To Trollope-l

December 5, 2000

Re: Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 46-52: Deepening like a Coastal Shelf

My heading is an allusion to Larkin's poem, 'This Be the Verse, which captures in bold stark terms the quality of family life in this novel. This week's chapters dramatise the internecine warfare endemic to family life. Trollope partly retrieves his breaking the logic of his own story and the characterisation of his figures when he made Mary pregnant. He does not falsify the relationships of the characters or their personalities even though he has guaranteed what I now see will be an ironic or saturnine happy ending by the pregnancy. Now the title does make sense. But I am getting ahead of the narrative and will wait to discuss the title when we get to the end of the book.

Some examples:

When I saw the heading of Chapter 46, Lady Sarah's Mission, I thought to myself, 'uh-oh, we are going to have Lady Sarah to the Rescue' and 'spare us'. But no. Her 'mission' fails because Trollope doesn't flinch from showing us that she is driven to try to get the girl back only because the girl is pregnant with a possible heir. He does not flinch from having Mary, this time Marquis-of-Brotherton-like, refusing to pay lip service to the lie that Lady Sarah loves her. Mary makes it clear that the sisters will be forgiving her, and she will not endure the implications of that, and they would enforce upon her their repressed pleasureless way of life:

'You would all think me wicked if I were there, because I would not live in your ways'.

'We should not think you wicked, Mary'.

Yes, you would. You thought me wicked before.'

'Don't you believe we love you, Mary?'

She considered a moment before she made a reply, but then made it very clearly, 'No', she said,

'I don't think you do. George loves me. Oh, I hope he loves me'.

'You may be quite sure of that. And I love you'.

'Yes; just as you love all people, because the Bible tells you. That is not enough'.

'I will love you like a sister, Mary, if you will come back to us' (Folio Society, IHP, introd. DSkilton, Ch 46, p. 369).

Love her like a sister, eh? The way she loves Lady Susannah and the way Lady Susannah loves her and Mary. The depiction of family life at Cross Manor shows the mother manipulating her daughters in the way weakness tyrannises over strongness, yet relieved when Lady Sarah goes out for this rare visit as then for a few hours she is free of the burden of her presence (p. 366). This recalls another line from another of Larkin's poems: 'everyone ... going down the long slide/To happiness, endlessly'. Endless it is, never ceasing, how they use one another.

There is a problem in the above dialogue and it will plague the book from here on. Mary's hope that Lord George loves her goes unexamined. Does he? He has a peculiar way of showing it. Trollope makes a transvaluation or new use of the term 'manliness' in this book. The Marquis is again vicious: now he will get back at George for siding with the Dean by insisting he has the right to throw George out of his house. Here again we see that practically speaking Lady Sarah is the only one in this family with any understanding of the way human relations really work. She doesn't want to go to a house she doesn't have the legal right to stay in now that the Marquis has once shown he is willing to use that right against them. She's right. One such betrayal is enough. She is overruled by the others who so long for the prestigious place. Then they get there, and the Marquis acts in character: 'When people are dependent on me I chose that they shall be dependent' (Ch 48, p. 384). Again he only makes explicit the handles people really use over one another.

Asinine George is now homeless: because of course he persists in taking ceremony, taking what people say, seriously. The Dean steps in and writes as cordial a letter as he can inviting George to come live at the deanery. Note the language used: 'Be a man and come to us, and let us make much of you' (Ch 48, p. 386). But George refuses. And why? Because 'how was he now to exercise authority over his wife/" (p. 387). We get him thinking about how he needs to make Mary feel she has done wrong (after all his denials to the Dean he would do such a thing); without making the skirtingly incestuous nature of the Dean's behavior over Mary's sex life, George knows that if he goes back, he will be a cypher for the Dean: the quarrel as he and Mary frame it, is she will not return to him, unless he agrees to allow the Dean to carry on in the same position vis-a-visher and him; he is struggling against 'putting himself into the Dean's leading strings' (p. 376) Trollope sheers off making this Oedipal complex explicit, leaves it there hintingly in George's thoughts: 'For reasons of his own he had come to the conclusion that the less he had to do with the dean the better for him' -- and, as he sees what his position in his relationship with Mary to be, the better for 'his wife' (p. 381).

This is love? Well, it's what's often called love in the world. Ordinary jargon or the cover-up vague cant words of daily life would call George's refusal to go live in the Dean's house manliness. However, in context it is unmanly of George to not to take the invitation up. It shows him to be just like his fool of a mother, in thrall to how he appears before others, in thrall to customs everyone else knows are rationales they pay lip service to. Were George a chimpanzee, he would not get even the lowest branch on a tree; in human society it is only luck that has given him his half-hold on his rank; pull that rug out from under him, and where would he be? The vulnerability of us all is laid bare before us.

Mary's hope also opens up for us the cant in Trollope's presentation of her character. We have now had a few chapters in which we meet Jack de Baron sneaking around her house, talking to Adelaide Houston of how alluring he finds her. Chapters 43 ('Real Love') and the ironic close of Chapter 51 ('Guss Mildmay's Success') where Jack almost goes into the house where Mary is residing, but is stopped by the Dean's presence -- that Dean keeps the men in line, does he not? -- are very odd because nothing happens in them. Trollope seems intent on making us see that Jack is intensely attracted to Mary and she to him, but he cannot in a middle class book, really show them having an affair or outwardly regretting that they cannot manage it in the glass-house world they live in. Into the vacuity of this he pours absurd sentimental words from Jack about how before Mary he feels such 'awe' before her, how he 'really loves her', how very 'special' and 'different' she is. The unbelievability of this is patent -- as is Trollope's not giving Mary any angry thoughts over her husband, any doubts, just a kind of girlish delight, of oh see, we are walking in the village together, and now everyone will see we are in love. Worthy a 12 year old reading a romance -- or an imagined 17 year old female reader who has yet to become an adult and dreams men are the pliable adorers her romances have told her.

There is a remarkable passage in one of Thackeray's letters about _Pendennis_ where he inveighs about the climate surrounding the writing of books because, says he, it prevents any author in England from ever showing how a young gentleman in London really spends his hours, really thinks, and especially about women. Thackeray groans over the falseness of the depiction of young men. As pernicious is this depiction of a young woman's feelings: the young woman who could speak so to Lady Sarah and fight her husband off so effectively, would not be so vacuous when it comes to understanding how she is being used by her father nor so mechanically pliable towards George.

The reason Trollope doesn't go into Mary's mind is he would then have to break central tabooes which kept girls of her class in place by a series of lies over their lack of sexual appetite, anger, frustration. In his The Victorian Frame of Mind, an old but readable well-informed book, Walter Houghton goes over how middle class girls of this period were manipulated into making aggrandizing marriages, and into submitting to all sorts of controls by making the assertion of any anger or sexual appetite unthinkable. One instrument of this inculcation was the middle class novel. In his An Autobiography, Trollope says that not a single sentence, and certainly not two chapters should be written which do not at the same time as they present character advance the plot. But he can't advance the plot in Chapters 43 and 51. Yet he can't resist these unattached squirmings of Jack de Baron.

Still despite these emptinesses in Mary's mind, this vacuous presentation of Jack de Baron, the rest of family life as presented in these chapters, the character of the Dean himself, of his son-in-law proxy, of the Cross Manor family life is presented far more truthfully than it usually is anywhere today too. The Dean thinks to himself how bringing his son-in-law into the house will not be pleasant to him, but 'for his daughter's sake' he must needs make the best of it. One of George's sisters, Lady Alice explains George's loyalty to his wife and inabilty to break from the Dean thus: "'He had a great deal of money with her, you know' (ch 52, p. 414).

We have parallel groups: Mr de Baron whose daughter sold herself to a man who bores her; Guss Mildmay who is supposed to be joyous because she gets a strangled proposal of marriage which she can now manipulate 'You are heartless -- absolutely heartless', but my dear, says he, 'I can't afford' anything else (p. 409). There's Mrs Montacute Jones whose husband used to beat her. Trollope wants to use her as an amusing figure. Lucky her she's got a legal separation -- and there was no pregnancy I suppose. She's a hollow cynical Mrs Grantly, matchmaking away ('Man hands on misery to man'). You really have to wonder what it is that the Baroness Banmann could possibly want or hope to gain. One reason her suffragette qualities come out as simply powerhunger is Trollope offers no context in social life for anything else that could be real.

The underside of all that is usually hidden, that goes unspoken, that is often denied in family life, is dramatised before us.

Ellen Moody

Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 46-52: Deepening like a Coastal Shelf

From: Ellen Moody

There is a problem in the above dialogue and it will plague the book from here on. Mary's hope that Lord George loves her goes unexamined. Does he? He has a peculiar way of showing it.

I believe Lord George has a degree of love for Mary. It's not passionate, by any means, but we hear what he's thinking, and very often it's of Mary and about Mary. Rather than loving his wife as a person, I believe he's more in love with the idea of a wifely ideal. As such, Mary MUST fit this mold, no matter what it takes. And George, as her husband, MUST love her in an extremely protective way. Really, I think George had very poor role models when it came to knowing how to love a woman, and if we knew more of the relationship between his own father and mother I believe that would be most illuminating. In lieu of that, we see the relationships within the rest of the family, and none of those are entirely warm. Lord George loves in a rather distant way, but I do think he loves his wife.

We get him thinking about how he needs to make Mary feel she has done wrong (after all his denials to the Dean he would do such a thing);

The way he thinks about this seems rather like the way a minister would deal with a sinner. I'd not thought of it before, but Lord George seems almost to be trying to save Mary from eternal damnation by getting her to confess her sins, real or imagined. And he's rather manic and zealous about it.

Trollope seems intent on making us see that Jack is intensely attracted to Mary and she to him, but he cannot in a middle class book, really show them having an affair or outwardly regretting that they cannot manage it in the glass-house world they live in.

Trollope seems to give Mary a sort of ethereal purity that doesn't allow her to see de Baron in a sexual way. She is entirely wrapped up in her husband, and though she may realise she loves de Baron in a friendly way, cannot even see how near the boundary she's flirting. De Baron, on the other hand, seems fully aware of the score. I believe he'd jump on Mary given half a chance, but she never gives him a lead-in. There'll be more on this a bit later in the book..

As pernicious is this depiction of a young woman's feelings: the young woman who could speak so to Lady Sarah and fight her husband off so effectively, would not be so vacuous when it comes to understanding how she is being used by her father nor so mechanically pliable towards George.

But is it not true that real people are sometimes like that? Mary has grown up with the Dean as her father, and to a certain extent I'm sure what he does is taken as a given. She knows him, understands him, and doesn't really question what he does. That he loves her she's certain, thus she trusts him implicitly. I'm not sure that's really so unusual.

The reason Trollope doesn't go into Mary's mind is he would then have to break central tabooes which kept girls of her class in place by a series of lies over their lack of sexual appetite, anger, frustration.

Yes, I believe this is very true. Mary's mind must have been in the most turmoil of any character, and to have honestly looked into it would surely have been very shocking! I agree this is a big reason Trollope doesn't let us see in here.

You really have to wonder what it is that the Baroness Banmann could possibly want or hope to gain. One reason her suffragette qualities come out as simply powerhunger is Trollope offers no context in social life for anything else that could be real.

The Baroness Banmann is a very interesting peripheral character. I do wish we knew more of her. She sounds quite the virago, but that's about all we really see of her. We hear of her movements, but all we catch are glimpses of her otherwise. Very odd, the whole thing.

The underside of all that is usually hidden, that goes unspoken, that is often denied in family life, is dramatised before us.

What struck me, in reading this book, is how very much local society seemed to know about one another's business. I suppose such would have been the case, through gossip, etc., but I got the feeling everyone knew everything that was going on. In the case of de Baron and Mary, though Mary herself was blissfully unaware, the rest of their little microcosm seemed perfectly cognizant of the fact Jack loved Mary. If she'd not been so busy with her own woes I'd have more trouble believing she didn't see that, but frankly, with Mary, I can believe it! Society was so up on things as to allow Guss the chance to work up a good fury at Mary before she'd even spoken to her on the subject of Jack. It's no wonder that, by the time Guss finally could confront Mary, she blew up like an atom bomb!

In essence, little seems to have been kept secret. As such, I do believe Trollope did an excellent job of portraying the way family secrets ripple through society, and how difficult it is to get anything accomplished with everyone in your world scrutinsing you. Also, there's much of the obligatory jockeying for power through marriage, children, etc., as well as manipulation of those who trust you. This was a fascinating and wonderful read, indeed.

Lisa Guardini

Re: Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 46-52: 'The poor beggar hadn't much life in him ...

Why couldn't they wait?', asks the Marquis de Brotherton (Folio Society, IHP?, introd. DSkilton, Ch 52, p. 413). This recalls Larkin's 'Get out as early as you can,/And don't have any kids yourself', except that Larkin's tone is hard, apparently without regret.

For about a chapter Trollope moves into the Marquis de Brotherton's mind for the first time all novel long. We find there despair, suicidal impulses, something like regret, a sense of life's meaninglessness, what the French in the 18th century called 'ennui', a form of depression. These nightly trips into the streets where thousands of prostitutes were to be readily found in the streets, taverns and of course gambling houses and brothels of England signal desperation. Again were Trollope only allowed to the closing dialogue of Chapter 52 ('Another Love') between Adelaide Houghton and the Marquis would end in a quietly indicated casual sexual encounter later that night in bed somewhere in this country house. This was a typical way to spend time in such jaunts. Trollope comes as close to this as he can (Ch 52, pp. 416-17), the scene beginning, again suddenly giving us some center of soft emotion on the part of the Marquis, 'Perhaps you'd have been just as keen as she is to rob my boy of his name'.

In his essay in Trollopiana, 'Pagans and Popinjays', (No 46, 1999, pp. 13-22), Anthony Juckes likens Is He Popenjoy? to Trollope's last long novel, Mr Scarborough's Family, and brings together the villain-hero of that novel, the magnificently intelligent bitter Machiavel, Mr Scarborough and the Marquis de Brotherton. We have not been talking about how the text we are reading has been bowlderized by the younger Charles Dickens -- wiped out are numbers of little phrases which would allude more directly to sexual appetites and possibilities going on between the characters. Is He Popenjoy? first appeared in this Dickens's All the Year Round. So did Mr Scarborough's Family. There the younger Charles Dickens again bowlderised the text, this time to the point that modern editions which are good go to the volumed publication of the novel to get a real sense of Trollope's originally sharply nuanced portrait of the desperate deviant. What he erased out what the what he feared would be a deeply offensive portrait of a character clearly meant to be the hero, whose death we are clearly to mourn (Geoffrey Harvey, 'Introduction' to the Oxford Classics Mr Scarborough's Family). Lucy and Richard Poate Stebbins upset (and scandalised to some extent) Trollopians when in their family biography, they likened the Scarborough-Marquis types to Trollope and called him a pagan -- as he does Mr Scarborough -- and talked of his desperate behaviors in old age.

We cannot like the Marquis; indeed, he is repellent. But he had whatever were his reasons for going to Italy, for marrying there, for having a child. Why should he endure condescension, which would turn into interference, the hypocrisy he would have to assent to over his dark children -- were he to have had any more. As presented, there doesn't seem to be much joy in life in England -- just salvation through work. Which is what the Marquis suggests he regrets not having done, not having attached himself to (p. 415). Trollope's repeated motto throughout the books comes from Shakespeare: 'The labour we delight in physics pain'. The last serious scene between Plantangent Palliser and his oldest son, Lord Silverbridge, is one in which Pallliser tries to communicate to the puzzled (and shallow) young man the importance of work to him. The Marquis didn't care for what was on offer - in his case estate management. Unlike the Dean he cannot find meaning in garnering titles nor watching gyrations on a luxurious dancefloor and basking in the apparent admiration of others for a sold daughter. The book tells us, the problem is, given society, which means given human nature, there is nothing else, unless the Marquis had some special talent, which he clearly doesn't. He goes out like a shot in the night with the death of the baby.

How many novels use the death of a baby as the means of a happy ending?

Ellen Moody

Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?, Chs 46-52: 'The poor beggar hadn't much life in him ...

From: Ellen Moody

For about a chapter Trollope moves into the Marquis de Brotherton's mind for the first time all novel long. We find there despair, suicidal impulses, something like regret, a sense of life's meaninglessness, what the French in the 18th century called 'ennui', a form of depression.

I was rather amazed after having a look inside Brotherton.. I was almost shielding my eyes as I read, so terribly dark is he inside. I do believe he was terribly depressed, and that's why he lashed out so spitefully at others. Why this was I'm still not certain. Could part of it be the pressure of being the heir apparent? But why? I still do not completely understand him, though I feel I sympathise with him a bit more after seeing more of his own inner turmoil.

These nightly trips into the streets where thousands of prostitutes were to be readily found in the streets, taverns and of course gambling houses and brothels of England signal desperation.

Indeed, though we don't find out exactly what he's doing we can guess.. And that just adds to how agonised a character he seems to be.

Again were Trollope only allowed to the closing dialogue of Chapter 52 ('Another Love') between Adelaide Houghton and the Marquis would end in a quietly indicated casual sexual encounter later that night in bed somewhere in this country house. This was a typical way to spend time in such jaunts.

That was a very odd exchange, between Adelaide and the Marquis! I can see how this could have been considered quite shocking to Victorian audiences, though things are kept shrouded. We still know exactly what the Marquis is saying to Adelaide, and Adelaide proves herself to be a very enlightened woman in her responses.. This is no Mary, that's for sure!

We cannot like the Marquis; indeed, he is repellent. But he had whatever were his reasons for going to Italy, for marrying there, for having a child. Why should he endure condescension, which would turn into interference, the hypocrisy he would have to assent to over his dark children -- were he to have had any more.

Indeed, I can see that point from the Marquis' point of view. But I still don't believe he loved, or was capable of loving, his wife or child. They were pawns, essentially, and his complete coldness at the death of his son and heir was nothing short of chilling. Even when left alone he shows no emotion. Mind, I believe he's greatly numbed by his obvious depression, but to have no regret at his child's death seems incredibly harsh. I cannot fully empathise with the Marquis, and cannot in any way like him. I feel sorry for him, but that's as far as I can go.

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Heroism in Is He Popenjoy

The beauty of this book is that if it has a hero, this hero has clay feet. I suppose George Germaine is as close to a hero as we come, although I am very fond of Lady Sarah. But George is a hero with the most claying of clay feet. Nor is there much sign he will ever improve. Both George and his sister Sarah want to preserve the dignity of their noble family. Sarah is intelligent but limited by lack of experience. George is simply not very intelligent.

This is the beauty of Trollope. The heroes can have clay feet. Dickens gives us heroes who are limited only by the abuse coming their way. Scott gives us flawless heroes such as Ivanhoe. This, I suppose is what is meant by Trollope's realism. He heroes act like real people, warts and all.

Sig

I so agree with you. Trollope presents George as thoroughly unlikeable at the beginning of the book, by the end of the book most readers will surely have come round to liking and even feeling sorry for him, with his limited ideas. George hasn't changed - the reader has!

Love, Gwyn.

Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000
 Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Heroism is Is He Popenjoy

I'm not sure George hasn't changed. He has related to people (including Mrs.Houghton) physically and mentally in ways he never has, has physically fought in a sense for Mary, has walked out on the Marquis and then said no to a later interview, quarrelled with the Dean, reached a balance of power of sorts with Mary. And of course even if he hadn't improved he would still look very good in comparison with all the wretched people in this book.Pat

Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] The Dean's Paradox

It was something of a jolt to find that other readers were looking for a hero in 'Is He Popenjoy?' What makes Trollope's late fiction so interesting to me is the lapse of the hero. Heroines persist, but Trollope seems to have lost interest in heroes, or in what for him had always been the heroic problem, complying with the gentlemanly ideal. Lord George's candidacy as a hero suffers a fatal blow early on: "He was simple, conscientious, absolutely truthful, full of prejudices, and weak-minded." Sig Eisner has written of Lord George's feet of clay, but I think rather that it's his head that's wanting heroic potential.

The Dean, as Ellen Moody suggests, is certainly no conventional hero. But I find him at the center of the book. Certainly no one asks the eponymous question more insistently than he, and it is his money that pays for the inquiries that so irritate the Marquis. Even more, it's his entree to the aristocracy that underlies the entire story. Mary and George, we know, don't much care about acceding to the title, and are much more taken up with the problems of marital fidelity that only Mary's pregnancy resolves. From the moment we learn of this happy development, the novel pitches forward on a course that can only, it seems, result in the gratification of the Dean's fondest hopes. Now, here is the paradox: what can we say of an aristocracy that admits the blood of former stableboys? The Dean himself bursts with pride at the thought of his achievement, and we can be fairly sure that he would make short work of speculations along the lines of Kant's categorical imperative. Nonetheless we must wonder what lustre a marquis's coronet would retain if the Dean's success were a more common occurrence. Surely the thrill of his advance depends entirely on the Dean's being a singular exception to a rather stringent rule.

Trollope, delightfully to my mind, raises a host of questions on this point but answers hardly any. For the most part, these questions, touching on the nature and value of an hereditary aristocracy, lack currency for us, especially now that the House of Lords has been reformed. The interest lies in trying to entertain them from an 1870's standpoint. We have a wicked, quasi-Byronic peer, whom everyone feels constrained to respect as a matter of civic duty even though he fulfills none of a peer's functions. That is what being a peer is all about: not having to prove yourself. He owes everything to his status within a family, and yet mistreats that family shamelessly. In the wings, destined to replace him if he dies childless, stands his far more virtuous but also more generally perplexed brother, George. Lady Sarah is almost too virtuous for aristocracy. Trollope inverts the standard comparison by opposing her with a pretty churchman's daughter whom one would expect to have less inclination toward worldly pleasure than the daughter of a rich and great house. He has put the money in the 'wrong' pocket.

The problems of the Marquis's foreign marriage trigger the plot: it's with regard to them that the Dean, so to speak, comes in. The Marquis may not have to prove himself, but he will have to prove that his marriage, and the birth of his son, accorded with established protocols. On this subject he is not free. His attempt to cast the Dean's inquiries as an insulting impertinence is not entirely successful, for the world seems to feel that the Dean's questions should not have to be asked. Rich and manly, and even more singleminded than Archdeacon Grantly - who rather than Dr. Thorne seems to me to be his antecedent in Trollope's fiction - the Dean takes on the full brunt of the Marquis's brazen challenge to English institutions. There is nothing noble about his fight - he's far too interested in the outcome - but all the same the Dean commands an aristocratic elan. In this connection it's not irrelevant to note that deans (and not bishops) are the nominal owners of cathedral edifices. There is a parallel between the Marquis's disregard for the proprieties and the Dean's utter worldliness.

Is this aristocracy a Good Thing? Always more concerned with individuals than with classes (we'd hardly read him otherwise), Trollope doesn't seem to believe that the question can be answered. That ambivalence is the principle pleasure of this novel.

RJ Keefe

Subject: [trollope-l] Heroism is Is He Popenjoy

Yes, Gwyn, this was exactly my experience in reading this book. I started out thinking George a spiteful prig, and ended feeling so much more sympathy for him. I think it was the fact Trollope let us know so much of what he was thinking and what his motivations really were that swayed me. I saw how he always meant the best in regard to Mary but just kept tripping himself up on those clay feet Sig so aptly mentioned.

Lisa Guidarini

Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?: What Has Been Accomplished?

I wonder if George changes at all or if only our attitude towards him does. Very often characters are said to change when it is the readers' attitudes towards them that shifts as we watch them over the long haul of a story. In this novel none of the characters changes; very few even recognise themselves in the manner of an Austen character. It is we who grow and recognise things about life as they become different people to us. The perceptual shift is in us. None of these characters manages to change the world they are in either. The Dean shifts people about as does the Marquis.

We could ask: what is accomplished in the world of this novel by the events that happen in it? Nothing much, just a shift of players who are like chesspeople on a board. Mary reaches the end of the board, and whee, she's crowned, but inside she's not changed a bit nor is she suddenly respected because of what she is from inside. In other novels by Trollope something is accomplished that's personally and socially meaningful at least to the character who acted: e.g., Mr Harding gives up his place. Not here. That's what Mary is groping towards when she says to her father how she feels empty about what's happening. It may be said well, the Dean will have his grandchild a Marquis. Yes that is what is accomplished. And Trollope has showed us the underside of how this was managed. So what is meant?

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?: What Has Been Accomplished?

In reply to Ellen Moody's question about what is accomplished in Is He Popenjoy?, I should say, everything, and in a stroke, by the death of the (now childless) Marquis. With his elimination, other characters move into roles for which they are suited, and the result is the most convincing and satisfying ending to a Trollope novel that I've encountered. Ellen calls the characters 'players,' but I'm very uncomfortable with the fungibility that this usage implies. Lord George, until his accession to the Brotherton title, has quite conspicuously not been a player, and his frustrations have menaced his marriage, especially on the point of his father-in-law's largesse and interference. I found myself asking if he ought to have married at all without some money and position of his own, as he clearly couldn't handle making use of someone else's. In the end, the title is his, along with all that coal, and he slips effortlessly but credibly into a parliamentary role. Mary's dignity (which seems to have impressed no other member of this group) makes her a natural Marchioness. The Dean, who embodies everything vital and active in this book, comes at last to rest, his objectives satisfied. Even Jack de Baron takes up a life, with the Marquis' money, that restores him to the conventional fold.

This conventional fold, about which there is no doubt in my mind that Trollope harbored feelings of the deepest respect, even when criticizing its less intelligent exponents, appears to disturb and repel modern readers. The idea of convention carries associations of aridity and asphyxiation. But not for me. For me, convention is nothing less than the root, or sine qua non, of social life among men and women, without which incoherence would prevail. Just as there could be no driving about in cars without rigorously observed rules of the road, so our shared pleasures depend on a mutual understanding that rests, in turn, upon the observance of established signs. Changing the meaning of these signs is often desirable, as our arrangements are very imperfect, but new meanings, once accepted, become new conventions.

Is He Popenjoy? is littered with characters who flout convention. One might argue that every character in it is forced to act contrary to expectation by circumstance if not by wilfulness. The Marquis, of course, lies at the heart of this dystopia. The effects of his sociopathy include poisoning his mother against her more dutiful son and inciting his sister to take up what arms she has against him. He goads the Dean into unseemly, if honorable, violence. And so on through the list of characters. As a rich peer, he commands great powers of misrule, and it is only with his death that the conventional order rights itself.

RJ Keefe

Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com

I am glad RJ has replied. Perhaps I should have answered my question more carefully and said, Nothing much worth admring or intensely wanting ourselves. Far from it.

I agree with RJ when he wrote that 'Trollope harbored feelings of the deepest respect' for the conventions, customs and laws of civilisation. Indeed, the book allows us glimpses into a savagery and anarchy, a spite and nastiness just below, that ought to urge us to cling more strongly to these. However, this adherence is not on behalf of virtue or goodness, but on behalf of safety, of control. The novel is not for the open society, it is for the closed one (of Popper's formulation). It is up to the reader to decide how he or she responds to that.

As ever RJ and are not that far apart; we see the same thing but come at it from different political, personal, and class or social perspectives. Perhaps we can reconcile our differences in this way: I suggest the subtitle to Is He Popenjoy? could appropriately be Civilisation and our Discontents In saying this I am in a way only echoing what the reviewers said of the book at the time, only they were indignant while I am fascinated. I didn't mean to say I found the book's ending unsatisfying. I like that it's not fatuous, that it's uneasy, that the characters have none of them been presented falsely, though there has been some satiric exaggeration, some going over the top now and again to make some points. In this most Freudian of books, the final question is not what is good or what is happiness, but to see the loss and the gain clearly, what you get and what you give up, what you have to do to win out the modicum of content and safety this society offers.

It may be said that at the close of the book Trollope makes all sorts of efforts to offer the reader consolations as we see his characters accepting their roles, though at the end of the book still hitting out at one another. Again how we respond to this reveals more about us than our author, more about what we are prepared to accept in the service of repressing the aggressive and erotic instincts, the aggrandizing ones in order to find some peace or contentment.

I wrote earlier this week about the misogynistic impulses that may be discerned in the design of the book and the attitudes towards its females and males, especially towards Mary and George. Another way of seeing this could be that the judgements of value which people give to male behaviors like aggression and to female behaviors like submission and chastity follow directly (I paraphrase Freud here) on our wishes for happiness. We wish to follow our deeper biological instincts and to pave the way for each of us to hold fast to our share as we get it inside our family or community. So we turn illusions into arguments. What I have tried to do in talking about this book for all these weeks is shown us how Trollope is aware that these arguments are illusions, and dramatised this, not that he has urged us to sweep them away.

What I was trying to do was widen the discussion away from whether a character has changed or our attitude towards him or her. We must see the design, and that means the motives behind what happens over the course of the book and how the characters are presented to us. Think of Ibsen's Doll House, which this book is contemporary with. Mary's father bought her a doll's house (Munster Court), and now at the end of the book she's going to have to leave it behind because the man her father got for her has given her a doll everyone will want in another setting. The Pillars of Society which has themes so close to this book was first performed in England in 1880; A Doll's House, 1879 in a highly successful production.

Ellen Moody

Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?: What Has Been Accomplished?

I have to say thank you, RJ Keefe. I am totally in agreement with your analysis. I have been fascinated by this book. Reading it has been like looking through a kaleidoscope. Trollope changes the plot emphasis and shake - we see another scenario. Another shake and it changes again. Some of the characters are trying to create change, others to prevent it. Have to rush off so can't write more, but just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your email.

Cheers. Teresa

Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?: What Has Been Accomplished?

As so often happens, Ellen Moody's posting has helped me to a finer view of my own thoughts. When Ellen writes that 'adherence [to convention] is not on behalf of virtue or goodness, but on behalf of safety, of control,' I see that goodness begins where convention leaves off. The virtue of adhering to convention is just another form of the virtue of staying healthy or of avoiding illness. Just as almost any health-giving practice can be overdone, and made harmful, so too mindless an adherence to convention can be stunting or worse. But a critical respect for convention is very different from wanton disregard.

For all its excitement and vitality, Is He Popenjoy?' remains, as Ellen suggests, a negative novel, very much a study of discontents. I take a view that's perhaps closer to Jung than to Freud, though: much of this book's unhappiness comes from the failure of power-figures such as the Marquis to play his part. He is a failure in much the same way that Amfortas is a failure in Parsifal: his weakness or self-indulgence has let his community down. 'Playing the part' of a marquis or other exalted peer in Trollope's world is not a matter of convention; the Marquis's rudeness is one thing, his abandonment of Manor Cross and his parliamentary role another. Of course he could be just as unpleasant to his family if he stayed at home and behaved 'like a Marquis,' but the unpleasantness would make sense to its victims.

John Sutherland opines, in his preface to the Oxford Classics edition, that the new harshness of Trollope's presentation of early feminists responded to the movement's first signs of actual success. 'Misogyny' is too crude a term, I think, for the impulse behind caricatures like Baroness Banmann. What disgusts Trollope is the idea of women's attempting self-sufficiency. (It's still hard for many people to understand that women who want careers can also want men, and in more or less traditional relationships.) There is nothing misogynistic (however paternalistic) in his treatment of Mary Lovelace, who embodies, in her refusal to throw the Adelaide Houghton business in her husband's face, or even to mention the matter to anyone else, an ideal of feminine nobility.

RJ Keefe

Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] IHP: The Dean Who Looks Forward to the Death of a Child

From: Ellen Moody

Who is the hero here? The dean, looking forward to the death of a child, can't be it. The reviewers at the time professed to be revolted or at least disturbed by him.

I have felt both emotions in relation to the Dean, as well.

Trollope stated, as narrator, in one of the Barsetshire books (was it Barchester Towers, perhaps?) something about not delving too deeply into the content of a sermon, because it wasn't his business, the business of the novel...? (as you can see, memory is not too clear about this.) In any case, in none of the Trollope novels I've read, has the religious thinking or religious life of its clerical characters been a focus of the story, aside from general things like are they High Church or Low, and how that contributes to conflicts between the characters.

All we see of the Dean in this novel is his worldliness--he encourages Mary to go out and have fun once she's out from under his direct care (supposedly), he fights for a Marchioness title for his daughter long after it's apparent it's a losing battle, he batters the Marquis in a fit of anger, he crows and glories in the death of little Popenjoy. He deserts his post often to visit lawyers or his daughter.

When it comes to Mary, it seems, any religious training or thinking he's acquired seems to disappear. I wonder if knowing what he is like as a religious man would make him less distasteful to me, or make him a better balanced character?

To those well read in Trollope: does he ever go deeply into the religious life of any of his clerical characters?

Beth.

From Rory O'Farrell

As a quick answer, I think he does not, the deepest being Josiah Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset. In terms of theology he does not probe at all deeply, The Bertrams being perhaps the deepest.

Rory O'Farrell

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Is He Popenjoy?: What Has Been Accomplished?

I wouldn't venture to go into the topic of feminism here; it is such a broad and deep topic and one I hardly understand myself. I imagine that Trollope saw it as something that would turn society upside down, and that was just too much for him (and it has in many ways turned society upside down). But when Mary overhauled the "big" family home in London at the end of the book, I did wonder if there was any relation in the author's mind to the discussion of female architects in the original meeting of the Disabilities. Mary did construct a new house in a way (her way). Pat

To Trollope-l

Re: Feminism in Is He Popenjoy?

December 14, 2000

In response to RJ, Pat wrote:

I wouldn't venture to go into the topic of feminism here; it is such a broad and deep topic and one I hardly understand myself. I imagine that Trollope saw it as something that would turn society upside down, and that was just too much for him (and it has in many ways turned society upside down). But when Mary overhauled the "big" family home in London at the end of the book, I did wonder if there was any relation in the author's mind to the discussion of female architects in the original meeting of the Disabilities. Mary did construct a new house in a way (her way). Pat

I am for once too tired to look it up, but the above paragraph reminds me of something I never mentioned in my posts thus far: there is a curious parallelism between the language Mary uses to George and Adelaide Houghton uses to her husband at a couple of points, and this past week I noticed the same formulation in something Mary said to Jack de Baron. Sutherland is right when he argues that the contemporary reader would have seen in Mary a rebel, would have thought her much allured and really tempted by Jack. I cannot agree that there is anything noble in Mary's behavior to Adelaide in the penultimate scene of this week's instalments: in that one she comes out sneering and ungenerous, very foolish from the point of view of self-interest and getting along in society; she has a lot to learn about the uses of courtesy. Her father of course knows how to use courtesy. We are probably intended to see her as emerging as the very strong one in her relationship with George. To me it remains striking how differently Trollope develops the emotional atmosphere surrounding this Mary as opposed to the Mary in Dr Thorne. The penultimate chapter of Dr Thorne ends with one of the most touching utterances and gestures in all Trollope: '"Oh Frank; my own Frank! my own Frank! we shall never be separated now'". The difference between that and this Mary's last sentences to her husband in a parallel place in both books ("How a woman can be so nasty I cannot imagine. But I will never trouble you by talking of her again. Only I have told James that she is not to be let into the house") says it all.

Ellen Moody