax of George and Mary's story and then Trollope's sudden turnabout and violation of all that has gone before.

Chapter 37: The Kappa-kappa

It opens with the scene at the dance. As ever, what readers enjoy reading is an ordeal for the sensitive sympathetic characters -- in this case, Lord George, and after she falls, Mary. Trollope gives us a real sense of the excitement of being in such a room through Mary's mind. We see here how little real happiness, how much actual emotional disturbance such experiences bring to the discerning. Trollope manages this by inserting into Mary's thoughts his own:

There was the evil woman before her, already dancing. The evil woman had nodded at her, and had then quickly turned away, determined not to see that her greeting was rejected; and there was Augusta Mildmay absolutely dancing with Jack de Baron, and looking as though she enjoyed the fun. But to Mary there was something terrible in it all. She had been so desirous to be happy -- to be gay -- to amuse herself, and yet to be innocent. Her father's somewhat epicurean doctrines had filled her mind completely. And what had hitherto come of it? Her husband mistrusted her; and she at this moment certainly mistrusted him most grievously. Could she fail to mistrust him? And she, absolutely conscious of purity, had been so grievously suspected! As she looked round on the dresses and diamonds, and heard the thick hum of voices, and saw on all sides the pretence of cordiality -- as she watched the altogether unhidden flirtations of one girl, and the despondent fronw of another -- she began to ask herself whether her father had not been wrong to insist that she be taken to London ... Then Jack de Baron came up to her, talking to her father (Folio Society, IHP, introd. DSkilton, p. 301).

Mary's mind is epitomised in the childish summation of Adelaide as 'an evil woman'. It's funny in the same dumb absurd way as George's later half-mad half-hysterical meditations over what everyone must be thinking of him and her (i.e, 'As he stalked up and down the room in his wrath, he forgot as much as he remembered ..., Ch 39, pp. 308-9). The note of Mr Trollope is heard in the understanding that all is a pretence, and especially the cordiality. Last week Teresa wrote of how spite and nasty comments which people so enjoy can ruin the lives of others. Just after we have had the suggestively half-dramatized scene, in some ways the high moment of the novel, midpoint in it -- 'she was in very truth walzing with Captain de Baron' (we feel this unawakened young woman's intense sexual excitement here) -- and George has ripped her away, Trollope writes one of the sharpest scenes in the books. Each of the characters whose voice we hear pretends to be ever so sympathetic, to care ever so much, and each has a venomous dart so deliciously to throw at those who have left (i.e., 'Of course this little episode contributed much to the amusement of Mrs Montacute Jones's guests ..., pp. 306-7). The tone of this close is so light; it's better than Sheridan in his School for Scandal (whose major characters have ironic names like Backbiting, and Mrs Candour). Others enjoy misery when it's not theirs. Against this we have a strong dialogue between the Dean and his daughter in which in coded language, he instructs her to withhold sex from George, to which she replies, in effect, oh you don't know the half of it:

'"listen to what I am telling you. Say as little as you can till I am with you. Tell him that you are unwell tonight, and that you must sleep before you talk to him". "Ah! you don't know, Papa" (p. 306)

In modern language, that's "oh, you don't know the half of it. No he doesn't. It cannot be that they have been having no sex since by the end of this instalment we are told Mary is pregnant and she must have gotten pregnant before the previous instalment when the hard work upstairs (the 'immediate acts of tenderness and so on) were still going on. It has simply been all just so much dutiful hard work on George's part and childlike unresponse on Mary's. Liberation from stereotypical sexual roles of often presented simply as freeing the woman; it is also intended to free the man.

I remarked on the balance of the approach throughout: Trollope offers much sympathy for George in this scene, _viz_., 'Though he knew that he was surrounded by those who would mock him he could not restrain himself' (p. 305).

An important subtext and theme of this past week's instalments is the role of ridicule in social life, how it poisons those susceptible to it and elates those who are not and can dish it out.

Chapters 38 & 42: Rebellion & 'Not go!'

These are remarkably brave chapters for a man writing for a middle class audience in this era. In each we get two dramatic scenes of confrontation, Mary and George and George and the Dean (in 38 first Mary and George fight, then George and the Dean, in 42, first the Dean and George and then Mary and George). We also get a scene in intense confiding between the Dean and his daughter where we see him shape her in a direction which keeps her safe from what would have been the emotional harassment and scourging she would have known from the anti-sexual ethics of the unmarried females at Cross Hall.

The depiction of Mary's outward demeanour in "Rebellion" reminds me of Trollope's depiction the way Emily Trevelyan looked to Louis: 'Her nostrils were dilated, and her eyes were bright with anger' (p. 308). Like Emily, Mary is now withholding sex altogether until her husband yields up the idea he has been in the wrong and she has done nothing whatever to merit his hysteria or strictures. In this novel, though, Mary is not filled with the kind of frustrated seething hatred we find in Emily -- who has been married to Louis for 2 years and already has a child, and with whom it is hinted intense dislike and quarreling has gone on quietly for some time. Mary doesn't dislike George; she simply has no adult emotions towards him or other men. In the first chapter where he seems still to want to assert his 'marital rights' (really the way he has seemed to feel about it, 'marital duties' would be the appropriate phrase) the way she manages to keep him at a distance upstairs is the presence of a serving woman (p. 310). Ironically, there is no privacy in these middle class sleeping arrangements bedroom if either party doesn't want it. Those who imagine that Victorian men had all the trump cards often forget the way the sleeping arrangements with the husband in a dressing room next to the wife's bedroom and two servants (valet and lady's maid) milling about. The clash between the couple resembles those we read last week. She takes suspicion itself to be an unbearable insult; protection is abhorrent (as she insists she has not sullied her sacredness). There was this striking statement from her:

'"I cannot stop people from talking and thinking evil. But I will never say that I think evil of myself by hiding myself. I don't know what you mean by privacy. I want no privacy" (p. 310).

This is brave. How many of us can act on this? How many of us have hidden away. There is the astute observation that privacy doesn't exist. We are all acting out in front of one another, noticed just as strongly when we stay in by those whom we are interdependent with as when we go out. Through Mary's words come Trollope's understanding of the transparent nature of social life. David Skilton has written about this in his introduction to The Golden Lion of Granpere; a long time ago I wrote a posting about the anguish of knowing you show yourself in spite of all efforts to the contrary in the great short story, 'The Spotted Dog.'

Then we get George versus the Dean. The Dean's obtuseness to what he has wrought in marrying this couple, his ruthless lack of concern for feelings as if they can just be shaped as he pleases or in his daughters' 'interests' when he made this marriage are brought out. He is now breaking it up again until it suits him to allow it go forward again. He is certainly right in this scene though: George's behavior will destroy Mary's happiness if he is allowed to bring her back to the dense cats at Cross Hall ('cross' is allegorical we now see). In the second chapter the narrator enters the Dean's consciousness we read thoughts about how if he lets Mary go she 'should be secluded and maligned, and even, for a whie trodden underfoot', but if there is a 'separation' 'his girl would have been altogether sacrificed, and her life's happiness brought to shipwreck. Still he banks on the sheep-like nature of George, how time will make all forgotten (this reminds me of how politicians work). So he first moves in and then maintains his position between the couple: Mary is not going to move out. In the next chapter (and again in later ones) he is unconscious, unashamed of his continual wishes to see the young baby Popenjoy dead: '"everybody must feel that it would be better for the family that he should be out of the way. Nobody can think that such a child can live to do honour to the British peerage" (p. 319). Why? Because he has dark skin? No, rather because the Dean wants his sperm in place. The paragraph which follows in which we enter the Dean's rationalisations about its 'Italian mother', how he is just out for the truth ('I could not rest in my bed'), and ending on Miss Tallowax's being 'quite alive to the glory of the Brotherton connection' is sickening. In the chapter where the Dean beats the Marquis up, he never hears the Marquis say he has affection for his son, or he hears it and couldn't care less. The Marquis is perfectly right to say to this man, you can run about and in effect accuse my wife of being a whore; why is your wonderful sacred object, 'holy' Mary, any different. The Marquis sneers and triumphs, we see that the Dean deserved to get as good as he dishes out. What after all is his idea of his daughter's happiness? The right to dance amidst a pretence of cordiality? His ground is as weak as George's; neither cares for Mary as a person; she is an object to both. Not everyone has his thick skin, their eye so intensely fixed on the prize.

The first climax is repeated twice. Mary and George's separation comes about at first in the muddled, messy way such things really do in reality. He moves out without really meaning to; nothing is decided, things somehow create their own momentum:

It was a miserable day to them all. Many callers came, asking after Lady George, presuming that her speedy departure from the ball had been caused by her accident. No one was admitted and all were told that she had not been much hurt. There were two or three stormy scenes between the dean and his son-in-law, in one of which Lord George asked the dean whether he conceived it to be compatible with his duty as a clergyman of the Church of England to induce a wife to disobey her husband. In answer to this, the dean said that in such a matter the duty of a Church dignitary was the same as that of a gentleman, and that he, as a gentleman, and also as a dignitary, meant to stand by his daughter. She refused to pack up, or to have her things packed. When he came to look into himself, he found that he had not power to bid the servants to do it in opposition to their mistress. That the power of a husband was paramount he was well aware, but he did not exactly see his way to the exercise of it. At least he decided that he, at any rate, would go down to Cross Hall. If the dean chose to create a separation between his daughter and her husband, he must bear the responsibility. On the following day he did go down to Cross Hall, leaving his wife and her father in Munster Court without any definite plans (Ch 39, p. 314).

Trollope has also picked up how individuals cannot be understood and do not understand themselves outside their social interpendencies with one another. When the dean is asked how he, as a clergyman, can flaunt the taboos of marital obedience for a wife, he answers that he is a father and a gentleman determined to protect his daughter as a lady.

The second scene is not indeterminate, a real decision is made, and it is made by Mary. When George leaves for the first time, we are told of high quarrelling between them (p. 315), of how George talks of force, and how Mary, prompted by her father, says she will not run away from evil tongues which will get even bitterer in her absence than they would in front of her -- oh, how right she is there. They trump him by asking him to remain -- the pretense of hospitality and friendship, as long as it's on their terms. He groans, but will not yield out of pride (p. 315). He then returns and we have a repeat of "Rebellion" in the chapter entitled "Not go!". The final paragraph here is not quite Ibsen's The Doll House, and Mary does not quite come up to Nora, but she goes near it:

He found his wife and asked her whether her things were being packed. "I cannot go tomorrow", she said.

"No go!"

"No, George -- not to Cross Hall. I will go to the deanery. You promised to go to the deanery".

"I will not go to the Deanery. I will go to Cross Hall". There was an hour of it, but during the entire hour, the young wife persisted obstinately that she would not be taken to Cross Hall. "She had", she said, "been very badly treated by her husband's family". "Not by me", shouted the husband. She went on to say that nothing could now really put her right but the joint love of her father and her husband. Were she at Cross Hall, her father could do nothing for her. She would not go to Cross Hall. Nothing short of policemen should take her to Cross Hall tomorrow' (ch 42, p. 342).

Alas, as we know by the end of the instalments, Trollope has done precisely what Henry James accused him of doing most of the time (the rare exception said James was He Knew He Was Right). Against the logic of his story, his presentation of the characters' sexual life, their boredom and lack of understanding or sympathy for one another, he begins to tell us they miss one another, and suddenly Mary is pregnant. Suddenly we are told they love one another. With no preparation, no substantiation anywhere except that he is bored and lonely and regarding as a fool where he is, and angry, humiliated, and talking dumbly (as the narrator says), and she is stuck with her father. Had Trollope said they got together faute de mieux and really presented the nature of that, he would still have written a great book. Her absurdly soppy letter over her pregnancy is that of a foolish child, parallel dumb written words which match the kind of spiteful words she has continually for Adelaide: "I don't know anyone that I think so ugly. She is a nasty made-up thing" (Ch 40, p. 320). This recalls Austen's Lydia Bennet (in Pride and Prejudice) when Lydia describes her rival for Wickham's affections as a nasty freckled thing and Elizabeth Bennet realises how petty, small minded and nasty she too had been to think this way, even if she had been too conscious in her own mind to be able to voice such petty spiteful transparently self-conceited talk. Trollope sacrifices this truthful picture to (in James's words) 'conventional optimism'; he is 'afraid of a misery which is too much like life".

Too bad. It was becoming a great book. The very balanced presentation of the characters was part of the greatness. Ibsen's idealises Nora. Not so Trollope. Ibsen does not dare to present male sexuality in the real light such a culture presses on it on. Ibsen has no equivalent of this Dean.

Ellen Moody

Re: _Is He Popenjoy?_, Chs 38-45: Climax (II)

The second climax is the Dean's roughing up of the Marquis. It occurs, appropriately enough, at Scumberg's. As with the treatment of the climax between George and Mary, Trollope's treatment of the aftermath or consequences of the climax shows him in retreat from his own vision.

Again we have the most neutral of presentations. The Marquis is again given all the truths to say; he is less the phony continually. At the same time, he wants revenge if it emerges from the scene that the Dean will continue to treat his wife as a whore (I'm not afraid of this apparently terrible word) and will continue to attempt to de- legitimize the baby son. There is implicit hilarity in the words given the Marquis if you have been listening to Trollope text and paying attention. Note how little parade we find in this man, how he deflates the macho male ideal continually:

'"I never walk -- never could walk. I don't know why it is, but my legs won't walk.

"Perhaps you never tried".

"Yes, I have. They wanted to make me walk in Switzerland twenty years ago, but I broke down after the first mile. George used to walk like the very d---. You see more of him now than I do. Does he go on walking?

"He is an active man."

"Just that. He ought to have been a country letter-carrier. He would have been as punctual as the sun, and has quite all the necessary intellect" (Folio Society IHP, introd. DSkilton, Ch 41, p. 326).

Here is our direct reflection of Trollope himself in Lord George. George is a self-scourging portrait of Trollope himself -- a country letter-carrier, the active man, the male caught up in the entanglements of a sexually repressive hierarchy drenched establishment.

The Dean interrupts; he is not amused. He is after all another aspect of Trollope too -- the role he played in public, the one he wanted others to believe in, the carapace that worked. And so the Marquis comes right to the point: "You want to make your grandson Marquis of Brotherton" (p. 326). For once he also presents his side of the case: because he has not followed English conventions, because his wife is of another culture, the Dean does not scruple, as it is to his advantage, to say she was not his wife, and his son not legitimate. The Dean grows more furious as the Marquis speaks on. It becomes clear to the Marquis that the Dean is not going to give in, so he decides he might as well say what it is the Dean is and what it is his daughter is thought to be.

Again we have some amusement which Trollope ruins at the end of the instalment by simply (by deus ex machina on his part) making Mary suddenly pregnant. The Marquis needles the man in two ways. George 'is not very clever" but he has listened to the lawyers who say there is no case, so the Dean is going on in opposition to Mr Battle:

'"I am not dead, and may outlive at any rate you. Your girl hasn't got a child, and doesn't seem likely to have one" (p. 327).

The Dean is off his head with "downright pride". The Dean asks if it is was for this the Marquis sent him; not wholly is the reply. "I thought it might be as well to argue it out", but as this has got nowhere, he might as well speak his mind, and calls the Dean's legal maneuvrings a "persecution". It is at this point that the Dean describes the Marquis's wife in a way that prompts the Marquis to call Mary a whore:

'"The Countess Luigi was presumably a married women when she bore that name, and I look upon it as a sacred duty to ascertain whether she was so or not".

"Sacred!" said the marquis with a sneer.

"Yes; sacred. There can be no more sacred duty than that which a father owes to his child" (p. 328).

The blind hypocrisy of this rationale and the atavistic valuing of sexuality as something numinous is placed before us. That word "child" is not meant as a needle because the Dean is too self-centered to see that his description of the Marquis's wife is profoundly offensive. The Marquis picks up the word, and leads with it. And "such a child". He kicks Mary to hurt that Dean back: 1) he of course cares nothing for birth, "Had she behaved herself I should have thought nothing of the stable". So much for her blood. And then, though he leads such "a solitary life", Rumor reaches him too, and comes out with the word that so enrages this father: "A sacred duty, Mr Dean, to put the coronet on the head of that young --- " (p. 328). In all the Dean's descriptions of the lead-up to the encounter, nowhere does he mention how he described the Marquis's wife and son. He deserved what he got.

So too does the Marquis. All book long he has depended on everyone obeying ceremony; he has laughed at them as prigs, asses, phonies, people pretending to emotions they don't have, using ceremony to get him to acknowledge he will follow some obligations to them (meaning provide versions of prestige and the equivalent of income in a place to live and handing over of rents). Now suddenly the Dean having been hit in a way that explodes all the codes of sexual taboos in speech, hits back savagely (Ch 41, pp. 328-30).

Those who live by the sword have to watch out: they may die by it.

Trollope can be accused of drawing back from the logic of this scene in two ways. In the scenes that follow the Marquis is not presented dramatically, not heard from. He is not allowed to give his side of the story. On the other hand, this quarrel does give George the courage to refuse to eat with his father-in-law. It's for the wrong reasons. George is indignant that the Dean broke ceremony, disrespected his brother. That's what the Dean did right; he acted sincerely. But then, as the Marquis says, George always gets it wrong. Still George moves out of the Dean's house and that precipates the separation from Mary which could have led to a strong great book had Trollope manifested 'the same courage' (again I use Henry James's words) which he did in his depiction of the Trevelyans [He Knew He Was Right] Rev Crawley and Lady Mason [Orley Farm].)

It's revealing that Trollope does allow himself to show a fuller response to the scene between the Marquis and the Dean in the marginal subplot -- through the comedy of the petty utterly self-centered ambitious and absurdly transparent Mr Groschut. As in Austen's Emma where Mrs Elton is a caricature of Emma herself, the worst of Emma writ large, so Mr Groschut is a caricature of the Dean, the worst of him writ large. We are told how Mr Groschut tells everyone how concerned he is for the office of the clergy, the church (as the Dean was so concerned for the legitimacy of the Brotherton heir), about Mr Groschut's sense of his sincere religious scruples (as the Dean is so intent on Mary's sacredness), and how he therefore tries to move everyone to fire the Dean, meanwhile telling how his motives and words are all for the best:

'he believed, and rejoiced in believing, every word of them. He was a pious man, and did not know that he was lying. He was an anxious Christian, and did not know that he was doing his best to injure an enemy behind his back. He hated the Dean; but he thought that he loved him. He was sure that the dean would go to some unpleasant place, and gloried in the certainty; but he thought he was most anxious for the salvation of the Dean's soul' (Ch 44, p. 350).

David Skilton has argued that those of Trollope's books which angered his readers most are those in which he flouted the conventional happy ending of an apparently successful (or at least prudent) marriage between two people of the same class, and those in which he presented as a hero or heroine a type of person all the ambitious values of the time which said that reward came to the virtuous and hard working who obeyed all conventions. Lady Mason, we call, forged some papers so her son would be brought up a gentleman. Trollope can get away with sticking to the truth in the margins of his text, and so he does constantly.

The second form of retreat is that the Dean does not kill the Marquis. The keeping with bitter comedy is in a sense another swerve away from probability. After all the Marquis is struck very hard, ends up crumpled by the fireplace dogs. His skull ought to have cracked. He ought not to be able to get up and walk again. This would be a sardonic irony, given his complacency about his lack of practice.

Admittedly there is much effective hard comedy in the aftermath of the Dean's nearly murdering the Marquis. Also, Trollope has remained at a distance from all the characters, and continually gives a hard presentation. Had the Dean murdered the Marquis, the book would have had to turn towards the deep-musing tragedy of Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots where a brother murders a man who seduced his sister and now plans to abandon her and is not in the least ashamed of his conduct, laughs at the brother's need of respectability to his face. However, there Trollope has identified with the hero, Thady, felt for the herione, Feemy, intensely as a woman; has presented a world he is fond of. One cannot say he is fond of the society he presents here -- anywhere.

The comedy does provide a countereffect and distraction from the sudden turnabout with Mary's pregnancy. It's revealing that as Trollope doesn't provide the scenes where Mary defies George and separates herself from him, so he doesn't dramatize the ones where he comes to be told he is to be 'happy father'. Instead we get jokes like the one of Mary imagining just what life might have been like for Mary had she gone to Cross Hall:

'at Cross Hall not a half-hour would be allowed to pass without enquiry as to its purpose. At Cross Hall there would be no novels - except those of Miss Edgeworth which were sickening to her. She might have hall Mudie down to the deanery if she chose to ask for it. (Ch 45, p. 355).

Those of us on Janeites who have endured months of an Edgeworth book will appreciate Trollope's implicit remark to us about how densely didactic and philistine her books really are.

Then after George has come to acknowledge the bairn on the way (bairn is a good word), Trollope does not let up on the margins of what Mary's life as George's wife could have been had she not separated herself. Despite Mary's pregnancy, George's pride and anger are alerted when the Dean insists Mary should be cared for solicitiously, that she should "be made happy" and therefore must still live apart from George and the sisters:

"'Do you think that as she is now she should be subjected to the cold kindnesses of the ladies of your family"

"What right have you to call their kindnesses cold?" (Ch 45, p. 358).

The right of truth.

We can only hope that Trollope remains true to his original conception of the pettiness of the characters, the absurdity of the Marchioness (the mother), and brings in the Marquis more inwardly once again, at least once -- more true to life in the margins of the book so that it will not dissolve away into the falsenesses of the depictions of Grace and Mrs Crawley at the close of The Last Chronicle when Lady Lufton comes to call, or the close of Dr Wortle's School (an unrealistic marriage between two children unconcerned with all that has gone on suddenly thrown in from nowhere). In a book which argues that fiction which intends to be taken seriously, ought to be read psychologically and with close attention to its real closeness to life, Bernard Paris argues that

"happy endings almost always bring a raised eyebrow if we have truly understood the characters. But endings which try to be faithful to the mimetic impulse by suggesting the open-endedness or ongoingness of life do not satisfy the reader's desire for an aesthetic pattern, for some completion, especially if the rest of the novel is highly patterned. The best kind of ending seems to be a death which is both realistically called for and aesthetically satisfying (Bernard Paris, A Psychological Approach to Fiction, Indiana University Press, 1974, p. 277).

It would have been far more satisfying, true to life, true to Trollope's own depiction of the Marquis's state of health, lack of prowess, and the Dean's bull-like strength, had the Dean murdered the Marquis. It would fit all we know had Mary and George stayed separated -- or, upon coming together, returned to just the kind of tensions and troubles and problems they had before the pregnancy, including the yearly visits to London and its attractions -- including its alluring Jack de Barons and desperate Adelaide Houghtons. Too bad. In the treatment of these climaxes we can understand why Is He Popenjoy? has been forgotten.

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

Hello all

Ellen has given us all masses to think about in her two long posts about the climax of Is He Popenjoy?. I'm still busy pondering over some of the points she raised but would just like to make a few comments on the violent confrontation involving the Dean and the Marquis.

Ellen wrote "In the chapter where the Dean beats the Marquis up, he never hears the Marquis say he has affection for his son, or he hears it and couldn't care less. The Marquis is perfectly right to say to this man, you can run about and in effect accuse my wife of being a whore; why is your wonderful sacred object, 'holy' Mary, any different. The Marquis sneers and triumphs, we see that the Dean deserved to get as good as he dishes out."

I think this is all very true - the Dean's fervent hopes that a toddler will die just so that his own grandchild can inherit are downright sickening. But I can't help suspecting that this isn't how Trollope intended us to take this scene.

To be honest, I feel the writing here is highly sympathetic to the Dean - there are references to his "strength" and the narrator asks "How should he moderate his wrath under such outrage as that?" It seems we are supposed to feel that the Marquis has goaded him beyond endurance by using "that word" about his beloved daughter. (The word itself is not printed in my edition - does anybody else have the word appear or is it left as a dash everywhere? I assumed it was "whore", anyway!)

I suspect that here we are supposed to be cheering on the big-hearted, bluff Dean as he dishes out his summary brand of justice to the insufferably rude Marquis - just as we are apparently expected to approve of Johnny Eames giving Crosbie a black eye in The Small House at Allington or Frank Gresham thrashing a man for jilting his sister in Doctor Thorne (was it his sister? I can't find my copy of the book to hand at the moment!). Again in Doctor Thorne, Trollope seems to regard even killing as justifiable in defence of a female relative's honour. When Roger Scatchard kills Dr Thorne's brother for seducing his own sister, he gets only a six-month sentence, and Trollope as narrator comments: "Our readers will probably think the punishment was too severe."

There are similar scenes of violence in many other Victorian novels, for instance in Vanity Fair which we have just been reading on VictorianFiction, where Rawdon brutally attacks Lord Steyne and cuts his face with a diamond after being given strong reason to suspect that he has been sleeping with Becky, Rawdon's wife. Thackeray is clearly on Rawdon's side in that instance and I suspect that Trollope is almost equally on the Dean's side here. It seems as if there's a feeling among a number of Victorian writers that men are justified in violence against other men if they are defending the honour of women. (Phineas Finn even fights a duel!) This doesn't only apply to male writers but also sometimes to women - for instance in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Bronte shows her hero, Gilbert, slashing a supposed love rival with a whip.

Ellen mentioned that there are autobiographical elements in Lord George - in the Penguin Companion to Trollope Richard Mullen suggests that this also applies to the Dean, whom he describes as one of Trollope's most autobiographical characters.

There are clear similarities between the Dean, Dr Wortle and Archdeacon Grantly, as well as Dr Thorne, who are also quarrelsome and opinionated in the same sort of way, and who are all thought to contain elements of self-portrait. But the Dean is noticeably less sympathetic than the others.

This ties in with Ellen's idea of Mary and the Dean being a darker version of Dr Thorne and his Mary. Another element of this is that Dr Thorne finds himself hoping that Roger and Louis Scatchard will both die so his Mary can inherit - then feels guilty for the very thought and redoubles his efforts to save them both. But by contrast the Dean doesn't seem to realise there is anything wrong with his hope that little Popenjoy will die!

A passion for Trollope is fast spreading through my family, BTW! My dad has also been reading IHP and is amazed by the Marquis. He phoned me up last night gasping in amazement, and asking: "How could anybody be so rude?" He wondered if the name "Popenjoy" was meant to suggest "popping in" - does anybody have any thoughts on this?

Bye for now
Judy

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

Dear Ellen, Judy and all:

From: Judy Geater Ellen has given us all masses to think about in her two long posts about the climax of Is He Popenjoy?

Yes, and I'd like to thank Ellen for taking the time to post such a thorough analysis of these chapters. I've been mulling this over a bit today myself, and thinking mostly about the relationships between Mary and the Dean, Mary and George, the Dean and George, and Jack de Baron and his feelings for Mary. I find these some of the more interesting relationships in the novel.

To be honest, I feel the writing here is highly sympathetic to the Dean - there are references to his "strength" and the narrator asks "How should he moderate his wrath under such outrage as that?"

I agree. I definitely feel more sympathetic toward the Dean than the Marquis. It could party be I know the intentions of the Dean (to protect his daughter and advance her in social position), whereas the Marquis is a much more shady, and much less benevolent, character.

It seems we are supposed to feel that the Marquis has goaded him beyond endurance by using "that word" about his beloved daughter. (The word itself is not printed in my edition - does anybody else have the word appear or is it left as a dash everywhere? I assumed it was "whore", anyway!)

No, it's not in my Oxford World's Classics edition, either, and I can only assume you're right as to the nature of the word. I immediately interjected "bitch" as a kneejerk reaction, but I think that's due to the popularity of the word in general right now! I'm quite sure it must rather have been some derivative of "whore" Trollope intended, and I doubt it's actually printed in any edition.

I suspect that here we are supposed to be cheering on the big-hearted, bluff Dean as he dishes out his summary brand of justice to the insufferably rude Marquis

I must admit I was quite hoping the Dean would knock the Marquis flat for his disservice to Mary! I suppose I should not be advocating violence, and normally would not, but in this case I just loved seeing the Marquis knocked to the ground. I thought it interesting the Dean had a fleeting thought that he could have just propped the Marquis back in his chair and denied everything.. But in the end he was upright and honest, as I thought he would be.

It seems as if there's a feeling among a number of Victorian writers that men are justified in violence against other men if they are defending the honour of women.

But isn't that really a much older custom than that? What of the days of chivalry, when the knight protected the honour of the fair lady? I think the theme goes back much further than the Victorian era, but I do agree it seems quite prevalent with the Victorians.

This doesn't only apply to male writers but also sometimes to women - for instance in The Tenant of > Wildfell Hall Anne Bronte shows her hero, Gilbert, slashing a supposed love rival with a whip.

Gilbert, though, had no real proof of anything when he did that act of violence. He was merely going on suspicion. In the Dean's case, the Marquis said the offensive epithet about his daughter more than once before he knocked him flat. I'd consider him provoked, and his actions more justifiable than Gilbert's cold-blooded strike. In Gilbert's case it was much more violent and brutal, and he left his victim's fate to chance as he wasn't sure if he'd killed the man or not. At least the Dean had the Marquis seen to.

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

From: Ellen Moody "This week's chapters bring us the climax of the book which comes in two connected incidents, the highly dramatic roughing up of the Marquis by the Dean, and the revealingly undramatised separation of George and Mary."

On the subject of George and Mary, it almost seemed as if their separation happened of itself, with little free will exerted by either. There was the verbal back and forth of "You're going," "No, I'm not," and then they each went their separate ways. It was not as if they set out to separate. In fact, Mary seems quite broken up about the fact they're going in opposite directions, though she has the strength of character not to give in to her husband when she thinks what he wants is wrong.

These chapters impressed upon me even more the good opinion I have of Mary. I thought George's treatment of her at the party to be abominable, and was so glad for her that she had her father to fall back on. If not for him she'd have been so much more at the mercy of Lord George. Though she does depend greatly upon her father, I think she also has quite a lot of character in her own right.

All the characters are presented in lights which show us how they regard themselves and make us see how their perspective has merit; they are all at the same presented in ways that subject them coolly and at a distance to assessments which make us see their spite, selfishness or narrowness, and rather callow or cavalier approach to the views of the others.

I believe these chapters reveal much to us about the character of Lord George.. I believe he's unconsciously trying to push Mary as far from him as possible, possibly with the hope he can then more fully pursue Adelaide. Or maybe he's just trying to drive a wedge, and not literally separate himself from his wife, so that she comes to accept a greater distance in their marriage. In this case he would likewise be more fee to pursue other interests. With her being so virtuous and loving it's much more difficult for him to justify his own behaviour for long. I believe he'd like to corrupt Mary, or at the least turn her into the sour, dissatisfied wife. Perhaps he'd even like her to rush to Jack de Baron, as that would serve his purposes just as well as anything in freeing him up.

I hope to return later with more thoughts on Ellen's post. For now I must run!

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

From: Ellen Moody Mary doesn't dislike George; she simply has no adult emotions towards him or other men.

"Childlike" sums up Mary quite well, I believe. She has a childlike trust in people, a childlike obstinance, and a somewhat innocent view of what's right and what's wrong. I can almost see her stomping her foot with indignation when George lectures her. At the same time, I think George takes tremendous advantage of the naive Mary, and that in some ways his own behaviour toward her is somewhat immature. In the scene immediately following Mary's disgrace at the party, Trollope tells us how George tends to remember things very selectively, forgetting his own guilt and focusing in on his perception of all the wrongs Mary has committed. He forgets all about Adelaide, for example, and his own far greater guilt as far as dalliances go, instead choosing to harangue on Mary endlessly for what's really a quite trivial matter. I also find it interesting Mary lets him get away with it.. But the point is, he knew she'd let his past transgressions slide, and he took full advantage of it.

'"I cannot stop people from talking and thinking evil. But I will never say that I think evil of myself by hiding myself. I don't know what you mean by privacy. I want no privacy" (p. 310).

This is brave. How many of us can act on this?

I agree, this is very brave indeed. It illustrates Mary's high moral character quite well. Though she is childlike in so many ways, like a child she can also be innocently wise. Not having had much exposure to society, it may be easier for her to put such a spin on things. Unfortunately, when she's matured a bit she may be somewhat more jaded than this.

He is certainly right in this scene though: George's behavior will destroy Mary's happiness if he is allowed to bring her back to the dense cats at Cross Hall ('cross' is allegorical we now see).

I thought it interesting, in the Dean's conversation with George in regards to Mary returning to Cross Hall, that the Dean said Mary wouldn't be happy stuck away with George's catty sisters (he didn't say "catty," but that's what he meant). When George called him on it the Dean promptly backed down and said something about he should ask Mary what she thinks.. I suppose even the Dean has his limits, when it comes to speaking frankly!

His ground is as weak as George's; neither cares for Mary as a person; she is an object to both. Not everyone has his thick skin, their eye so intensely fixed on the prize.

Sadly enough, I fear this may truly be the case. Though I like the idea of elevating the Dean's love to that of the virtuous father for his child, it all boils down to the inheritance. While I do believe he geniunely loves Mary, at the same time I can't ignore the obvious jockeying for position initiated by the Dean. After all, he seems quite the instigator in provoking George to seek out the truth about little Popenjoy.. George may have done so on his own, but likely not nearly so quickly without the Dean's urging.

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

At 20:37 00\11\30, Lisa Guidarini wrote: In the Dean's case, the Marquis said the offensive epithet about his daughter more than once before he knocked him flat.

If I remember correctly, the Marquis repeats the word again in the presence of the doctor, policeman, hotel manageress and staff, causing them immediately to fall into sympathy for the Dean and his actions.

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] That word

Judy Geater writes, with considerable acumen, that the word used by the Marquis when he was goading the Dean was "whore." I'm sure that it was, although it could have been "strumpet," "floozy," "woman of the streets," "harlot," or even "trollop." The point, as Ellen has already pointed out, is that the Marquis was annoyed at the Dean and George questioning the virtue of his wife and at that moment decided to retaliate in kind. The Dean was a muscular man with a trigger temper and tossed the Marquis into the fireplace. We have been building up to this moment all through the book. We have learned that the Dean and George set about questioning the virtue of the Marquis' wife. We have also learned that the Marquis has little regard for anyone or anyone's feelings. And we have learned that the Dean, in spite of his cloth, was the last man ever to turn the other cheek. So when the Dean questioned the virtue of the Marquis's wife, the Marquis, in turn, questioned the virture of the Dean's daughter. Fewer scenes in Trollope have had more careful preparation.

Sig

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] That word

At 20:19 00\11\30, Sigmund Eisner wrote: Judy Geater writes, with considerable acumen, that the word used by the Marquis when he was goading the Dean was "whore." I'm sure that it was, although it could have been "strumpet," "floozy," "woman of the streets," "harlot," or even "trollop."

I think because of the typesetting clue (-----) indicating a single word, we must opt for just a single word, not a descriptive phrase. As the Marquis' language has been rather unguarded on occasion, I think whore best fits the case. He was addressing a clergyman of the Church of England, to whom the phrase "whore of Babylon" might not be unknown, both from Revelations and also used by extremists within the CofE and other religions to describe the Church of Rome.

Rory O'Farrell Email: ofarrwrk@iol.ie

Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] That word!

From: Judy Geater (The word itself is not printed in my edition - does anybody else have the word appear or is it left as a dash everywhere? I assumed it was "whore", anyway!)

It wasn't printed in my edition either--the original edition or serial must not have had "the word" in it. I can't imagine, considering the tone of the rest of the book, that it would have!

My first thought of what "the word" was, was "slut," but "whore" may be more accurate, considering the circumstances of her marriage?

Beth.

To Trollope-l

November 30, 2000

Re: Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: The word is probably 'harlot'

Since we are given no first letter of this profoundly offensive word, nor any rhymes, nor any hint of how many syllables it contains (the typesetting is a dash, but a dash regularly signals names of several syllables), we have to turn either to other Victorian middle class novels or one by Trollope himself where a woman is called a 'bad' name which stigmatises her as sexually unchaste is used and where there is a terrible explosion.

There is at least one. In the opening pages of He Knew He Right Emily and Louis have a terrible fight upstairs. She comes downstairs to talk with her sister, Nora, and tells her that if Louis 'grossly insults' her again, uses that 'bitter word', she will leave him. The threat comes early. Nora suggests that once is not sufficient for such anger -- this is interesting. Perhaps Nora doesn't take the word so seriously because she doesn't guess what it is. Or perhaps we have here some sense of what people are in real life prepared to endure for a while from one another. To Nora's attempt to get Emily to calm down, Emily replies: it was 'not for the first time' [he has said such a word to her]. Emily then suddenly vows not to sleep with Louis, even if she doesn't leave him: ''I shall continue to live with him, of course, as a sort of upper servant, because of baby. But he shall know that I think and feel'. Again Nora says, forget it, to which Emily says: who can forget such words, and 'Nothing that I can do pleases him. He is civil and kind to you because he is not your master; but you don't know what things he says to me' (Everyman HKHWR, ed DSkilton, pp. 7, 33).

A remarkable opening for a Victorian novel. Like George, we have already had some strong hints that Louis suffers from sexual anxiety. In the case of HKHWR Trollope helps us along with allusions to Othello who also suffered similarly. People forget that Othello was an older man too.

We travel through over 600 pages of trauma for the Trevelyans and at long last we are told the word. How? Louis begins to use it repeatedly, and Emily begins to agree she is one. His mind is wholly unhinged, and if she were to object he would become shattered altogether. Even then only once is this dread word uttered: when he lays dying, Emily asks him to withdrew the word 'harlot' (p. 733). He never does.

The word harlot is also used -- and it has the cruellest of effects -- in Linda Tressel. The truly sex-hating Aunt Stambach calls the heroine a harlot. She had called her a 'castaway' and said she had 'polluted' desires. When this didn't seem to inflict the necessary mental torment to force the young Linda to marry a much older man who is distasteful to her and to make her feel deep shame for her love for a handsome young man, the aunt uttered this word. This novel is the darkest one Trollope ever wrote: the heroine's fate is that of Clarissa Harlowe.

Harlowe? What did Richardson mean us to hear in that word, punningly? Why, harlot.

The word's toughness probably finds its roots in ancient history and the beginnings of Christianity. What we have to realise is the Marquis is breaking an intense taboo. Whore doesn't cut it; it's rough slang. Slut is a relatively modern term with connotations of slattern (meaning messy). It is through the medium of the Christian religion that an intensely repressive attitude towards female sexuality, one that carries overtones of neurotic power and ferocity that the taboo is conveyed. Go back to the first century and you find prostitutes are called harlots. Equally important, the word has connotations of promiscuity too. Harlotry. What the Marquis has accused dear sweet Mary of is longing for sex indiscriminately, allured by it, with overtones of nubility. Now that's exquisitely perfect for her attraction to Jack de Baron.

It's a kind of sardonic joke.

As I argued the Marquis has a lot to get back at. The Dean has to the Marquis' face, to his face, told him that his wife was married to another man while pregnant with his child; has to his face said he doesn't believe his son is legitimate. True, the Dean doesn't use the word bastard. But then the Dean is filled with rationalisations. He's doing this out of a sense of duty and so on. All disinterest he.

I do agree with Judy that Trollope pours some of himself into the Dean, and that he fully expects us to be on the side of the Dean at the moment of the blow. Also that we have earlier paradigms for this scene in Dr Thorne. And that there is a good argument that he wants us to side with the Dean -- except that throughout the book and in these scenes my sense is Trollope has distanced himself from his characters in this novel in way that is extreme for him. This is a jaundiced book. To an unusual extent he stands outside with respect to all of the characters.

In response to Lisa, let me suggest that Trollope finally always sees his women through a man's eye, even when he enters into their minds deeply and sympathetically -- as he does in the case of Lily Dale or Alice Vavasour. He does frequently build the young virginal or chaste heroines out of literary stereotypes first, while his males often reflect aspects of his own personality. The persuasively rounded and effective older women he takes from his mother ('pulping' bits of her): Lady Carbury for example or Lady Glen when older. I suggest he eyes Mary as a father does a daughter; for my part I eye her as another woman, and her hardnesses don't escape me. There's a level in which George is as frightened of her, as leery, as he is of Adelaide who is rather an actress.

Finally I agree with Sig that the confrontation between the Dean and the Marquis has been building up for the whole of the novel. To revert to Dr Thorne, we might say that in Dr Thorne, this robust male type was balanced against Squire Gresham, and the result was a finally comforting book; in Is He Popenjoy?, the opposite number to the man whose origins are low, who is proud and wants to rise intensely, who has a 'daughter' for whom he has high aspiration is the Marquis of Brotherton. The Marquis occupies Gresham's position in the narrative, and enables Trollope to depict and satirise hard truths about the values of society in this book.

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

Hello all

First off, thanks to everybody for their thoughts on *that* word. Ellen's arguments in favour of "harlot" seem persuasive to me, but, still, "whore" is the word I heard in my mind as I read. However, the meanings are very similar, and the Dean could certainly not be expected to enjoy hearing either term applied to his beloved daughter.

Re the Kappa-kappa...

Ellen wrote 'she was in very truth waltzing with Captain de Baron' (we feel this unawakened young woman's intense sexual excitement here) --

I agree that Mary seems to be excited here, but what I want to know is, just how sexy is the dance?! I've read this chapter several times now but find it hard to visualise the Kappa-kappa, so I'm hoping that some of the dance experts on the list might be able to help me. (Is there an illustration somewhere?) What I'm wondering is just how close the couples would have got. Would the jealous Lord George have had to look at his wife in the arms of Jack de Baron, or would it be like a country dance with the couples dancing opposite each other but not actually touching?

Either way, this scene seems to me to epitomise the deep-rooted problems in George and Mary's relationship. For her, the colourful dance represents all the lively world of entertainment which her husband is trying to keep away from her - the grown-up world which he doesn't want his child-bride to share. For him, it represents the temptation and impurity which he wants to keep well away from his wife. He hates the dance because it is a public spectacle and might lead to his sacred Mary becoming the subject of gossip - he knows in his heart that there is nothing going on between her and Jack, but he doesn't want anybody else to have any reason to think that there is.

The confrontation also seems deliberately planned to contrast ironically with the Dean's confrontation with the Marquis, showing the Dean's strength and George's weakness. George defends his wife's honour by dragging her out of a party, causing confusion and making himself something of a laughing-stock. The Dean defends the same woman's honour by half-killing the man who dared to insult her.

Ellen wrote "Against this we have a strong dialogue between the Dean and his daughter in which in coded language, he instructs her to withhold sex from George, to which she replies, in effect, oh you don't know the half of it:

'"listen to what I am telling you. Say as little as you can till I am with you. Tell him that you are unwell tonight, and that you must sleep before you talk to him".

"Ah! you don't know, Papa" (p. 306)

I have to say that I at first read this quite differently, assuming that the Dean is trying to protect Mary from being told off/lectured by her husband - telling her to slope off and keep out of his way until his anger has abated. However, after reading Ellen's comments, I can see that the passage could work equally well or even better the other way - with him trying to prevent the couple from kissing and making up before he can get over to their house and take control of the quarrel and the situation.

The quarrelling between Mary and George the next day seems almost painfully realistic to me - you have to flinch at the way in which they wilfully misunderstand each other, only half-say what they are thinking, and are both so ready to strike self-regarding noble attitudes rather than really listening to what the other one is thinking. It seems only too plausible as they go round and round in weary circles and don't come to any conclusion. I get the impression that the Dean all but bulldozes them into a separation, constantly standing between them and ensuring that his daughter has no opportunity to give any ground even if she wants to.

The confused and piecemeal way in which the couple separate seems very realistic, but I have to suspect that in real life such a separation would quickly become permanent - as it does for the equally ill-matched Alexandrina and Crosbie in The Small House at Allington. Mary's sudden softening towards her husband doesn't seem very likely, somehow.

Bye for now
Judy Geater

From Catherine Crean (offlist):

Dear Ellen,

I finally had a day to get caught up on things. I reread all your posts on IHP and as usual, you are brilliant. Your close reading of the text is an absolute treat to read. I was just wondering, who was it exactly who did not agree with you? I didn't notice anyone "taking you on." (But there are some people whose posts I just delete without reading.) I think your analysis is dead right on all counts. IHP just misses being a great book because of the fake happy ending that gets slapped together. A shame, because IHP is a fascinating book. We see several insightful brave threads started, and then we retreat into "sugar and spice and everything nice." I thought your comments about Brotherton were wonderful. To call him a "bad man" (as I do, in jest) misses the point. Brotherton is only acting in a way that he knows he can get away with. You are right when you say that in IHP, Trollope is challenging the boundaries of "good" behavior. (You said it better than I just did.) So much of getting along in life consists in our all understanding and obeying societal rules. If the facade of good manners falls away, all hell breaks loose. The thing you said (which I agree with) about the Dean wishing his "sperm" be part of the new Marquis is the only post I might see as "incendiary" to some people. I will post tomorrow and I congratulate you on a fine job. It is marvelous to watch your razor sharp intelligence at work!

Love,
Catherine

PS - I have a few thoughts about stables and Mrs. Toff. (Both as separate subjects) that may upset some people. Tant pis!

Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?M, Chs 38-45: Climax (I)

Judy wrote: I agree that Mary seems to be excited here, but what I want to know is, just how sexy is the dance?!

Indeed! I can't imagine any sort of salsa or dirty dancing in Victorian times. I can't quite picture what in the world they were doing to cause Mary to fall down! Must have been rather animated..

In any event, to me it sounds more like the name of a sorority, or an honour society, than a dance!

For him, it represents the temptation and impurity which he wants to keep well away from his wife. He hates the dance because it is a public spectacle and might lead to his sacred Mary becoming the subject of gossip - he knows in his heart that there is nothing going on between her and Jack, but he doesn't want anybody else to have any reason to think that there is.

My impression is he knows full well there's nothing so terrible about Mary's dancing with Jack de Baron. I still think he's using this to manipulate Mary as much as any real feeling of being scandalised by her behaviour. The irony is Lord George ultimately scandalised the party far more by over-reacting than Mary could ever have done merely by dancing. If he were truly so worried about reputation I'd think he would stifle his impulses and address her in private. '

The confrontation also seems deliberately planned to contrast ironically with the Dean's confrontation with the Marquis, showing the Dean's strength and George's weakness. George defends his wife's honour by dragging her out of a party, causing confusion and making himself something of a laughing-stock. The Dean defends the same woman's honour by half-killing the man who dared to insult her.'

Do you think this was some sort of compensation for George knowing he hasn't the power the Dean has? That's an interesting thought.. The more I think on it, the more plausible it seems. Lord George feels powerless in relation to the Dean, and especially as regards the Dean's relationship with Mary. Though Mary's under George's roof, she's really still under the Dean's protection. Hmm..

' The quarrelling between Mary and George the next day seems almost painfully realistic to me - you have to flinch at the way in which they wilfully misunderstand each other, only half-say what they are thinking, and are both so ready to strike self-regarding noble attitudes rather than really listening to what the other one is thinking.

Yes, I thought so as well. Goodness knows I've been in that situation before, and have spited myself far too many times in the interest of being "right." That was a very well-done scene, indeed.

Lisa Guidarini

To Trollope-l

December 2, 2000

Re: Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-46: The Psychoanalytical Perspective

Reading over Lisa and Judy's astute postings yesterday on why George behaves so embarrassedly, hysterically, rigidly, or absurdly (which word we choose tells as much about us as Trollope's character), I become more and more convinced that this book not only lends itself to a psychoanalytical perspective, it can only be made sense of this way. That is, without the paradigm of the Oedipdal complex as it works itself out variously, much that we see would be absurd. With it, we can recognise the undercurrents that, mutatis mutandis, govern our lives. To quote Pope whom Trollope read:

Oft in the Passions' wild rotation tost,
Our spring of action to ourselves is lost:
Tir'd, not determin'd, to the last we yield,
And what comes then is master of the field.
As the last image of that troubled heap,
When Sense subsides, and Fancy sports in sleep,
(Tho' past the recollectoin of the thought)
 Becomes the stuff of which our dream is wrought:
Something as dim to our internal view,
Is thus, perhaps, the cause of most we do
('Moral Essays I: Epistle to Cobham', lines 40-50).

Judy wrote:

''The confrontation also seems deliberately planned to contrast ironically with the Dean's confrontation with the Marquis, showing the Dean's strength and George's weakness. George defends his wife's honour by dragging her out of a party, causing confusion and making himself something of a laughing-stock. The Dean defends the same woman's honour by half-killing the man who dared to insult her.'

Then Lisa replied:

Do you think this was some sort of compensation for George knowing he hasn't the power the Dean has? That's an interesting thought.. The more I think on it, the more plausible it seems. Lord George feels powerless in relation to the Dean, and especially as regards the Dean's relationship with Mary. Though Mary's under George's roof, she's really still under the Dean's protection. Hmm.

To which I now add:

George's sexual inadequacy may be the result of his mother's strong favoring of his brother, and his failure even slightly to hold his own against that brother. It has, however, not been helped by Mary's cleaving to her father: the father made the marriage, brought Mary to London, installed her in a house, got her a carriage; if he could have he would have given her the 'little fellow' in the oven himself. We can say he almost has -- by proxy. His absenting himself from the house fools no one; the minute his plans for his daughter's positioning of herself are endangered, he moves back in and instructs Mary to keep her door shut. Sometimes a door is only a door, but when it is a gateway to the sexual gateway, the symbolism is inescapable.

Judy also wrote:

'The quarrelling between Mary and George the next day seems almost painfully realistic to me -- you have to flinch at the way in which they wilfully misunderstand each other, only half-say what they are thinking, and are both so ready to strike self-regarding noble attitudes rather than really listening to what the other one is thinking. It seems only too plausible as they go round and round in weary circles and don't come to any conclusion.

I get the impression that the Dean all but bulldozes them into a separation, constantly standing between them and ensuring that his daughter has no opportunity to give any ground even if she wants to.

The confused and piecemeal way in which the couple separate seems very realistic, but I have to suspect that in real life such a separation would quickly become permanent -- as it does for the equally ill-matched Alexandrina and Crosbie in The Small House at Allington. Mary's sudden softening towards her husband doesn't seem very likely, somehow.'

I offer the idea that improbable as it feels in the book only this sudden pregnancy can bring them together. Were this a classical epic we would doubtless have Juno-Hera invoked as dea ex machina, but it is supposed to be realistic fiction. Trollope has many troubles with his presentation of Mary. On the one hand, he sees her from the outside and as if he were her father, fond yet without illusions about her childishness and blindness to her own impulses. He is the Dean bullying her, taking over. On the other, as George he responds to her as the middle class gentleman who resorts to more 'lower class' and simply psychologically vulnerable types (the Amelia Ropers, Madalina Desmoulins, Janes [from [Can You Forgive Her?], Mrs Lucy Mortons [Sir Harry Hotspur, the woman the hero lives with while courting the heroine]), because he is put off, frightened by, uncomfortable with the trained to be self-contained chaste goddesses of his milieu. He certainly is partly Johnny Eames and Charles Tudor. There we see glimpses of his young manhood, rebuffed, disrespected, and made to feel inadequate by the women of his class. It is documented how such men did form intense emotional attachments to lower class women and sometimes lived quietly with them for years and years. Yet through Mary he will produce highly sophisticated understandings of the real nature of social life how it impinges continually on what we imagine is our privacy, our solitude, our apartness. The lines quoted by Lisa denying there is such a thing as privacy is Trollope breaking through the character to express his own courageous views. They tell us how he lived his life for real. How he managed to become the effective postman, the novelist, the world traveller despite his boyhood humiliations, years of depression, intense sensitivities.

This is another of Trollope's many indirectly iconoclastic books. I can't remember being driven to psychoanalytic interpretations for his others. In the earlier production of the father-daughter variation on the Oedipal relationship in Dr Thorne he went nowhere as deeply into the psychology of such a relationship. I wonder if others recall that John Letts told us when we started this read that he wanted to choose Is He Popenjoy? for the Folio Society Club. It would have been a brave choice, but how many readers would have read the book carefully enough?

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] IHP: Dancing, Mary and the Dean

I think that it wasn't the bagatelle itself that was the outrage. Lord George was upset about it because Adeliade set him up by first talking about Jack and Mary as if there was the danger of an affair, and then misleading him into thinking that Mary had arranged to meet Jack at her house to play bagatelle. He must see that Mary has more fun with Jack than with him.

Also Lord George likes improving entertainment. He wants her to spend her free time reading serious books and sewing for the poor. The idea of her meeting a handsome young man to play a child's game won't sit well with Lord George. Especially a young man who is more attractive to her than he is.

Plus I think that he needs to feel suspicious of Mary so that he can feel less guilty about his own visits to Adelaide.

Clarissa

Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] IHP: Dancing, Mary and the Dean

Hello all

Thanks for all the information on the Kappa-Kappa and waltzing - I must say I had somehow imagined rather sedate ballroom dancing, and it's quite an eye-opener to realise just how daring this dance clearly was for the period!

By coincidence, I've just been reading Trollope's very powerful short novel An Eye for an Eye (I loved it and read it all in one evening because I couldn't put it down!) and noticed this comment in John Sutherland's introduction: "Trollope occasionally sold his novellas to the evangelical magazine 'Good Words'. But they had once returned something of his because it contained a scene of dancing. A story centred on copulation would hardly be to their taste." So from this it seems as if many people regarded dancing as rather shocking! Does anybody know which story was rejected by the magazine?

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the whole dance scene is incredibly theatrical, with George, Jack and Mary playing out a drama in front of an audience, so to speak. She knows that there is gossip about her and Jack - yet she goes ahead with the "wild dance" with him. He knows, or should know, that it will lead to even more damaging gossip if he marches in and pulls her off the dance floor - yet he goes ahead and does just that. Both are stubborn, but I still feel more sympathy for Mary because she is so much younger and she only wants a bit of fun - something she gets precious little of shut up at home with her morose husband and his mother and sisters.

It's interesting that Sutherland thinks there is a real danger of an affair between Jack and Mary. I certainly thought this at first, if anything just because of Jack de Baron's name - he might as well be called "seducer"! But by this stage I really don't think we are expecting the rather mild flirtation to turn into anything more.

To digress for a minute, I'm puzzled by Jack and Mary playing bagatelle slightly earlier in the novel. I had a bagatelle set when I was about eight and it was a sort of old-fashioned pinball game where you pulled back a handle to send small metal balls into pockets - don't know if I'm explaining this very well! But my point is that it was very much a game for young children and I can't quite imagine two adults meeting to play this. Does anybody know if bagatelle used to mean something different?

I'd also like to backtrack a little on the Dean. I argued in an earlier post that Trollope wants us to approve of his action in hitting the extremely rude Marquis - but I'd have to say that he does also question the violence, showing that George for instance strongly disapproves. The same is true in The Small House at Allington, where we are encouraged to cheer on Johnny Eames as he gives Crosbie a black eye -but then Trollope queries the violence by making it clear that Lily would be horrified if she found out about it.

This is one of the things that makes him such a fascinating writer, the way in which he so often sees two sides of the question!

Bye for now
Judy Geater

From Rory O'Farrell:

I remember that we had a bagatelle board, much like Judy describes. It was made from mahogany, and measured about 30" by 14". The ball was shot by using a thing like a small billiard cue to shoot it up the side of the board and around the curve, where it broke and descended into the pins. If you were lucky, it went into a pocket and settled there. The pockets were little cups in the surface of the board, so the ball didn't always stay. Having to shoot the ball with the little billiard cue required much more skill than the spring thingy!

Rory O'Farrell

Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] IHP: Dancing, Mary and the Dean

At 22:31 00\12\03, Clarissa wrote: "I think that it wasn't the bagatelle itself that was the outrage. Lord George was upset about it because Adeliade set him up by first talking about Jack and Mary as if there was the danger of an affair, and then misleading him into thinking that Mary had arranged to meet Jack at her house to play bagatelle. He must see that Mary has more fun with Jack than with him."

"Playing bagatelle with Jack" was not a pursuit where one might expect much company - so they would not be chaperoned as Lord George would probably prefer. Also, playing bagatelle would probably involve some small wagers (gloves" and "new hats", whether these are to be understood literally or as slang for small amounts of cash, and such wagering would certainly be seen by Lord George as a departure from the straight and narrow path he would wish his wife to walk. "Playing bagatelle with Jack" would probably be seen by Lord George as "an occasion of sin"!

Rory O'Farrell

From Ellen:

Re: Dancing and the Evangelicals: Is He Popenjoy? and Rachel Ray

To Judy, Rachel Ray was rejected by Good Words. The story has been told a number of times; most introductions include it. One can infer from the incident something that comes to the surface repeatedly in Is He Popenjoy? Trollope had a strong spirit of subversive mischief in him. He was invited to write a novel by the Rev Macleod for a magazine known to be heavily evangelical; the opening sequence includes three delightful chapters in which the heroine goes to her first ball. She shocks her own relatives -- especially a jealous spiteful sister (that's the way Trollope characterises the sister); the relatives and their clergyman friend are shown to be bigoted hypocrites. Rachel even seems to walks out with the young man -- without a chaperone. When Trollope protested that he could never imagine Macleod's readership protesting these scenes or his characterisation and story in general, Macleod just about accused him of disingenuousness (lying is the less polite word). How could he not know he would offend? And how could he imagine that Macleod would still honor the contract and publish the novel. Macleod presented himself in a way similar to Thackeray when Thackeray rejected a couple of Trollope's short stories.

Rachel Ray is a lovely novel -- a fractured pastoral with strong satiric sequences on the hypocrisies and root impulses of puritanism, on the evangelicals as tyrannical, rightist, and on elections. It also has an astute portrait of the strong hero and the enthralled heroine. Although Lady Anna was by reviewers said to be comparable to Felix Holt (both looked at as radical), Rachel Ray is rather like Felix Holt in many many ways. We read it, The Belton Estate and Felix Holt on this list from two to a year and a half ago now.

George Eliot loved Rachel Ray and was so enthusiastic about it when she read it, she rushed a letter to Trollope to tell him how healthy and beautifully knit together it was. She said such a novel would do people good. As Macleod was right about the satire, this tells us much about Eliot.

There are still cultures in the world -- and religious groups here in the US -- who regard dancing as sinful.

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

From Lisa Guardini:

At 19:42 00\12\04, Dagny wrote: When I read about wagering for gloves and new hats I assumed that this is literally what the ladies did, so, since they were not using money, they were not actually betting, making it seem a bit more respectable. But I don't know what the custom actually was.

Sutherland's note in Oxford Classics IHP is: '"New hats" is 1870s slang for guineas. Playing for gloves means playing for forfeits. Mary means that they will stop wagering for small sums of money, if it so vexes her Brotherton relations.'

But whether for money or goods, we are all agreed that Lord George, from his high moral ground as husband, would regard this as gambling.

Beth wrote:

Sounds more like aerobic exercise than dirty dancing to me! :)

Indeed, when I read back through it I'd have to agree! Perhaps this was just a very early version of Tae Bo.. ;-)

Although there is some waltzing in there, which involves close contact between the dancers, and the gentleman having his hand upon the lady's waist, I believe.

Didn't Lord George think the reverse waltzing was perverse? I hope I'm remembering correctly, but it seems to me I remember him thinking that watching his wife waltz backwards with de Baron was particularly shocking to him.

On another note, my opinion of Lord George is turning around, the further I read. I had a rather low opinion of the man at first, but now that I've read the sections in which he gives Adelaide what-for I'm thinking I was too harsh on the man. The more I learn of him the more realistic and just he seems. He's not without his flaws, but as Ellen Moody and others have pointed out he has some reasons for this related to self-esteem issues, courtesy of his mother.. He truly is a well-rounded character and I'm now regretting some of my earlier harsh judgement of him.

Lisa Guidarini, off for a cuppa cuppa coffee

Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 38-46: The Psychoanalytical Perspective

From: Ellen Moody

I become more and more convinced that this book not only lends itself to a psychoanalytical perspective, it can only be made sense of this way. That is, without the paradigm of the Oedipdal complex as it works itself out variously, much that we see would be absurd.

I agree, there is much depth in this novel and so many undercurrents that lend themselves very well to psychoanalytic study. There's much of the Oedipal in Lord George's relation to his mother, and much of that is likely at the root of his problems with Mary. Likewise, there's the sort of reverse of the Oedipal situation going on with the Marquis and his mother, and the differences in personality between the brothers because of that.

As I said in another post, I'm beginning to be much more sympathetic to Lord George. Part of this stems from discussions about his relationship with his mother, and his mother's spurning of him. I find it nothing sort of shocking how she treats him, mostly because I can't imagine favouring one of my boys over the other in that manner. I suppose things are different when you're so concerned with social position, but even then I find the disparity between her treatment of the Marquis and George to be extreme.

Wasn't there reported to have been such an extreme in the treatment Fanny Trollope gave to two of her sons? I seem to remember some accusing her of spurning Anthony in the way Lord George is spurned. But I believe others have also refuted the charge, in Fanny's defense.

In normal sibling relations, it's common to feel one's siblings were liked better than oneself. My older brothers did sometimes resent what the perceived as spoiling of me, as I was the youngest AND the only girl.. So I do believe the feeling of being slighted is a normal one. Therefore, Anthony may have had the perception of being spurned without Fanny actually doing anything out of the ordinary. What occurs in Popenjoy, therefore, may or may not be Trollope's own personal experience. I only commented upon it as I've seen such reports in the occasional biography. I'll leave it to the experts to judge!

George's sexual inadequacy may be the result of his mother's strong favoring of his brother, and his failure even slightly to hold his own against that brother. It has, however, not been helped by Mary's cleaving to her father

I believe the Mary/Dean relationship is equally as important as the relationship between Lord George and his mother, definitely. I'm not sure Lord George could have fallen into a more stressful marital situation than he has, actually, as far as personality types!

I get the impression that the Dean all but bulldozes them into a separation, constantly standing between them and ensuring that his daughter has no opportunity to give any ground even if she wants to.

The Dean can be highly manipulative, I agree. He's one who's fallen in my opinion, while Lord George has risen.

One thing about Trollope characters, and I know this has been said before on the list. They are so amazingly REAL! They have their flaws and their strengths, and I almost feel I witness them undergoing transformation as I read. In reality I'm seeing their different dimensions, much as you get to know a person in real life. This, I believe, is one huge strength of Trollope and where he best succeeds as a novelist.

I offer the idea that improbable as it feels in the book only this sudden pregnancy can bring them together

I think this is very true. The whole family is so excited when Mary becomes pregnant, and even the sisters begin to relent a bit. Part of that is the whole heir issue, so what if the child is a girl?? That seems almost a disastrous proposition at this point!

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Tame that woman down!

I think Ellen is right when she says that Is He Popenjoy? just misses being a great book. As much as I love this book - it's one of my favorite Anthony Trollope novels - there are parts of the book that make me want to scream, "Ooooooh noooooo! Don't you do that, girl!" the way some people in the audience shout at the movie screens. Mary has plenty of intelligence and spirit. That is bad! Tame that woman down! Trollope comes right out and says what thinks about women and happiness in this book - get married and have babies.

IHP is fascinating because Trollope is laying out the options for women in this book. You can be a Lady Sarah (tough maiden aunt) a Lady Selina Protest/Aunt Ju ("two old maids who have gone crazy because nobody has married them." Chapter 68), an Adelaine Houghton (bad woman) etc. etc. I don't think any of Trollope's other novels contain such a wide range of female proto-types as this one. Like Lady Glencora Palliser, Mary "kicks against the pricks." But in the end, we know she'll be back in the sewing circle making petticoats. No more dancing for her. Thank goodness Mary gets pregnant!

And then we see the machinery in action - Lady Sarah rides our with her lasso and ropes that cattle home where she belongs. When the Marquis insults the Dean because he "reeks of the stable" all I can think of is a stud farm. Consciously or unconsciously the metaphor is there. Ellen is right when she says that part of what drives the Dean in his quest to prove the swarthy baby is not Popenjoy, is the Dean's desire to be the grandfather of a Marquis. But all of this jockeying (another horse metaphor!) around will come to naught if the brood mare won't be still and get impregnated, and then get into the barn and give birth. The scene early in the book where the women are stationed around the bed that Queen Elizabeth may or may not have slept in were showing us the battlefield - the bed. Mary's withholding sex, leaving George, having close physical contact with a man not her husband, are all scary and dangerous because she must produce an heir - a real Popenjoy. The fact that Mary is tamed down, put down, and shut up by the end of the novel really irritates me. I don't think it's an accident that one of the naughty things Mary does with her naughty friends is play at telling fortunes with "fortune telling cards."

This reminded me of a Tarot deck. Mary at the end, has to be the "Good Queen." That is, a queen who bears the children and keeps her image intact. (And her virtue intact as well.)

Catherine Crean

From Sig:

Kishor A Kale wrote:

What kind of forfeits would be customary?

Dear Kishor:

Don't ask.

Sig

Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Tame that woman down!

From: Catherine Crean

I think Ellen is right when she says that Is He Popenjoy? just misses being a great book. As much as I love this book - it's one of my favorite Anthony Trollope novels - there are parts of the book that make me want to scream, "Ooooooh noooooo! Don't you do that, girl!" the way some people in the audience shout at the movie screens. Mary has plenty of intelligence and spirit. That is bad! Tame that woman down!

HA! Catherine, that was so entirely funny... I've not yet finished the book, but it's ranking as my favourite Trollope novel to date. I'll reserve judgement until I've finished, but thus far I can't see it falling off its pedestal within the last few pages.

Trollope comes right out and says what thinks about women and happiness in this book - get married and have babies. IHP is fascinating because Trollope is laying out the options for women in this book. You can be a Lady Sarah (tough maiden aunt) a Lady Selina Protest/Aunt Ju ("two old maids who have gone crazy because nobody has married them." Chapter 68), an Adelaine Houghton (bad woman) etc. etc. I don't think any of Trollope's other novels contain such a wide range of female proto-types as this one.

It's interesting to see them lined out like this, Catherine. I suppose I'd been liking Mary for her spirit, but you've given me pause to stop and think things through a bit more!

Really, I can't see her losing her spirit, but I do get your points about what Trollope really appears to be saying. It's all these little things we have to pay attention to, in order to discover what message he's ultimately sending, no matter how much spirit he may have granted our Mary. It's how well she maintains that spirit, by the end, that will be the most telling. But in the end, we know she'll be back in the sewing circle making petticoats. No more dancing for her. Thank goodness Mary gets pregnant!

HAHA! Indeed! I've no doubt she'll be brought back around to her proper place in society by the end. But, then, I can't see Mary as happy being separated from Lord George. If she's happier in the home, with the children pulling at her skirts, that seems to me a fine thing for her. She didn't seem entirely comfortable in her women's meetings, listening to the Frau rave, so I picture Mary as a domestic sort by nature.

I'm curious to read the ending, and to see exactly how Mary does settle back into home life. I really am hoping she doesn't lose any of that wonderful spirit.

When the Marquis insults the Dean because he "reeks of the stable" all I can think of is a stud farm. Consciously or unconsciously the metaphor is there.

Wonderful observation, Catherine! I didn't even note that one.

Ellen is right when she says that part of what drives the Dean in his quest to prove the swarthy baby is not Popenjoy, is the Dean's desire to be the grandfather of a Marquis.

Yes, exactly. A peaches and cream baby is called for, to carry the family name and assure Mary's social position..

Mary's withholding sex, leaving George, having close physical contact with a man not her husband, etc. are all scary and dangerous because she must produce an heir - a real Popenjoy. The fact that Mary is tamed down, put down, and shut up by the end of the novel really irritates me

Ah, yes, but at the same time I must risk invoking female ire and say again, perhaps this is what Mary really most wanted, after all (a happy and EQUAL family unit). Until I've read the ending I don't know for sure, but I do get the impression Mary would be happiest in the family circle. She definitely does NOT need the interfering sisters around, but if she can get Lord George to bend and become more reasonable in his expectations I can see her being quite happy. And once she's produced that heir I'd expect George to relax in his ideas of whom she may and may not see. Or would that go the opposite way and cause him to be MORE strict??

ARRGH! Now I'm convoluting myself! Anyway, in a nutshell, if Lord George releases his strangle hold on Mary, and doesn't allow his family to run all over her, I think it's a good thing for Mary to return. However, if Mary's relegated to the same second-class status she had before, I think it's very, very bad..

Now I have a monstrous headache!

Lisa Guidarini