no. W

CLASS STRUCTURE AND THE FEMALE CHARACTER IN

ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Mary Sterner Lawson

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1975 la.

© 1975

MARY STERNER LAWSON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii

ABSTRACT

A significant element of The Way We live Now is Trollope's acutely sensitive delineation of female characters differing in class, ambition, temperament, and experience yet alike in being caught within and restricted by the system of social structure in the novel. In creating these char­ acters Trollope did not, as he says he did, just "take the whip of the satirist" into his hand to expose "the commercial profligacy of the age." His female characters, particularly, are more than character types functioning as satirist's tools in an indictment of the Victorian Age. His stance toward them is ironic, but his sympathy for them prevents his char­ acter delineation from being satiric or embittered.

Two chapters provide background material, one on the novel and its era and one on class structure in the age and in the novel. These precede chapters—usually focussing on a single character who provides a springboard to discussion of a major issue relevant to that character, the novel, and the women of the age—on the young woman in love, marriage, spinsterhood, the lower class girl, the heiress, and the outsider.

The conclusion reached in this study is that the effects of class structure on female characters of the novel are several and complex. The norms expected within societal groups and classes are often at odds with individual needs and desires, and require some sacrifice on the part of the woman. This may cause mental conflict, because deviation from the norm by refusing to sacrifice one's personal desires is not tolerated well or at all by one's social equals. The conflict may resolve itself in acceptance of the norm. Or the conflict, the strictures that cause it, and dissatisfaction with one's class and its values may inspire a romanticism that tries to ignore the values and biases of one's class. Generally the result of a woman's rejection of societal values is an essentially futile rebellion from the reality of the world that tries to restrict her and an eventual return to her own class level where she is in actuality more at ease.

Society is a powerful force and class biases are not to be denied. To remain within the circle of London and country gentry society, or any other circle, a woman must reckon with that circle'sr'Structural rules. Ill

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION...... 1

I. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW AND ITS ERA...... 10

II. CLASS STRUCTURE IN THE VICTORIAN AGE AND IN THE WAY WE LIVE NOW...... 24

III. THE YOUNG LADY IN LOVE...... 49

IV. MARRIAGE...... 73

V. THE SPINSTER...... 98

VI. THE LOWER-CLASS GIRL...... 121

VII. AN HEIRESS...... 140

VIII. AN OUTSIDER...... 163

IX. CONCLUSION...... 179

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 191 In 1954 Walter Allen noted that "Trollope’s later

novels have not received the attention they deserve." Of

these later novels, Allen lauds The Way We Live Now as "one of the remarkable novels of the language.”''' The twenty year period since then has produced criticism that begins to give

The Way We Live Now its due, but that criticism too frequently

focuses on Trollope's stated purpose in writing it, i.e., to 2 expose "the commercial profligacy of the age." In addition, critics prefer to view the novel as indicative of the "moral indignation of an aging, if not an old man," indignation 3 . . giving vent to bitter satire. Views of the novel as a satiri­ cal expose have not changed appreciably since Henry James said of it that "a more copious record of disagreeable matters 4 could scarcely be imagined," except that twentieth century critics are not as repelled by the disagreeable as James and earlier critics were.

The frequent view of The Way We Live Now as a powerful diatribe against corrupt business and political practices is not arrived at without some reasoning. This novel is massive and complex, and its structure is such that its web of corruption has at its center a well-wrought figure who tends to readily

1 2

draw attention, Augustus Melmotte. Also Trollope’s statement

of his intent in writing The Way We Live Now tends to draw

attention to features in it suggesting it is an indignant

expose*. And as a novel The Way We Live Now*s structural web

and subject matter are undeniably significant. But Trollope

does far more than just expose commercial profligacy, and

his attitude, his tone, is not best described as indignant

or embittered.

Thus it seems to be time now for a new view of The

Way We Live Now, a view looking not toward it as a satirical

expose, but toward a significant element of the novel that

gets short shrift in critical approaches bent on defining

Trollope's tone as indignantly satirical. This significant

element is the acutely sensitive delineation of the several women characters capable of and often exhibiting great strength and determination yet caught within and restricted by the

system of social structure in The Way We Live Now.

Previous critical studies have partially probed the

Trollope canon in the light of Trollope's obvious interest in the re-creation of the social structure of the age, the delineation of the English girl, and the realistic creation of many types of characters, but to date no single intensive study has been made of Trollope's characterization of women in a single novel and of how those women manuever in the para­ doxically rigid yet flexible class structure.

Such a study is in order, is viable, for several 3

reasons. Although one hesitates to focus on a part rather

than the whole novel, The Way We Live Now is of such sheer

breadth and complexity that a study trying to embrace it in

its entirety could hardly do justice to it. Therefore, by

thoroughly studying a part of the novel—yet a part that is

integrally and significantly related to the whole, one can

hope to come to a clearer comprehension of the fiber of The

Way We Live Now. And Trollope's particularly effective char­

acterization of the women in the novel—their conflicts and anxieties, their bids for freedom and bows to convention— is a salient feature and an integral part of the novel.

Further, Trollope’s finesse in characterizing women differing in matters of class, temperament, ambition, and experience attests to his facility as a novelist. And viewing Trollope’s approach to placing these women within the kind of class structure he creates in the novel helps to establish the tone he takes toward the social milieu of his fictional world and toward the society of his age.

It is important to note the tone Trollope takes toward his fictional world, and it is his tone that is misinterpreted in previous criticisms of The Way We Live Now. Trollope him­ self did not feel he was creating any embittered view of the social milieu. In fact, he considered himself to be a recorder of the common experiences of average and representative men and women from various classes within the social structure.

Thus, according to his autobiography, he was most pleased 4

with Nathaniel Hawthorne's statement that his novels are

Just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.

Trollope's response to this statement that he quoted in the

autobiography was that he had

always desired to "hew out some lump of earth," and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,—with not more of excellence, nor with exag­ gerated baseness,—so that my readers might recognize human beings like themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among the gods ot demons.5

Trollope's readers have always recognized how very human and

realistic-seeming his characters generally are.

However, his contemporaries, and other readers down

through time to us and our contemporaries, acknowledge that

Trollope's own particular province in the realm of character­

ization is the delineation of the English female mind. An

1877 Edinburgh Review critic found Trollope to be "a middle-

aged or elderly gentleman worming himself into the hearts

and confidences of young ladies and identifying himself with g the innermost workings of their minds." In Partial Portraits,

Henry James noted Trollope's bent: "Trollope settled down

steadily to the English girl; he took possession of her, and turned her inside out. He never made her the subject of heartless satire. . . ; he bestowed upon her the most serious, the most patient, the most tender, the most copious consider­ ation. "7

This "tender, copious consideration" is in evidence 5

in his fictional women of The Way We Live Now. The tone he

adopts toward these women is, though he at times does not

condone their behaviour, one of a novelist attempting to act

as observer and recorder of those women under the glass case,

yet an observer clearly sympathetic with the anxiety they

experience as a result of the dilemmas in which he has placed

them.

The bases for their dilemmas are rooted in the funda­

mental issues at hand in the novel, a knowledge of which is

crucial to an understanding of the female characters and

their conflicts. Therefore the first chapter of this study

provides background material relative to the era in which

The Way We Live Now is set, and to Trollope's representation

of that era in major themes relating to members of all classes.

The second chapter furthers necessary antecedent material in

defining class structure in The Way We Live Now and discussing

how each class is represented in the novel.

Subsequent chapters constitute the core of the study.

In these chapters, depending on the topic at hand, slightly

different approaches are used. When appropriate to discussion

of a character, background material about the age is used to

illustrate that Anthony Trollope, as he said he was, is indeed concerned with the people his readers found around them and

found themselves to be. The intent in presenting background material about heiresses, spinsters, or outsiders who existed within the age is not to say that Trollope virtually photo­ 6 copied Victorian life, but rather to show how circumstances of his characters have a relation to the age and in some respects parallel and in other respects diverge from actual nineteenth century life.

Also Trollope's views are at times quoted, and some pertinent statements from other Trollope novels are included.

To follow character development closely, the organization of several chapters follows chronologically the occurrences in the characters' lives. Interpretations and analyses occur, then, as characters' words are spoken and as their actions take place.

With one exception, Chapter III, the focal point of each chapter is a single character. The differences among the women do allow this convenient method of organization to have a reasonable basis. The titles affixed to each chapter are not meant to have a pigeonholing effect, however, and characters are compared, contrasted, and commented on in chapters other than their own.

Trollope's focal point throughout his delineation of the women in The Way We Live Now frequently is love, for example, but Hetta Carbury has been chosen to introduce that topic. The type of girl who in several earlier novels of

Trollope would have been the protagonist and the feminine ideal,

Hetta provides a springboard to Trollope's treatment of love in the novel because her story is illustrative of the kind of strength that even his most innocuous-seeming female characters 7

Cc.n develop in love situations.

When love is the word the characters think of and use,

mcirriage is the state they are aiming for, so the two are

very closely related concerns. Several women in The Way We

Live Now are either married or widowed, and these women—

Lady Carbury, Lady Damask Monogram, Lady Pomona Langestaffe,

and Madame Melmotte—are the subjects of the fourth chapter.

This segment probes how Trollope sees this state in The Way

We Live Now, and what marriage means for this particular set

of fictional characters.

In Georgiana Longestaffe, the subject of the fifth

chapter, Trollope bemusedly yet sympathetically creates a

character frantically afraid that marriage will not be her

lot. Georgey is tempted not to balk at virtually any suitor, but Ruby Ruggles, the focal point of Chapter VI, is more

than tempted to forego a secure match for the pleasure of being with an upper class near-seducer.

Marie Melmotte and Winifrid Hurtle, the women dis­ cussed in the seventh and eighth chapters, provide a contrast to other female characters in the novel. Both are foreigners to English society, but Trollope proves that a foreigner has some chance to find a niche in the English society of The

Way We Live Now if she possesses a commodity much in demand in the novel—money—but that she is in danger of being treated as little more (and probably less) than a commodity herself. 8

How Marie Melmotte and Wihifrid Hurtle and all the other characters are placed within the social structure of

The Way We Live Now is one of four major concerns of this paper. A second focal point is the conflicts and anxieties of each character; a third, the types of characters Trollope creates and their similarities and differences. The fourth, and a very significant concern, is the study of the female characters as fictional creations and their relationship to the novel as a whole. Notes

"'"Walter Allen, The English Novel : A Short Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1954), p. 238. 2 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1947), pp. 293-94. 3 Randolph M. Bulgin, "Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: A Study of its Historical Background and Critical Significance," Diss. Princeton University 1963, p. 13. 4 Henry James, cited in James Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), p. 265. 5 Trollope, An Autobiography, pp. 122-23. g 1877 Edinburgh Review, quoted in Rafael Helling, A Century of Trollope Criticism (Helsingfors: societas Scien- tiarum Fennica-Finska vetenskape-societeten, 1956), p. 81. 7 Henry James, Partial Portraits (New York: The Mac­ millan Company, 1888), p. 127-29. CHAPTER I

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW AND ITS ERA

A look at the era of The Way We Live Now and Trollope's

thematic representation of it in the novel is a preliminary

requirement for a better understanding of Trollope's view

of the social scene, its class divisions, and its inhabitants.

Trollope readers familiar with the Barchester series, pub­

lished between 1855 and 1867, are generally quick to notice

a change in tone in the later The Way We Live Now, although

the Barchester novels are far from devoid of the unscrupulous

and ambitious personages found in the later novel. The

Barchester series "came out in the midst of a period of English history when the contest between agricultural interests and the interests of the rapidly increasing manufacturing centers was the great issue of the day."^ But by the time of The Way

We Live Now, the struggles were more fierce, the competition more keen, and the social intermixing more frequent between the two factions.

At the time The Way We Live Now was published in book form in 1895, the British economy was experiencing its first difficulties since the 1840s.- Economists differ in assigning a specific date to the decline of the British economy, but they seem to concur in believing that the decade in which The

10 11

Way We Live Now was written was a significantly different decade from preceding ones in terms of the economy—and that matters at home declined further as the century wore toward a close. As Michael Sadleir indicates of the seventies, the

Golden Age of England had passed:

Bitter criticism of the immorality of privilege, blended with a resentment at the new intimacy between blue blood and dago money-bags unites the sticklers for Englishry, the reformers, the bourgeois and the intelligent working­ men. And in the background larger issues are developing. The agricultural prosperity comes abruptly to an end; the overseas extensions of industrial capital have spread so far and so successfully that the very contemplation of them provokes the vision of a Greater Britain. As the classes who for a quarter of a century have ruled the land draw into retirement or, in self-preservation, invest their wealth in trade, the now triumphant money- power launches the country on the vivid adventure of imperialism. The self-sufficiency of England is over; mid-Victorianism—as Trollope knew and loved it—is at an end.

The eighties were to bring a definite economic change for the landed interests. The seventies, though, was a decade of painful transition. Speaking of the upper class during that time, Wingfield-Stratford comments,

Throughout the fifties and sixties its prestige and splen­ dour were, to all appearance, undiminished. Agriculture continued to flourish in spite of free imports, and the great estates furnished their owners with lordly incomes. It was not, in fact, till the end of the seventies, that the sentence, so long deferred, was at last executed. A series of bad harvests precipitatéd a disaster that the competition of cheap foreign corn had made inevitable, and the landed interest received a blow from which it never recovered. The day of the old upper class, based on land and hereditary descent, was over. The new plutoc­ racy rose, and has been in process of swamping it ever since.3

Of the often ruthless ambition of both the new plutocracy and 12

the floundering titled and/or landed classes, Trollope is

a conscientious recorder. Indeed, according to Mario Praz, his verisimilitude may be said to be "his own essential quality,

that of acting as the supremely faithful mirror of the Victor- 4 lan Age between the years 1860 and 1880." Occasionally his contemporaries found the "mirror" to be almost too reflective.

One of the few reviews favorable to Trollope toward the end of that time period, a review written in August of

1875, comments, "The Way We Live Now is only too faithful a portraiture of the manners and customs of the English at the latter part of this nineteenth century. For all its exactitude, however, it is neither a caricature nor a photo- 5 graph; it is a likeness of the face which society wears today."

Trollope's Autobiography indicates that he did not like what he saw on that "face." According to his account of his motiv­ ation in writing The Way We Live Now, he was instigated to write the novel by reflections concerning "the commercial pro­ fligacy of the age" and by the fact that "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificant in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dis­ honesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abomin­ able."6

Although the novel is much more than a diatribe against avarice and dishonesty—as noted in the introduction, and as 13

subsequent chapters will indicate—it is important to realize

that The Way We Live Now does contain criticism of the classes

Trollope rubbed shoulders with and viewed from afar. Accord­ ing to Pope-Hennessy, who views the novel in terms related to Trollope's statement of his motivation in writing it,

Trollope recorded the behaviour and morality of the Eng­ lish upper classes as he saw it in London and the shires, or as he heard tell of it in the smoking-room of the Garrick Club. His simmering distaste for what he saw is reflected in successive novels until, in the year 1873, it boiled over and goaded him into writing that bitter satire on London Society The Way We Live Now.?

Interestingly, the book did not get the attention it deserved. A critic or two partially praised it, but for the most part his readers were indifferent to it because accord­ ing to contemporary reviews many of his reviewers felt it could not possibly be true that they were so malicious: perhaps it was too near the truth to please them. A second reason for the small splash it made was that Trollope had saturated the reading public with his prolific writing:

This novel, had it been written by anyone else or had it been published anonymously, would never have been allowed to pass out of English fiction, but because it came after a long series of novels by the same hand, and because its author had been for some years 'taken for granted' by the critics, its remarkable qualities remained unperceived.8

A particularly remarkable quality of The Way We Live Now that

"remained unperceived" is that his dominant themes, as they are borne out effectively by characterization, say much about the era and about the nature of mankind then and now.

One major theme, often found in other novels of Trollope, 14

is that economic or social advancement is rarely, if ever,

gained without cost, personal and/or monetary, to those who

advance. Advancement in marriage, politics, or society is

often accompanied by a loss of values made necessary by what

one must do in order to step up in the eyes of the world.

Asa Briggs correlates socio-economic advancement and

loss of values in an astute comment: "All Trollope’s themes

revolve around the ease of individual advancement in a fluid

society and the much greater ease of individual disaster.

Integrity appears as a rare gift rather than a common denom­

inator of action. The Way We Live Now ... is a bitter 9 attack on the social shams of his day." When human consider­

ations—honesty, justice, love, integrity—begin to be thrust

aside by an increasing number of people from all social classes,

the values of society as a whole may be said to be decaying:

this is a second major theme in The Way We Live Now.

Critics delight in cataloging the abuses that indicate massive social decay in the novel. Bulgin lists "dishonest

finance, racial prejudice, loveless marriage, drunken youth, heedless gambling, ignoble journalism, fashionalbe writing or no talent, and puffing [empty praise in fashionable journals] as the subjects of Trollope's satire.Another critic, Hewitt, finds that "the way we live now, in short, is a matter of social ambition, money, and snobbery.

Further on in a chapter on The Way We Live Now, Hewitt indicates that the decay of values was especially evident in 15 12 London society, which is faced off against old country values.

But not only in the London of the seventies was the reign of

money uncontested: "the worship of Mammon was not confined to

business circles. It was almost as common among the landed 13 as the monied aristocracy. It infected all professions."

The worship of money caused increased emphasis on what

one had rather than on the type of values by which one lived.

In their greed, city and country people alike strayed beyond

the pale of gentile behaviour, which, Faber notes, is a quality

greatly admired by the novelists of the era, "Nobody can read

far into Victorian fiction without being struck by the immense 14 importance of being ’gentle.'" The respectable quality of

gentility is particularly strained in the era of the seventies, when money becomes, more than ever, an object of desire for

the landed classes, who face a disastrous economic decline

that money will help avert. The hallmark of the men of the

landed classes traditionally had been their gentlemanly quali­ ties: "Honour, dignity, integrity, considerateness, courtesy and chivalry were all virtues essential to the character of 15 a gentleman." These qualities came to be more difficult to live up to as time passed.

By the decade of the seventies widespread money worship caused many to believe that anyone or anything could be bought— even the virtuous qualities once so much admired. According to Wingfield-Stratford, the era as a whole specialized "in the purchase of what was, with unconscious irony, known as 16

honor." He interprets the purchase of honor as "the outward

and visible sign of the preponderance of monetary power having 16 shifted from land, and therefore from birth, to business."

Assuredly it is the unethically amassed money of the big busi­ ness representative (Melmotte) in The Way We Live Now that attracts those among the landed classes who have an eye to acquisition and/or worship of position and fortune—regardless of how these are gained.

The lengths to which such people will go are evident in the frenetic scramble for tickets to the dinner and evening entertainment Melmotte finances for the Emperor of China.

Although Melmotte is privately and publicly acknowledged to be or suspected of being a cheat and a swindler, he has sup­ posedly reached a level of wealth that renders him acceptable enough to cause the landed and titled to pander to him and prey upon him.

However, when Melmotte's reputation begins to decline appreciably, resulting in many vacant chairs at his dinner for the emperor:,. Melmotte is rather quickly thrust from society's favor. This is not to the credit of society, though, for as Cockshut notes, "The revulsion against Melmotte which leads to his disgrace and suicide is caused by the mere sus­ picion that he will turn out to be what he had always been 17 supposed to be."

Melmotte's ascendancy, in and of itself, is indicative of the degenerating social values of the time. Relatively 17

early in the novel, it becomes obvious to the members of

Melmotte's railroad board that the whole company is fraudulent:

There was not one of them present who had not after some fashion been given to understand that his fortune was to be made, not by the construction of the railway, but by the floating of railway shares. They had all whispered to each other their convictions on this head. Even Montague [a man slightly more aware of virtue than his fellow board members] did not beguile himself into an idea that he was really a director in a company employed in the making and working of a railway.-^

Later on in The Way We Live Now, Trollope comments, "It seemed

that there was but one commercial enterprise,—and that Melmotte

was its prophet" (353).

It is the rugged individualism of Melmotte and others

in The Way We Live Now that brings us to a third major theme

in the novel, i.e., that in the ordinary course of events man is pitted against a corrupt society, and that man finds

it difficult, if not impossible, to retain his individualism in this society. The pressure exerted on the individual by

society in the novel comes not only through isolation of the individual by society as a whole but also via the criticism of smaller units of society, such as family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances. To some degree at least, many characters in The Way We Live Now, particularly the women, run contrary to these smaller groups within society.

Although society—acting through these small units— may prevent an ill or two as it does in Ruby Ruggle's case by acting the part of Mrs. Grundy, it is likely also to en­ courage the worst in a man or woman. Thus a man like Roger 18

Carbury, who clings tenaciously to the old gentlemanly values,

is a rarity. And a Melmotte, egged on by greed and a money-

adulating society, is a not unlikely product of the same milieu. A more likely product, though, is Paul Montague, who does not have quite enough courage and integrity to

fight alone against society, but who knows full well that the old gentlemanly code would require that he do so.

Michael Sadleir makes an interesting comment on the two forces arrayed against each other, and on what Trollope thinks of them: "He weighed society against the sum of its individual members and, more often than not, found the former wanting." However, Sadleir feels that though Trollope is critical of society, he also was

a skeptic with a twinkle in his eye; a spectator at the game of life, excited but non-partisan, eager to applaud a brilliant piece of play or to shout against a blunder, but more or less indifferent as to which side won, pro­ vided that the match were keen and clean and that no vainglory went with victory.19

In short, Sadleir does not find Trollope to be a hypercritical observer of life.

Trollope's lack of partisanship shows nowhere more com­ pletely than in his admiration of the endurance which both essentially unadmirable (from the standpoint of a proper Eng­ lish gentleman) and admirable characters display. Endurance in the face of overwhelming odds is a fourth major theme in

The Way We Live Now, and one which—as later chapters will indicate—is of major importance in Trollope's portrayal of 19

the difficult position of the women in late mid-Victorian

society and in any society.

A not uncommon theme in varying types of Victorian

literature—found in the writings of Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy,

Carlyle, and Dickens, among others—endurance is a frequent

focal point in Trollope's writing. Cockshut notes that endur­

ance "consistently haunted Trollope's imagination . * . especially 20 endurance in a perverse and unprofitable attitude."

In The Way We Live Now Augustus Melmotte is a man whose

endurance is perverse and ultimately unprofitable. Brashly and sometimes brutally he persists in manipulating people until he feels he has thrust himself far above them. Moral and ethical instincts are totally absent in his monomaniacal drive for success. As he nears his peak he seems to become increasingly more immune to censure, but when the door society had briefly opened for him is suddenly closed, it is too much for him, and he commits suicide.

Melmotte, who as Bulgin notes is probably patterned after other contemporary swindlers—is an unfortunate product of his decaying age, but he is far from being the only corrupted character of the novel. As Trollope indicates in the themes of The Way We Live Now, that society's values as a whole are decaying, and though some individuals may persist in holding to better values, most people are tempted—at least a few times during their lives—beyond their ability to resist temptation.

By conscientiously writing of the values irretrievably 20

lost by greed and unscrupulousness, the costs often incurred

by the prevailing methods of socio-economic advancement, the

bitter conflicts waged by the individual against society, and

the endurance displayed by women and men in the face of great

odds, Trollope succeeds in laying wide open for observation

the turbulent decade of the 1870s. It is an era of parvenu

kings quickly checked, as well as of pawns, often crucial to

the games society plays, who long hold their positions.

The women in The Way We Live Now are sturdy pawns set

in certain positions by those who try to dominate them. And

in this particular novel, as well as in almost any significant

Victorian novel, position in a social class is important.

Professor Altick notes,

The chief preoccupation of the major novelists, as it was a leading one of other prose writers, was the struc­ ture, internal movement, and moral atmosphere of contem­ porary society. The novelists, Thackeray above all but closely followed by Anthony Trollope and by Dickens in his later books, were concerned with the anxieties, envy, insecurity, snobbery, and kindred psychological malaises that stemmed from the ambiguities of rank and wealth in a time of social flux. The proper study of mankind in Victorian fiction often took the form of a study of men and women in a given class and their efforts to maintain their status against outside pressures or, more often, to improve it.^l

Although Trollope's focus is most frequently on the landed gentry, the wide-ranging The Way We Live Now is a study of the men and women of several classes and their interaction.

To better understand the position of women among the various classes—their conflicts, and the "ambiguities of rank and wealth" that affect "social flux"—it is necessary to try to 21 define, as much as is possible, the various social classes of the era, and to indicate how they are represented in The

Way We Live Now. 22

CHAPTER I

NOTES

lj. H. Wildman, Anthony Trollope's England (Providence: Brown University, 1940), p. 61. 2 Michael Sadleir, Trollope, A Commentary (New York: Straus and Company, 1947), pp. 31-2. 3 Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Those Earnest Victorians (New York: Morrow and Company, 1930), pp. 28lr82. 4 ..... Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction (London, Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 261. 5 Anonymous review in The Times, August 24, 1875, quoted in Rafael Helling, A Century of Trollope Criticism (Central- tryckeriet: Helsingfors, 195677 p. 87. g Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1947), p. 294. 7 Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), p. 265. p Hugh Walpole, Anthony Trollope (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 165-66. q Asa Briggs, Victorian People: a. Reassessment of Per­ sons and Themes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 96. ''■^Randolph M. Bulgin, "Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: A Study of its Historical Background and Critical Significance," Diss. Princeton University 1963, p. 219. "'"'''Douglas John Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (Totowa: Rowan and Littlefield, W277“p. 14. ^Ibid., p. 17.

13 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press'^ 1957) , p" 184. 14 Richard Faber, Proper Stations (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 14. 23 15 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p, 16. ■^wingfield-Stratford, p. 42.

1 7 Anthony 0. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1950), pp. 206-7. 18 Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974), p. 78. All further references to The Way We Live Now are from the text and the page numbers of the quotations are included in the text of the chapters. ^sadleir, p. 155.

20 Cockshut, p. 31. 21 Richard Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 17. CHAPTER II

CLASS STRUCTURE IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

It is true of characters in the majority of nine­ teenth century novels, and is particularly true of The Way

We Live Now, that "whatever their social status, the charr- 1 acters are seen in relation to the structure of society."

With its wide range of people and class types, The Way We

Live Now is an amazingly inclusive novel. Even if the urban middle class, the gentry, and the aristocracy dominate the action of the book, its social range exceeds that of most of 2 Trollope's works." Such considerations as social status and societal structure bring to the fore certain matters that have a direct bearing upon the status of women in The Way We

Live Now: they are, the difficulty of making class distinctions, the criteria for and nature of the various classes of the era,

Trollope's view of class structure, and the novel itself as a mirror of class structure.

One does not have to delve far into social history during the Victorian era to discover that it is not always easy to draw the line between classes. Oxford sociologist

G. D. H. Cole believes there is no single "infallible cri­ terion" for class, and that the "very notion of class . . . is imprecise."3 As we see in the political history of an

24 25 era that records the ascension to political power b£ such men as Sir Robert Peel—whose grandfather, a wealthy Lanca­ shire calico printer, made his fortune through cotton spin­ ning—and as we see in the novels of Dickens, Thaceray, Eliot, and Trollope, class changes frequently alter the types and nature of class inhabitants. "Society’s edge was permanently blurred by the jostling of the thousands who were trying to get in with the hundreds who were trying not to be pushed out."4

Additional complications in deciding class divisions are that "an individual can be within the sphere of more than one class at the same moment, so that he cannot be assigned wholly to one class; and there exist individuals who can hardly 5 be assigned to any class, even in the most tentative way."

In The Way We Live Now, we find these complications with the

Melmottes, who are middle-class--nouveau riche-trying to be­ come "landed," and with Winifrid Hurtle, who does not fit at all into the prevailing schema of the era.

Nevertheless, there are class distinctions that are definable, even if only the core members of each class would be likely to have almost all of the characteristics usually ascribed to it. And Anthony Trollope keenly senses and records the emotional responses of various class members to each other.

As Cecil notes, "Trollope has an extraordinarily clear eye for the emotions of class-consciousness.That the sign­ posts of class consciousness and the subtleties of group 26 peculiarities are difficult to know is indicated by the 7 following page, an amusing insert from Punch.

When this insert appeared in Punch in 1841, but particu­ larly earlier in the century, change of position was not as easily achieved because class prejudices were stronger and social barriers were higher. Crow notes "Later in the century it was different. Wealth, whatever its origin; .-became a certain sesame into Society, but early in Victoria's reign g Society was a closed and exclusive body." The Punch classi­ fication, however, indicates that there was a public aware­ ness of the metamorphic and transitional nature of classes, and of the desire for class advancement, early in Victoria's reign.

Faber rather interestingly describes the paradoxically flexible and static nature of Victorian society:

the Victorian people's social and moral assumptions often seem those of a static society; this gives an illusion of stillness to a period that was full of movement. The stillness is not all illusory. There was a good deal of climbing up and down the ladder; but the ladder itself stood still.

As noted in the previous chapter, climbing up and down the ladder became more possible as the century rolled on, due to a declining agricultural economy. And by the seventies, the combined situation of a static "ladder" and a fluctuating economy affecting landed interests enticed those eager for advancement even more than before: "It was the continued existence of class lines at the same time that the dividing t

27

ST. JAMES'S SERIES f People wearing coronets. Superior People related to coronets. Class People having no coronet, but who expect to get one. People who talk of their grandfathers, and keep a carriage. e

f u i , SECONDARY L

(Russell-square group.) h

g People who keep a carriage, but are silent i respecting their grandfathers. H People who give dinners to the superior series. People who talk of the four per cents and are suspected of being mixed up in a Transition grocery concern in the City. Class (Clapham group.) People who "confess the Cape," and say, that though Pa amuses himself in the

. dry-salter line in Fenchurch-street, e

f he needn't do it if he didn't like.

i People who keep a shop "concern" and L

a one-horse shay, and go to Ramsgate e

l „ for three weeks in the dog-days. d ’’’People who keep a "concern" but no shay d

i do the genteel with the light porter M in livery on solemn occasions. People known as "shabby-genteels" who prefer walking to riding, and study Metamorphic Kidd's How to live on a hundred a year. Class V INFERIOR SERIES (Whitechapel group.) People who dine at one o'clock, and drink stout out of the pewter, at the White V Conduit Gardens.

. People who think Bluchers fashionable and e

f ride in pleasure "wans" to Richmond i

L Primitive on Sundays in summer. Formation w

o (St. Giles's group.) L Tag-rag and bob-tail varieties.

Punch, 1841 28

barriers were breaking down, consequent upon the increasing wealth of the bourgeoisis and the declining wealth of the

aristocracy, which made this ambition [i.e., class advancement] practical.

Trollope’s own views on social status and rank ele­ vation were somewhat ambivalent, which is perhaps understand­ able in that he personally was desirous of ascending as far up the social ladder as he possibly could, and in that he thoroughly enjoyed rubbing shoulders with society's elite.

As his novels and particularly The Way We Live Now seem to indicate, he was both critical of and desirous of preserving the status quo although the attitude he often takes is the tone of the ironic observer. Cockshut comments, "Trollope’s vague personal thoughts about rank can be summarized thus: class distinctions were necessary, but they were becoming less obvious; this was, no doubt, a good thing, but it did 11 make the whole subject very confusing." Hart comments on what he finds to be Trollope's own ambivalent feelings, which added to his confusion, "... although Trollope firmly believed in self-help and social advancement, he also felt at the same time that a social balance between the classes should be maintained.

Social advancement was not always easily achieved, but was nonetheless a common aim. Houghton quotes John

Stuart Mill on the great desire for advancement: 29

By 1840 Mill was saying that 'that entire unfixedness in the social position of individuals—that treading upon the heels of one another—that habitual dissatisfac­ tion of each with the position he occupies, and eager desire to push himself into the next above it' had be­ come or was becoming a characteristic of the nation. No one seems to care any longer to cultivate 'the pleasures or the virtues corresponding to his station in society, but solely to get out of it as quickly as possible.13

Crucial to an understanding of "station in society" and class structure is an awareness of the criteria—not the subtleties but the more obvious differentiations—relating to the dis­ tinctions of every stratum on the social scale. To begin with, "Account has to be taken of social function—of what a person does as well as of what he is—and the relations 14 between these two aspects are highly complex." Again, the ambiguity of some characters' positions in The Way We Live

Now makes a class assignment difficult, but one knows that though Lord Alfred is just a poor parasite living off a nouveau riche class member, he is an aristocrat, and though Paul

Montague is landless, he is a landed gentry affiliate.

Two considerations of social rank often paired are birth and wealth. The Victorian penchant for compromise may be applied to these two criteria, according to Faber:

Even the conflict between Wealth and Birth was solved by the Victorians in a realistic spirit of compromise. Some worshipped Birth alone; others worshipped Wealth alone; but most revered them both. There was something vulgar about unalloyed Wealth and something ineffective about unalloyed Birth; the solution was, wherever possible, to combine them.15

Indeed, in The Way We Live Now Melmotte is pure well-monied vulgarity personified, and Lord Alfred is unalloyed Birth de­ 30

generated to complete ineffectiveness. With his just suffi­

cient income and respectable background, Roger Carbury has

the proper combination to be a respectable member of the

gentry, but he is not admired because he is not wealthy enough.

In addition to occupation, money, and birth, education was a factor in class distinction during the Victorian Age, though not in The Way We Live Now. A good education is particularly advantageous if one is a member of the nouveau riche class. Had Melmotte succeeded innmarrying his daughter to Lord Nidderdale, his grandchildren from such a match, if aided by a good education, would have acquired a degree of refinement Melmotte himself could not have attained.

A lack of refinement, and undue worshipping of birth and rank, as well as moral and political corruption, are characteristic of the social class realms of The Way We Live

Now, realms that are often at odds with each other. These characteristics, which generally receive much attention in criticism, may be present in the class realms because Trollope merely thought that the novel would be more effective because of controversial subject matter and characterization. Or it may be, as Sadlier notes, that Trollope "was in his heart 16 of hearts profoundly critical of the established order."

In any event the groups within this established and often corrupt order that Trollope represents in The Way We

Live Now are the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and nouveau riche, middle, and lower classes. To better understand, in 31

the ensuing chapters, the disadvantages and advantages womens

in The Way We Live Now have because of the "established order,"

an awareness of the nature of each class and its representa­

tives in the novel, and an awareness of pertinent similarities

and differences between the classes, is of great importance.

In a study made in the mid-1860s by statistician Dudley

Baxter, the upper and middle classes "accounted for 23 percent

—not far short of a quarter—of the whole" population of

Great Britain. G. D. H. Cole, revising Baxter’s figures to

place domestic workers among the unskilled rather than skilled workers, divides the remaining three-fourths of the working population as follows: highly skilled, 14.4%; lower skilled, 17 33.3%; and unskilled and agricultural, 52.3%.

Unlike Dickens, Trollope apparently did not relish peopling his novels with the 77% of the population that com­ prised the lower orders of society because the lower classes do not receive nearly as much attention in his novels. Trollope’s childhood memories, vividly described in his autobiography, were of being poor, ill-clothed, and dirty. A sensitive boy aware of why people disparaged or ignored him, Trollope—if we can believe what he says of himself—eventually reacted against the poverty of his childhood by becoming a snob of sorts:

I do not scruple to say that I prefer the society of dis­ tinguished people, and that even the distinction of wealth confers many advantages. The best education is to be had at a price as well as the best broadcloth. The son of a peer is more likely to rub his shoulders against well- 32

informed men than the son of a, tradesman. The graces come easier to the wife of him who has had great-grandfathers than they do to her whose husband has been less,—or more fortunate, as he may think it. The fact remains that the society of the well-born and of the wealthy will as a rule be worth seeking.18

This attitude does not, however, keep him from sympathetically depicting the non-wealthy who genuinely deserve admiration for their character in spite of their class status.

Trollope does include a few inhabitants of the lower orders in his novels, generally making clear that they are not well-born, however. The Way We Live Now is no exception, including from the lower class Marie Melmotte's servant Elise

Didon, a tenant farmer and his granddaughter, a small-time dealer in meal and pollard, and a widow who supports herself by taking in lodgers.

The tenant farmer, Daniel Ruggles, "had the reputation of considerable wealth" (145-6). The land he holds, with the exception of some acres leased from Roger Carbury, belongs to the Elmham bishopric, and is held "on what is called a bishop's lease" (146). He is a successful tenant farmer, but Trollope equates him with the rural day labourers whose

"aspirations, whether for good or evil . . are, if looked at at all, fairly visible" so that "one can generally find what they would be at, and in what direction their minds are at work" (147). Ruggles' ambitious granddaughter Ruby and the other women from her social class are better read and more imaginative, Trollope notes, than the Ruggles kind of man in that class. 33

Ruby’s fiance John Crumb and Daniel Ruggles seem to

be in the upper fringes of the lower class. Crumb is the

"prosperous young man at Bungay in the meal and pollard line

to whom old Ruggles had promised to giveX500 on his marriage

to Ruby" (146). Prosperity does not make him attractive to

Ruby, however. Though "a sturdy, honest fellow" and "the

very soul of industry" he is dusty with meal, slow of speech,

and dull (148).

John Crumb, though not a gentleman in terms of manners

and attire, is eminently respectible, and Trollope admires him for his native worth. Mrs. Pipkin, the aunt of Ruby

Ruggles, is "a poor woman" who is "quite respectable, and has

five children, and lets lodgings" (319, 342). Apparently a relatively prosperous tenant farmer is higher on the social

scale than a landlady, for Daniel Ruggles, who "had steeled himself against the whole Pipkin race," will not speak with

Mrs. Pipkin (342).

Dissension within a class because some members of it feel they are superior to others is common to all classes.

Trollope seems particularly to enjoy depicting the animosity within two groups in the middle class realm, the editors and the lawyers who are the main representatives of that class in The Way We Live Now. Except in Broune's case, these men are shallowly depicted minor figures, yet we see through them, according to Michael Sadleir, "an actuality he knew, which actuality consisted mainly of the facts and incidents 34 19 of comfortable middle-class existence. ..."

The three editors, Nicholas Broune, Ferdinand Alf,

and Mr. Booker, are all relatively successful in their pro­

fession. To be an editor of a popular journal means that to

cater to the taste of the audience is of great importance.

Alf's approach to his trade is to criticize everything, "to

vilify all that he touches," and he "never made enemies, for

he praised no one" (10). Broune and Booker both cater to the

public and to good and bad writers by puffing, by falsely

praising writings. As competitors they all are jealous of

one another, as their conversations with Lady Carbury, who plays them off against one another to get favorable reviews,

indicate.

The lawyers in The Way We Live Now need no one to

increase their feelings of animosity toward each other.

Squercum is an ungentlemanly upstart of dubious origin, who does his own law work himself, is industrious, and assists heirs in suits against their fathers. All of this disturbs the Bideawhiles, who have "a rule in the house that anything done quickly must be done badly. They never were in a hurry for money and expected their clients never to be in a hurry for work" (468). Because Squercum and the Bideawhiles so often support opposing causes, they are quite often at odds with one another.

Also in the middle class realm are the publishers

Leadham and Loiter. The procrastinators that their names 35

indicate, they send manuscripts in a sack to their reader

"by long sea to Glasgow," for they "can't publish before winter" anyway (724). Like the editors, they are forced to handle inferior writing which they try to discourage. Since

their aim is profit, the universal aim of the era, Leadham and Loiter encourage novelists not to let their books "end unhappily . . . because though people like it in a play, they hate it in a book" (717).

Like the lawyers and editors, the publishers are not characterized as perfect people: in fact, Trollope's depiction of the middle class in The Way We Live Now—through these three groups—is not on the whole favorable. Certainly these are people very common in their pettiness, greed, procrastin­ ation, and pride. Trollope does tender us contrasts, such as the respectable but slow Bideawhiles versus the ambitious but suspect Squercum, but he does not really cause us to com­ pletely admire the behaviour of one type of person more than the behaviour of another type. What he does achieve by such a contrast is a successful delineation of class differences, prejudices, and animosities.

During the late mid-Victorian era class differences existed as they exist during any era. Although some members of the middle class might be long-standing inhabitants of it

(like the Bideawhiles), others who have newly arrived on its fringes, such as Squercum, have not acquired the outward manifestations of that class and are therefore not accepted. 36

Thus the middle class, whose members are from a. great variety

of walks of life anyway—shop owners, professional men, petit

bourgeois, artisans—is a very diverse group.

In the uppermost division of the middle class, but

quite often considered alone, are the nouveaux riches. They

are not merely successful; they are overwhelmingly and often

extravagantly successful. Frequently lacking the refinement

of the upper classes which many of them desire to enter, they

are often satirized as people who quickly try to amass all

of the trappings of wealth. A typical example of this type

is Mr. Veneering of Charles Dickens, whose name says much

about his nature. Veneering is like many Victorians who,

"vigorously ascending the income scale, largely unconscious

of any necessity for canons of good taste, showed their self-

assurance by their purchases, producing a lavish and hectic 20 eclecticism." Included in this group of the nouveaux riches are families who became wealthy through industry, finance, and commerce, or rather through "trade," as their source of wealth is spoken of disparagingly by the upper classes.

The ranks of the nouveaux riches were not large nor was it easy for them to become socially acceptable; "those members of the middle class who achieved gentility, or afflu- 21 ence, were after all a very small minority." Assimilation into the upper class, when desired, was not easy for them to achieve, for "buying land was not of itself enough. . . . the appropriate manners had also to be acquired; and the source 37 22 of wealth mattered fully as much as the amount." Jt was

understood by the higher classes that "Whatever merchants 23 might feel, ’trade' was incompatible with gentility."

Trollope records this incompatibility superbly in The Way

We Live Now through Augustus Melmotte and Ezekiel Brehgert.

Melmotte epitomizes the vulgarity, pride, and sense of power ascribed to the nouveaux riches. The upper classes

condescend to come to two entertainments given by the Melmottes, but their opinion of the wealthy upstarts is low: at one point

the Duchess of Stevenage states,''"Of course they are vulgar,

so much so as to be no longer distasteful because of the absurdity of the thing" (33). When Melmotte decides to run for office after a few scant monthsoof apparent social success, he becomes yet more brash and rude, and "the more arrogant he became the more vulgar he was" (438). A few glasses of wine "made him, who was arrogant before, tower in his arrogance till he was almost sure to totter" (440) . But he does not need wine or social success to make him feel superior to the gentry members who bow and scrape to him. For example, early in The Way We Live Now, when Melmotte speaks roughly to Adolphus

Longestaffe, Trollope comments, "Since he had had two duchesses at his house Mr. Melmotte was beginning to feel that he was entitled to bully any mere commoner" (101).

Ezekiel Brehgert provides a contrast to Melmotte because Brehgert is superior to him as a man. However, his appearance is very common, and almost vulgar. "He was a fat, 38

greasy man . . . with hair dyed black, and beard and moustache dyed a dark purple colour. ... He was stout . . . and had

that look of command in his face which has become common to masterbutchers, probably by long intercourse with sheep and oxen" (485). A second strike against him, in addition to his common appearance, is that he has a taint of "city;" but what counts more against him when he begins courting Georgey is his Jewish religion. When engaging in commerical enter­ prises neither Melmotte nor Brehgert are particularly hampered by any association with the Jewish religion. However, Brehgert's religion is remembered by prejudiced people such as the Longe- staffes when he wants to marry a Christian, for Brehgert "was absolutely a Jew;—not a Jew that had been, as to whom there might possibly be a doubt whether he or his grandfather had been the last Jew of the family; but a Jew that was" (486).

If he could have been passed off as Christian, or converted— as Benjamin Disraeli—he would have been more acceptable as a suitor of a woman in upper class society.

What most disturbed bigoted members of the upper classes about people like Brehgert and, especially, Melmotte may not have been their vulgarity, but their potential political power and potential usurpation of the social system. According to Hart, "underlying" the "condemnation of Melmotte is his

[Trollope’s] fear that new corporate wealth is menacing the 24 old social structure." Trollope's views are a little exag­ gerated by Hart, but certainly "the period of Trollope's The 39

Way We Live Now" is one "when city finance and gentry were 25 getting somewhat mixed up together," and this alarmed purists

like Roger Carbury.

However, not all rich industrialists or financiers

envied the landed classes or aspired to enter them. The in­

dustrialist Millbank in Disraeli's Coningsby comments of his

supposed betters, "I have yet to learn they are richer than we are, better informed, wiser, or more distinguished for 2 6 public or private virtue." Millbank and other wealthy men brought to wealth by "the rise of industrial capitalism . . . could vie in pride of possession with the landed and merchant classes, and indeed outvie all but the greatest of the older aristocracy, but were neither assimilatable in manners to the 27 upper class nor desirous of joining it."

In The Way We Live Now, though, both nouveau riche representatives are aspirants (Melmotte much more so than

Brehgert) to the next level of the socio-economic scale, the landed gentry. The precise nature of this next level is some­ what difficult to describe, for "The landed gentry came in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, but contemporaries were confident that they formed a reasonably homogeneous group, the solid core of the landed interest, mainstay of the hunting field, and backbone of the resident magistracy which managed the country. To the genealogist and lawyer it was a simple enough matter to define them: they were the untitled aristoc- 2 8 racy." The class itself "included the younger sons of peers, 40 2 9 . . . baronets," and squires. Also, according to an I860

social directory, it "included a substantial minority who

were honorary landed gentry in virtue of being younger sons

of the nobility, clergymen, or gentlemen of independent non-

landed means, but not in virtue of possession of sizeable landed incomes."3^ Generally the class is divided into two

groups, a greater gentry and a lesser gentry, or squirearchy.

Numerically, according to F. M. L. Thompson, "In 1873 there were in England about 1000 members of the greater gentry 31 and about 2000 squires." The range of wealth within the class was wide, but often wealth was not the sole source of its members' pride: "Between the two ends of the scale the difference was one of wealth rather than quality, and the smaller gentry were not readily disposed to admit that the 32 great peers were socially superior, titles notwithstanding."

In The Way We Live Now Trollope superbly records the disposition of various county members toward each other and toward the nobility, a disposition that affects the women in the novel in regard to marriage and love. His relatively wide range of landed gentry types in the novel makes such a recording of this kind possible and interesting. Although the Primeros, the Longestaffes, and Hepworths, and the Bishop of Elmham have houses superior to Roger Carbury's "in material comfort and general comfort, ... to none of them belonged that thoroughly established look of old country position which belonged to Carbury" (112). According to Roger Carbury, the 41

Primeros' Bundlesham was too newly built? the Longestaffe's

Caversham, unpicturesque and monstrous; the Hepworth’s Eardly

Park house, "ugly and bad"; and the Bishop’s palace, too new

and lacking in distinction" (112). However, according to

Lady Pomona Longestaffe, any Carbury Manor—Caversham compar­

ison is presumptuous; is "as though the Carbury and the

Carbury position could be compared to the Longestaffe property

and Longestaffe position" (144).

Carbury Manor, though, has been in the Carbury family

longer than the estates of the Longestaffe or Primero families

have been in their hands. The Longestaffes, like many gentry,

are only a few generations removed from a background in trade.

The landed gentry of Suffolk recall this fact when they dis­

cover that old Longestaffe has sold his Pickering estate, for

older numbers of the gentry feel that an important possession

is land. "A fellow oughtn't to let his family property go to

pieces" (227). Suffolk, ashamed of the sale, takes occasion

to "remember that it was barely the other day, as Suffolk

counts days, since the original Longestaffe was in trade"

(445), even though the Longestaffes have been out of trade

for one hundred fifty years.

Adolphus Longestaffe and his neighbor Roger Carbury both have a trait common to the landed as Trollope character­ izes them—pride. Each feels he has the better property and superior social position, and both look down on newer entrants to their social class. Longestaffe regards Primero "as quite 42 an upstart, and anything but a gentleman" because primero

"owed no man anything" (172) . But Carbury regards both

Primero and Longestaffe as newcomers.

Carbury and the Bishop of Elmham and his wife are the only characters who could be considered more typically con­ servative members of the gentry. Primero voted as a radical, which automatically excludes him from the old school of the gentry. And Longestaffe is so desperate for money that he compromises himself by fraternizing with the swindler Melmotte, which Carbury finds most improper.

Like many of his counterparts during the era, Longe- staffe’s head has been turned by greed:

Many of the landed gentry were becoming corrupted by the money-spinning habits of commerce. Gladstone noted with disfavour 'the growth of a new class . . . the class of hybrid or bastard men of business, men of family, men of rank, men of titles, man gallant by courtesy and perhaps by nature, country gentlemen . . . giving their names to speculations which they neither understand nor examine, as Directors or Trustees.'33

The cooperation between the landed classes and the world of nouveau riche financiers came about by mutual desire for ad­ vancement, as noted in the discussion of the economic situ­ ation of the era of the 1870s. Agreements with wealthy trade peoples were not limited to the landed gentry: the members of the aristocracy, too, were ambitious to repair fortunes.

In fact, "the nobility were readier than the [conservative] 34 untitled gentry to repair their fortunes by going into trade."

Trollope finds fault in one way or another with all 43

of the landed gentry representatives in The Way We Live Now.

Longestaffe1s failings are many. Lady Carbury, widow of a

baronet, is worldly and unscrupulous, and her indulgence of

her son Felix has caused him to be void of a sense of ethics.

Paul Montague, a gentry affiliate, lacks courage and integrity.

Lady Julia Monogram lets her status consciousness override

consideration of her fellow men and women. Only Roger and

Hetta Carbury, who serve as touchstones of honesty and morality

in The Way We Live Now, appear to be virtuous, but even they

are not idealized.

The few representatives of the aristocracy that are

focused on for any length of time in The Way We Live Now receive

almost as much criticism as the landed gentry. Lord Alfred

Grendall is so completely improvident that his sister, the

Duchess of Stevenage, is gratified when Melmotte takes over

Lord Alfred's support. The Marquis of Auld Reekie is a queru­

lous old man whose greed parallels that of a counterpart in

the gentry, Adolphus Longestaffe. His son, Lord Nidderdale, is by the end of The Way We Live Now one of its more admirable characters. Good-natured throughout, he actually almost loves

Marie Melmotte by the time he tells her good-bye, and he helps her considerably at the time of her father's death.

From what we see of the aristocrats in The Way We Live

Now, they are not much better off than, nor much different from the gentry, even though some of them do dwell on’their supposed superiority. Trollope idealizes no one class group 44 in the novel. Actually in the nineteenth century and in The

Way We Live NowIn many respects the country gentry and squire­ archy resembled those above them, the landed aristocracy, 35 except in the scale of their possessions and style of living."

The resemblance caused distinctions to be difficult or impos­ sible:

Closely allied to the landed gentry by tradition, outlook, and family ties was the other important landed class in Victorian England—the nobility. In fact, it is fre­ quently difficult to discriminate between these two classes because the difference is not one of kind but of degree. There is no definite boundary between them. . . . Generally speaking, however, the distinction was rather one of wealth and titles than it was of blood itself. Members of the gentry married into the nobility, and it was taken as a matter of course? members of the nobility, such as Lady Arabella De Courcy, married into the gentry—in her case, into the ancient family of the Greshams. In neither situation was it considered anything unusual.36

Thus the aristocrats might have titles and greater wealth, but not necessarily more "honor."

What they did have until the middle class became more prominent in politics in the 1880s was the political power and control of the nation. As Faber comments, "wherever the basic power lay, the aristocracy was still the ostensible ruling class. For all the restrictions on its freedom of 37 political choice, its social prestige was still firmly rooted."

Social prestige the aristocracy may possess, but for the most part, in The Way We Live Now, they are lacking in the important values—as are members of other classes—such as integrity, honesty, and courage. Trollope's view of the aristocracy is not rosy, nor is his view of any other class. 45

This absence of glorification of characters causes The Way

We Live Now to have an aura of realism that is most impressive.

The various classes contain men and women as impulsive, petty, generous, greedy, as honest and dishonest, as those who walk around us today in "the way we live now." And the character­ istics of Trollope's fictional creations seem quite often to reveal themselves best in conflicts involving love choices. 46

CHAPTER II

NOTES

1 Raymond Chapman, The Victorian Debate: English Litera- ture and Society, 1832-1901 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968) , p. 186. 2 Randolph M. Bulgin,,"Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now: A Study of its Historical Hackground and Critical Significance," Diss. Princeton University 1963, p. 223. 3 G. D. H. Cole, Studies in Class Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul^ 1955), p. 1. ^Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain: 1851-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, l97l) , p. 2"40. 5Cole, p. 1.

6 David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists; Essays in Revaluation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), pT 251. 7 1841 Punch, included m Mark Perugma, Victorian Days and Ways (London: Jarrolds, 1932), p. 33. g Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 34. 9 Richard Faber, Proper Stations (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 11. "'‘^Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. HT6. 11 Anthony 0. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1950), p. 51. 12 Charles W. Hart, "Courtship and Marriage in the Novels of Anthony Trollope," Diss. Columbia University 1968, p. 129. 13 John Stuart Mill in "Democracy in America," quoted in Houghton, p. 186. 14 Cole, p. 2. l5Faber, p. 155. 47 ir Michael Sadleir, Trollope, A Commentary (New York: Straus and Company, 1947), p. 154. ^cole, pp. 55-67.

18 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley: Univers­ ity of California Press, 1947), p. 142. l^sadleir, p. 15.

20 . . S. G. Checkland, The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 1815-1885 (New York: St. Martins Press, 19Ó4), p. 315. 21 Esme Wingfield-Strafford, Those Earnest Victorians (New York: Morrow and Company, 1930), p. 43. 22Cole, p. 61.

22Faber, pp. 29-30.

24 Hart, p. 129. 25 W. J. Reader, Life in Victorian England (London: B. T. Batsford, 1967), p. 33. 2 6 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 255. 2^Cole, p. 89. 2 p F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 109. 2^Altick, p. 25.

26Thompson, pp. 127-28.

31 Thompson, p. 112. 22Reader, p. 18.

33 Lewis, Row, and Angus Maude, The English Middle Classes (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1950), p. 70. ^wildman, p. 71.

35 Thompson, p. 20. 3 6 J. H. Wildman, Anthony Trollope1s England (Providence: Brown University, 1940), p. 71. 48

37Faber, p. 149. CHAPTER III

THE YOUNG LADY IN LOVE

Anthony Trollope felt that love situations were necessary

ingredients of a novel: in his autobiography he states: "Very

much of a novelists’s work must appertain to intercourse be­

tween young men and young women. It is admitted that a novel can hardly be made interesting without love."^ The universal­

ity of love was what he felt to be what made it attractive

and necessary in a novel:

In one respect the necessity of dealing with love is ad­ vantageous,—advantageous from the very circumstance which has made love necessary to all novelists. It is necessary because the passion is one which interests or has inter­ ested all. Every one feels, has felt it,—or else rejects it with an eagerness which still perpetuates the interest.*2

Trollope’s thoroughness and success in treating this

universal theme even earned him the praise of Henry James:

Trollope has described again and again the ravages of love, and it is wonderful to see how well, in these deli­ cate matters, his plain good sense and good taste serve him. His story is always primarily a love-story, and a love story constructed on an inveterate system. There is a young lady who had two lovers, or a young man who has two sweethearts; we are treated to the innumerable forms in which this predicament may present itself and the consequences, sometimes pathetic, sometimes grotesque, which spring from such false situations . . . his accounts of those sentiments which the poets are supposed to have made their own is apt to be as touching as demonstrations more lyrical.3

James’ comment hints at the fact that Trollope's love stories are not sweet, romanticized little scenarios: Trollope describes

49 50

the ravages of love, the consequences of which—as a result,

frequently, of a love triangle--may be pathetic, even grotesque.

In The Way We Live Now, four women are involved in a love triangle. Hetta Carbury and Winifrid Hurtle are both courted by Paul Montague, and Marie Melmotte and Ruby Ruggles both receive the attentions of Felix Carbury. Of Miss Carbury*s situation, Hewitt comments, "The love affair of Hetta and

Paul is (apart from that of Ruby Ruggles and John Crumb) the least socially heterogenous of those on which Trollope spends much time," and that "the other courtships cut across 4 accepted lines of class division."

Since all of the women other than Hetta are in love with men more obviously above or beneath their station, their situations should more obviously reflect the difficulties a woman has in getting her will in spite of class differences and family and societal opposition. Hetta*s situation, how­ ever, should provide a register of Trollope's views of the subtleties of class distinctions, social biases, and family expectations, for the man Hetta loves is on a lower level within the ranks of the landed gentry than the man her mother wishes her to marry. Also, Hetta*s particular situation indi­ cates what can happen when forces are brought to bear against the will of the gentler type of Trollope heroine, for Hetta— who early in the novel is a relatively docile, passive young woman—later meets, with unexpected tenacity and strength, class and familial opposition to her desire to marry the man 51

to whom she has given her. consent.

The first views we obtain of Hetta in The Way We Live

Now—the views of Hetta before she develops a mindoof her own—

are of a young woman like other respectable girls of the

better classes. Such a girl living up to ordinary expectations

virtually "was a slave to the will of her parents.Her

instincts were toward self-sacrifice to the will of her family

rather than toward self-assertiveness and self-determination.

Like the typical girl of her time, she was expected to accept

the will of her family docilely: "The idea of female passivity was much encouraged; a woman was much more feminine if she g waited to be told both what to think and what to do."

Trollope’s presentation of the early Henrietta Carbury—defer­ ential, self-effacing, self-sacrificial, and passive—is of an almost model daughter of the Victorian age: the later

Hetta is quite different.

The economic conditions of Hetta's family and her mother's greater love for her son rather than for her daughter set the stage for Hetta's self-concept by being conducive to producing feelings of inferiority and self-sacrifice. Because

Hetta's father left all his money to his wife and son, Hetta is left dowryless and dependent on her mother until marriage.

Economy is a necessity for their family because her brother soon wasted his inheritance, thus also becoming dependent on

Lady Carbury. Since Sir Felix is "the darling of her heart"

(15), Lady Carbury is willing to sacrifice her own and her 52

daughter's comfort to indulge Felix's vices.

For Matilda Carbury, the world revolves around Felix

regardless of the fact that he is spoiled, wasteful, and

selfish, while her daughter is sweet and considerate. Lady

Carbury is far more concerned about how she can further her

son's interests than about her more sensitive child's feelings.

Hampered as they both are by Felix's wastefulness, however, neither of them had ever quarrelled with him, for a man's actions are not to be questioned. Lady Carbury's view of men strongly influences Hetta. Lady Carbury had been brought up to think it was a man's world, and had personally suffered because a woman thinking this is not allowed to react against a man no matter how cruel and inconsiderate the man is.

Further, Lady M. Carbury had suffered because of the tacit understanding that though a man with many impeffections may still be revered, a woman must be perfect. Observing her parents, whose lives reflected what was expected of a woman and allowed in a man, Henrietta came naturally to hold her mother's—and society's—views about men and women, and there­ fore never protested her brother's behaviour:

Henrietta had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance. She lamented her brother's evil conduct as it affected him, but she pardoned it alto­ gether as it affected herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were dis­ continued, and her moderate expenses curtailed because 53

he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always did eat up everything (15-16).

This significant passage indicates how secondary Hetta con­

siders herself to be to men. It is' also one of the more

interesting passages of The Way We Live Now in terms of the

female attitude toward the male. This type of attitude is

what causes Hetta to eventually forgive Paul, Winifrid Hurtle

to try to excuse Paul's behaviour, and Marie Melmotte to

keep giving Felix another chance.

Even when the woman feels she should not forgive the

man, the view prevails that a lover or brother should be

pardoned no matter how great his offense.

The effectiveness of what Hetta had been taught about

men, and how this teaching affects her attitude toward her

brother, is clear in a dialogue between Hetta and Paul Montague.

Montague says to her of Felix: "He has beggared himself . . .

And he will beggar you and your mother." She replies, "I don't

care about myself" (36).

An awareness of Hetta's lack of concern for herself is evident in her mother's view of Hetta. In registering

Lady Carbury's opinions in the second chapter, Trollope comments

"Of her daughter's prudence she was as well convinced as of her own. She could trust Henrietta in everything" (15). And she could count on her daughter being prudent because to this point her daughter did whatever she wished her to do. 54

In her mother's eyes, Henrietta is an acquiescent soul

willing to put up with her mother's favoritism toward Felix,

and, indeed, accepting such favoritism as the normal course

of events, given Felix's rank and importance. The second

chapter of The Way We Live Now contains another view—that

of the omniscient narrator—that seems to look somewhat sar­

castically at a comparison of Hetta and Felix that would put

Felix first. Yet in this passage, the intent of which is

to describe Hetta, Trollope's ironic tone reflects and gently derides the views of society as well as of her family:

And now there must be a few words said about Henrietta Carbury. Of course she was of infinitely less importance than her brother, who was a baronet, the head of that branch of the Carburys, and her mother's darling? and, therefore, a few words should suffice (19).

Trollope then lapses into philosophizing about the Carbury siblings in a passage, like others on Hetta, that indicates

Trollope's concern for the influence of a character's environ­ ment on the character. He speculates on whether Hetta's vir­ tues were innate or "whether the girl's virtues were owing altogether to the lower place which she had held in her parents' heart" (19-20). Whatever the cause for her being different from her brother, Hetta "at any rate, had not been spoilt by a title, by the command of money, and by the tempta­ tions of too early acquaintance with the world" (20). Her ignorance of the ways of the world, and her unfamiliarity with how to maneuver in it, causes her to be shocked by her brother's revelation about her lover. 55

Hetta knew little of society, and society knew little

of her. Hetta "had not seen much of London society" both

because "her mother did not frequent balls" and because "a

necessity for economy was inimical to many gloves and costly

dresses." Therefore most of her time is spent at her mother's

Wellbeck Street home. However "occasionally the world saw

her, and when the world did see her the world declared that

she was a charming girl. The world was so far right" (20).

This kind of statement about "the world" accords some

clarity of perception to society, but indicates that perception

is limited. The comment about the world being right "so far"

also clearly foreshadows the future; she does not remain

gently agreeable. The early Hetta of acquiescent childhood

and youth is already transforming into a different person,

as the final paragraph of Chapter II indicates;

But for Henrietta Carbury the romance of life had already commenced in real earnest. There was another branch of the Carburys, the head branch, which was not repre­ sented by one Roger Carbury, of Carbury Hall. Roger Carbury . . . was passionately in love with his cousin Henrietta. He was, however, nearly forty years old, and there was one Paul Montague whom Henrietta had seen (20).

What follows in Hetta's case are the familiar Trollope ploys,

"Trollope's most banal and tedious device" according to 7 Bulgin, the love triangle plot, and the usual "series of rather mechanical social obstacles to a successful termination of courtship.8

Trollope's plotting may be classifiable as tedious and mechanical, but for Trollope such plots serve two significant 56

purposes. Through them Trollope dissects the framework of

society, baring without stint the raw greed and prejudice of

its class members, and portrays with an at times surprising

candour the supremacy of genuine love, revealing its anguishes

and its triumphs.

One critic links Trollope's plot patterning to the

love theme:

Trollope's love stories follow a largely conventional pattern. Lovers are, for a time, prevented from marrying either by parental disapproval, or by lack of money, or by discrepancies of rank or fortune; sometimes, one of the lovers mistakes his or her true feelings and forms another attachment which has to be broken before true love can triumph. In the end, however, all obstacles are removed and marriage results. .. It is an axiom, in­ separable from this conventional kind of love story, that without love no marriage can be happy.$

Trollope is more realistic about marriage in The Way We Live

Now than this axiom indicates, for although Hetta Carbury feels she cannot marry without love, three other women in the novel certainly settle for less than genuine and unremitting love.

The pressures exerted on Hetta to marry without love and her consequent actions reveal much about familial pressure and society's system of logic regarding marriage. To probe

Trollope's presentation of Hetta's dilemma and how reactions to her views register society's disapproval, one must turn briefly to the matter of choice in love generally, then to the specific choices Hetta has, and finally to the series of obstacles to her marriage that reflects society's views. 57

Trollope clearly recognized the restraints society

placed on the young girl at the point of love, as a comment

of his in The Bertrams indicates:

It seems to me that it is sometimes very hard for young girls to be in the right. They certainly should not be mercenary; they certainly should not marry paupers? they certainly should not allow themselves to become old maids. They should not encumber themselves with early, hopeless loves, nor should they callously resolve to care for nothing but a good income and a good house. There should be some hand-book of love, to tell young ladies when they may give way to it without censure.^0

Certainly the first choices of all the young ladies in The

Way We Live Now do not escape censure from society. Yet they persist at some length, if not wholly, in their loves. But only Hetta succeeds in bypassing ultimately the social barriers which in her case are not nearly as forbidding as the barriers in Marie's, Ruby's, Georgiana's or Winifrid Hurtle's situ­ ations.

But the opposition to affiliation with Paul Montague is strong, and perhaps with good reason—given the choices involved. Trollope, devoting the entire sixth chapter of

The Way We Live Now to Roger Carbury and Paul Montague, stacks the cards against Paul.

Of a family established in Suffolk "certainly from the time of the War of the Roses," Roger Carbury "was Carbury of Carbury, a distinction of itself" which his surrounding richer neighbors could not have. As to appearance, "a more manly man to the eye was never seen," for Roger had "the appearance of great strength and perfect health" (46). The 58

economy is such that the X‘2000 a year Roger's estate brings

in does not allow for a luxurious style of living, but it is

a very comfortable income for a man of Roger's managerial

ability. If social standing in The Way We Live Now depended

on character, responsibility, and manliness, Roger would be

highly placed in the world of the novel.

Roger Carbury is morally upright and financially secure;

Paul Montague, on the other hand, is inclined to be impecunious and irresolute. His income was not assured, and throughout the course of events in The Way We Live Now he is monetarily unstable and is never possessed of an income—gained through his own achievements—that is sufficient to support a wife and family.

As to Paulas physical appearance, little is said, except that he is referred to as a young man. Roger Carbury, however, is thoroughly described, and, to the eyes of a romantic young girl like Hetta, one may infer to his disadvantage. He "was not much short of forty years," and, though "good-looking" and "manly," Roger was "stout" and "partly bald" (16). One must deduce from how Roger is presented and how Hetta reacts to Paul that Paul is far more physically attractive to her.

Cockshut attempts to explain why Trollope avoids explaining his female characters' choices:

He does not stress the idea that choice cannot be ana­ lyzed; he simply leaves us to infer it from his silence. For him it is not mysterious, merely unknown. Sexual choice is a first principle on which the stability of the family and ultimately of society depend.11 59 And perhaps it is sexual choice Trollope is referring to when

he records "she did not love her cousin in that way" (48).

Other references, too, obliquely refer to physical attraction,

such as Trollope’s first comment about the two men, which

said Roger was almost forty and she had seen Paul. This is

a curious conjunction of ideas unless implying something about

their attractiveness.

This is not to say that Roger Carbury would not make—

to all other outward appearances—a good match for Hetta:

and that is the difficulty and the primary obstacle to a

Paul-Hetta match. Roger is not only monetarily stable; he

is also morally superior, and both Paul and Hetta readily

acknowledge his superiority. But it is Hetta's mother whose

comments provide not only the most ample register of social

opposition to the match, but also the strongest selfishly

personal opposition to Hetta's wishes. The pressure she exerts

against Hetta is significant in terms of Hetta's character

development because of the cumulative effect of her comments

on Hetta.

Lady Carbury's self-centeredness is the basis for the

first approach she uses to persuade Hetta to change her mind

and marry Roger. At one point, playing upon the sympathy

Hetta has for her mother's economic problems, Lady Carbury

tells Hetta "You could save me from much if you would" (41).

Lady Carbury feels her daughter has no right to refuse Roger,

for if she really thought of her mother she would readily 60

accept her cousin's offer. Repeatedly she pressures Hetta

with questions like "... how do you show . . . your love

for me? There would have been a home for us all. Now we

must starve, I suppose" (537).

Using another strategy at another point in the novel,

Lady Carbury plays upon Hetta's sympathy for and appreciation

of Roger Carbury—a factor that complicates Hetta's conflict.

To make Hetta give in because of pity for the cousin she ad­ mires, Lady Carbury tells her daughter, "if you don't accept

him he will never marry. . . . He will go on boodying [sic] over it, till he will become an old misanthrope" (127). This

type of statement sounds like an extension of the type of view that a woman should make great sacrifices for the comfort of

the man.

Lady Carbury's demand of Henrietta is not wholly selfish or sacrifice-based, for like Daniel Ruggles she knows her charge would be secure with a good, honest man. She pleads with Hetta to get her to accept the squire because he is "a gentleman, and a good man,—soft-hearted, of a sweet nature, whose life would be one effort" to make her happy (420).

This third reason, i.e., that Henrietta should marry Roger because he would make her happy, is better than the other two— marrying to please her mother and Roger.

To Hetta's thinking all of these reasons are insufficient, and she resists her mother's pressuring. Yet Lady Carbury per­ sists in badgering her: the many, many times Trollope sets up 61

these mother-daughter scenes serves two useful purposes;

Trollope makes certain his readers see how selfishly earnest

Lady Carbury is, and how great the pressures are against this

well-bred, naturally gentle English girl.

The mode of pressuring that has perhaps the greatest

effect .on Hetta is Lady Carbury's stressing of Hetta's self­

ishness, as a significant passage indicates:

Hetta felt that she could sacrifice much for her mother. Money if she had it, she could have given, though she left herself penniless. Her time, her inclinations, her very heart's treasure, and as she thought, her life, she could give. She could doom herself to poverty, and lone­ liness, and heart-rending regrets for her mother's sake. But she did not know how she could give herself into the arms of a man she did not love" (420-21).

This passage of Hetta's inner thoughts indicates the honesty and generosity of her nature. She can generously give much, but cannot be generous enough to be dishonest about love.

There are limits to a woman's impulse to and ability to sacri­ fice herself, and Trollope probes them in Hetta.

Trollope probes Hetta's limits further in setting up the second obstacle to Hetta^s love to Paul, the revelation of Felix's that Paul is engaged to and has been visiting an allegedly divorced American woman in.London while courting

Hetta. Not to have admitted a former engagement was shocking enough, but for that woman to be an American divorcee in whose presence at a seaside resort Paul was seen immediately prior to asking Hetta's hand in marriage was an unforgivable breach of propriety. And it is a social transgression Lady Carbury 62

is grateful for, "though it pained her to see the agony which

her daughter suffered" (543).

Roger, too, is not unpleased by Hetta's discovery of

Paul's liaison, and begins by innuendo and outright statement

to exert some pressure on Hetta to see his point of view,

i.e., that Paul is a usurper of Roger's rightful place, and

that Hetta should consider Roger's own suit. Roger, then,

for a period of time becomes a negative force, and thus a third

obstacle to the Paul-Hetta match. Trollope's presentation

of Roger's viewpoint is rather interesting. Of course, Roger's

love for Hetta causes him to say of Paul, "He owed it to me

not to take the cup of water from my lips" (581). But such

a statement is based on a lack of consideration of Hetta's

feelings and of Hetta and Paul as human beings with as much

right to love as he has.

A deep-seated feeling of Hetta's that Roger cannot

counter is that she has given her love "all away now. It

cannot be given twice" (582). Inexperienced in regard to what other women like Georgey and Winifrid of The Way We

Live Now know about the changeability of affections, and of what she and Marie Melmotte eventually learn, Hetta feels that the first love commitment one makes is an irrevocable one, and that both men and women should feel this same way.

The issue at hand that Trollope probes is a double standard of fidelity for women and allowable infidelity for men. Paul comes to accept a version of this standard in 63

rejecting Winifrid, and Hetta eventually bows to the standard

in accepting Paul. However, Hetta at first cannot acknow­

ledge Paul as her lover after learning of Winifrid. No matter

how "horrid" it is to marry a divorced woman, "an engagement

is an engagement," and she tells Paul he must not "throw

Mrs. Hurtle over" (615).

Hetta is not ignorant of the double standard. She

was aware "of all the tales of faithless lovers" (542). Her

brother, indifferent to Marie, is an example of one. She

figures Paul "is like other men," Like them, Paul "entangled

himself with some abominable creature and then when he is

tired of her thinks that he has nothing to do but to say so,—

and to begin with somebody else" '(618) . Yet even though she

recognizes that Paul is not alone in his behaviour, she is

too angry at first to forgive him.

The male view of the standard is evident in Paul’s

belief that there "was really very little to forgive" (.617) .

A structural balance is carried through in The Way We Live

Now by Felix's similar view that other men are as bad or worse than he is (541). Both views contrast with Roger's

idealistic stance about fidelity.

The tone Trollope takes toward the issue is one of the

observer who finds the double standard to be widely accepted, yet who recognizes that one's view of it may change if one

is personally affected by a situation involving it. Of

Paul's view, the omniscient persona comments: 64

But he probably omitted to ask himself whether he would have forgiven her very readily had he found that she had been living ’nearly three weeks ago' in close intercourse with another lover of whom he had hitherto never even heard the name (617).

He tops off this perceptive statement with a tongue-in-cheek remark found elsewhere with slightly different working in

the mouths of his characters: "But then,—as all the world knows,—there is a wide difference between young men and women"

(617).

Hetta must come to accept this difference, and her acceptance is motivated by successive sets of circumstances.

Her mother's relentless pressure provokes Hetta to finally defend Paul, which makes her receptive to the letter Paul sends her and causes her to seek out the American woman for confirmation of Paul's fidelity to herself.

The letter from Montague, reproaching Hetta for being unjust to him, causes the whole issue to come to a head in the chapter titled "Hetta's Sorrow," Through this letter, although still recognizing "that the man had behaved badly— having entangled himself with a nasty American woman," Henri­ etta comes to acknowledge to herself that "she would be true to him as far as her own heart was concerned" (726). All along she had known where her heart was: it is the letter from

Paul that shifts any vestiges of anger away from Paul and turns her anger full force on those people who are against her lover. She comes to feel that had it not been for her mother, brother, and Roger she might have had an opportunity of for­ 65

giving him (727).

This view Hetta comes to hold is significant in terms

of how Trollope presents this young woman as a manipulated

being given little chance to direct her emotions toward anyone

she should happen to like. Her mother, particularly, feels

that personal inclinations are "high-flown nonsense," and that

her daughter is a burden who ought to be happy to be placed

in the good situation Roger could provide. "Make up your mind to be the wife of your cousin Roger," she tells Hetta,

as if love and marriage were simply matters of decision—not

of feeling and desire.

Henrietta Carbury's burgeoning awareness that "there

had been a plot against her, and she was a victim" crystallizes

in the "Hetta's Sorrow" chapter as she reflects over her plight:

. . . she had fallen head foremost into the trap laid for her. She acknowledged to herself that it was too late to recover her ground. She was, at any rate, almost sure that it must be too late. But yet she was disposed to do battle with her mother and cousin in the matter— if only with the.-object of showing that she would not submit her own feelings to their control. She was savage to the point of rebellion against all authority-(727).

This last sentence is a significant indicator of the changes she has made. She has changed so much that she even feels

"capable of throwing propriety and delicacy to the winds," and she rebels against what all her critics—mother, brother, cousin—would deem improper by writing to Mrs. Hurtle to find out the truth. With "desperate fortitute," she mails the 66

letter.

Before the meeting with Mrs. Hurtle that signifies the beginning of the Hetta-Paul relationship denouement, Hetta has one final significant discussion with her mother. Prior to the bulk of their talk is a most interesting statement:

". . . she considered herself to be emancipated from control.

Among them they had robbed her of her lover" (733). This type of belief enables her to vehemently reject her mother's anti­ romantic view that a girl who has no fortune "must allow her­ self to be chosen" and must "do the best" she can for herself

"in order that" she "may live" (734). It is in one of the last discussions about Paul between Hetta and her mother that

Lady Carbury finally pushes her daughter too far by saying that Paul treated Hetta with "utmost contumely." This provokes

Hetta's angry reply:

I know nothing of any contumely. What reason have I to be offended because he has liked a woman who he knew before he ever saw me? It has been unfortunate, wretched, miser­ able; but I do not know that I have any right whatever to be angry with Mr. Paul Montague (734).

This statement translates Hetta's inward feelings about her­ self as a victim by bringing those feelings to the verbal level—thus more definitely exonerating Paul, as her mother realizes, "she had driven her daughter to pronounce an absolu­ tion or Paul Montague's sins, and that in this way she had lessened and loosened the barrier which she had striven to cons truct" (734).

The barrier comes all but down with Hetta's visit to 67

Winifrid Hurtle. They "were both of the same complexion,

both dark, with hair nearly black, with eyes of the same colour,"

but Hetta "acknowledged to herself that she had no pretension

to beauty such as that which this woman owned" (736).

The women perceive in each other the qualities Paul

admires. Though Winifrid is beautiful and rich-voiced, and

though Hetta thinks it "wonderful" that any man should be

able to part from such an attractive woman as Mrs. Hurtle,

Hetta sees clearly that Winifrid would be "an unfit wife

for Paul Montague" (739).

Accepting the futility of regaining Paul, Winifrid

helps Henrietta to accept the double standard. Hetta exult­

antly discovers Paul loves her, and subsequently finds it easy

to rationalize about his affair as she walks away from her

interview with Winifrid Hurtle. Trollope’s ability to plumb

the mind, and to illustrate changing and maturing thoughts

is evident in the following fine passage:

He had been true to her from the first hour of their acquaintance. What truth higher than that has any woman a right to desire? No doubt she gave to him a virgin heart. No other man had ever touched her lips, or been allowed to press her hand, or to look into her eyes with unrebuked admiration. It was her pride to give herself to the man she loved after this fashion, pure and white as snow on which no foot has trodden. But in taking him all that she wanted was that he should be true to her now and henceforward. The future must be her own work. As to the ’now,' she felt that Mrs. Hurtle had given her sufficient assurance (739).

Hetta's assurance carries over to all remaining discussions with her family. She feels "willing to be gracious . . . but 68 quite determined that nothing should shake her purpose" (739).

Other than Lady Carbury's objections to Paul, the only remaining obstacle is a trivial one. The letter full of love and forgiveness that Hetta writes to Paul does not reach him.

Roger Carbury conveys news of Hetta's change of mind to Montague, and also tells Montague of his plan to set up the couple to be financially secure in life.

Trollope transforms Roger into a fairy-tale like father and grandfather-to-be figure in deciding "to settle Carbury on Hetta's eldest boy on condition that such boy should take the old name" (806). The final two paragraphs of the novel, which pull together the plots and subplots, focus on the marriage that brings Hetta and Paul together and promises a reconciled Roger hopes of some enjoyment of his new paternal role.

Of course it may be quite easy to dismiss the climax of the courtship of Paul and Hetta as just another of Trollope's love stories ending in the age-old way. But the situation has much more to it than that in terms of how Trollope views the socio-economic element of a love relationship. In Hetta's case Trollope does say something about status as a determinant in a marriage match.

Portionless and not strikingly beautiful, Henrietta

Carbury is a burden to a mother who thinks the world revolves around her son. As a man and a baronet, Felix Carbury is deemed to be far more worthy of his mother's attention than 69

Hetta. Scrimping to support Felix means not buying the kind of attire nor going to the types of balls and social affairs that would show Hetta to her best advantage. So, to Lady

Carbury*s thinking, Roger Carbury's offer of marriage to

Hetta is a blessing.

And Trollope very carefully and effectively builds up both sides—marriage for love or marriage for security—of the issue. Paul is weak-willed and improvident, while Roger is strong and financially secure. Roger's sense of propriety is sound if old-fashioned, while Paul's sense of propriety is easily subject to undermining by a handsome woman or the promise of an easily-earned fortune.

Hetta, too, is weak-willed in almost all respects same one—love. But love is something her forceful mother thinks patently secondary to financial security. Trollope considers both factors: he does not seem to play down either the need for security or the need for love in a potentially successful marriage.

For Hetta, though, love is the only significant factor, and love for her means the irrevocable giving of oneself to one being only. Unexplicit as Trollope often is about sex, here in The Way We Live Now he clarifies even in the gentle lady's case that the physical side of love does exist. On

Hetta's initial acceptance of Paul, Paul "was at her feet in a moment, kissing her hands and her dress, looking up into her face with his eyes full of tears." When Hetta says her 70

hand is his if he wants it, he replies, '"Want it! Hetta, I

have never wanted anything but that with real desire" (534).

It is as if, for Hetta, the bringing of love feelings from

the mental level to the verbal level that means commitment

means the relinquishment of her virginal, innocent self that

can no longer be in so pure a state as to again allow her to

commit herself to some other man.

She is so steadfast in her belief that she would lower

her status and work for her living rather than marry someone

she does not love. As she tells her mother, "If you won't

take me with you when you go away with Felix, I must stay behind and try to earn my bread. I suppose I could go out as a nurse" (682). This kind of unrealistic statement from a girl who has never.'had to do anything but commiserate with her mother and brother is what Trollope uses to stress some need of an awareness of financial security.

A girl who does not have the slightest idea of her lover's monetary situation nor of her own—and does not really care—is incomprehensible to a mother like Lady Carbury, who feels that if a girl "has a fortune of her own she can pick and choose, but if she have none she must allow herself to be chosen" (734). Indifferent as she sometimes is to her daughter,

Lady Carbury does at one point reflect that "that which pained her most was the unrealistic, romantic view of life which pervaded all Hetta's thoughts. How was any girl to live in this world who could not be taught the folly of such idle 71

dreams?" (734) .

One might conclude, as Bulgin did, that the "measure

of her [Hetta1s] character is that she and the inconstant 12 Paul Montague deserve each other." However, in Hetta Trollope

creates a character who deserves much credit for the sheer

tenacity to come to grips with strong opposition and develop

from a delicate docile daughter of Victoria to a "savage"

in rebellion "against all authority" who has come to realize

"there had been a plot against her, and she was a victim."

But Trollope cannot leave her as a victim—of either her mother's interference or her lover's improvidence. Perhaps

Trollope felt compelled to set up Paul and Henrietta in a

situation that alleviated fears of insecurity. Although

Henrietta Carbury rejects the squire's suit, she nonetheless gains the peripheral advantages of marriage to him when his lands go to her descendents. Love triumphs in Hetta's case, but Trollope's other concern, financial security, is obviously not to be ignored. 72

CHAPTER III

NOTES'

■'’Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1947), pp. 186-7. 2Ibid., p. 186. 3 Henry James, Partial Portraits (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1888), p. 109. 4 Douglas John Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, T572T7~pi 14. 5 Wanda Fraiken Neff, Victorian Working Women: an His­ torical and Literary Study of Women in~Britlsh Industries and Professions (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), p. 204. g S. G. Checkland. The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 1815-1885 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1964) , pp. 318-9. 7 Randolph M. Bulgin, "Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: A Study of its Historical Background and Critical Significance," Diss. Princeton University 1963, p. 147. g Charles W. Hart, "Courtship and Marriage in the Novels of Anthony Trollope," Diss. Columbia University 1968, p. 15. g P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 52. ■'■^Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (New York, 1859), p. 119.

11 Anthony 0. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1950), p. 112. "^Bulgin, p. 22. CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE

Because Trollope spends much time in The Way We Live

Now in writing of the younger ladies of marriageable age, he presents rather thoroughly for his readers some of his views about the difficulties that such women have. Of another group of ladies, those who are or have been married, he says less, for in The Way We Live Now and other Trollope novels those women beyond the brink of marriage are frequently not given prime consideration. However, in The Way We Live Now Trollope does probe the married state perhaps more than one would ini­ tially realize. Through scenes involving and comments referring to Lady Matilda Carbury, Lady Julia Monogram, Lady Pomona

Longestaffe, Mrs. Hurtle, Madame Melmotte, and Mrs. Pipkin, and through comments by other characters in the novel about marriage, Trollope portrays these ladies as sharing several concerns and characteristics. In varying degrees they share a concern for social status and financial security, and they share certain attitudes about how they should appear in society and how they should act toward their families.

Through their stated views or through Trollope's com­ ments about them, the married and widowed women of The Way

We Live Now make clear that they feel marriage to be a major

73 74

aim of life. For Lady Carbury, "to marry and have the command

of money, to do her duty correctly, to live in a big house

and be respected, had been her ambition" (13). And what she

wished for as a penniless young girl, and the intensity of her

desire to marry and marry well, happen to coincide with the

prevailing view of marriage in Victorian England and with

some of Trollope's statements on marriage in novels other

than The Way We Live Now. Of course the widely held view of

where womankind belonged—in the home—was in force long before

the Victorian Age.

In Pamela's Daughters Utter speculates whether Richard-

son was the first to say "Woman's sphere is the house." At

any rate, the belief that the home is a woman's only proper

place continued to be strong until only recently. During the

Victorian Age, however, before man had really learned to accept the ills of the machine age, man particularly liked

the idea of the angel in the house as the guardian of the sanctuary away from commercial ills:

The Industrial Revolution created a psychological and amoral atmosphere for which an idealized home with its high priestess offered a compensating sense of humanity and moral direction.

The woman's role was very significant, as she knew:

She who produced the men while man was producing the things, was instinctively conscious of the importance of her function. Her sphere was home, and there was never a time when the home had played such an important part in the social system. . . . The cult of the home was all pervading.3

Since no ordinary girl wished to remain at her parents' 75

house as a spinster, most girls began early to dream of what

they associated with their dreams of home—marriage. For the

Victorian woman, "no way of life was honorable, was approved, 4 was even tolerable for a woman but marriage," and "from infancy all girls who were born above the level of poverty had the dream of a successful marriage before their eyes, for by that alone was it possible for a woman to rise in the world." Woman’s life was simultaneously aimed toward both achieving her goal, and not appearing to be seeking such a goal, as Harriet Martineau notes, "the sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and g to pretend they do not think so."

Anthony Trollope fully believed marriage was the only object of a woman's life. He states outright in North America written in 1862, "The best right a woman has is the right to a husband, and that is the right to which I would recommend 7 every young woman to turn her attention." In The Vicar of

Bullhampton (1870), Trollope comments of Mary Lowther, whose engagement had been broken because of money problems,

But poor Mary was, in truth, very wretched. When a girl asks herself that question,—what shall she do with her life? It is so natural that she should answer it by say­ ing that she will get married, and give her life to some­ body else. It is woman's one career—let women rebel against it as they may; and though there may be word rebellion here and there, women learn’the truth early.®

Of married life, Lily Dale's mother comments in The Small

House at Allington (1862-4), "I think it [married life] is 76

the only lot which can give a woman perfect content and satis- 9 faction. And in Orlev Farm, when Lady Stayely "thought it

a young woman's duty to marry," Trollope adds, "For myself, I am inclined to agree with her."''6

Marriage viewed as duty could be antithetical to ro­

mantic notions of love—and often is antithetical romantic

love in The Way We Live Now. Yet more unromantic is the fact

that women's advancement in the world can come about only

through marriage. And while her husband may have successes

and failures in his business or social enterprises, a woman ordinarily has only one chance to succeed socially—by a mar­ riage that will increase her standing in the world. Little as it dwells at length on individual marriages, The Way We

Live Now provides several well-wrought portraits of, and much rather scathing commentary about, marriage.

Of the several ladies through whom Trollope presents some views of marriage, Lady Matilda Carbury is perhaps the best character in the novel for bringing out some of Trollope's strongest commentary about marriage in The Way We Live Now.

Through a description of her past life, we learn that though a "very lovely" young girl at eighteen, Lady Carbury suffered from the severe handicap that prevents a maiden from attracting a swarm of suitors—she was penniless. She was not of the upper class, but "she was clever, and had picked up an educa­ tion and good manners . . . , and had been beautiful to look at" (13). Her cleverness and appearance she used to try to 77

achieve her ambition, "to marry and have the command of money,

to do her duty correctly, to live in a big house and be re­

spected." Because she had no dowry, she married not for love,

but for security:

When as a very lovely and penniless girl of eighteen she had consented to marry a man of forty-four who had the spending of a large income, she had made up her mind to abandon all hope of that sort of love which poets describe and which young people generally desire to experience. Sir Patrick at the time of his marriage was red-faced, stout, bald, very choleric, generous in money, suspicious in temper, and intelligent. He knew how to govern men. He could read and understand a book. There was nothing mean about him. He had his attractive qualities. He was a man who might be loved;—but he was hardly a man for love. The young Lady Carbury had understood her position and had determined to do her duty (13).

Fulfillment of her duty proved to be a difficult task.

On the whole, Lady Matilda Carbury's first marriage

was extremely unpleasant, primarily because her husband's

cruelty and imperiousness made life difficult. Nonetheless

she had tried to do her duty, as she saw it, to him and to

their children, and "during the first fifteen years she was

successful amidst great difficulties." But in trying not to

show the effects of "violent ill usage" and in trying also to conceal that her husband drank, in "doing all this she schemed, and lied, and lived a life of manoeuvres." These manoeuvres have a lasting effect on her system of values.

Perhaps Lady Carbury's marriage of convenience was productive of a somewhat warped sense of values from the start—because of the premise that it involves duty for the sake of social advancement, and not genuine love. Yet it 78

seems in The Way We Live Now that the women are forced toward

such a view. Lady Carbury, Georgey, Ruby, and Marie cannot

help their choices.

However, the state of marriage as a whole—consider­

ations of its economic base aside—seems to be a state a

woman looks forward to with at least some feeling of resigna­

tion. Marriage, generally, is not glorified in Trollope’s

works. In a section of Mr. Scarborough's Family, which Pope-

Hennessy quotes and then comments about, marriage is depicted

as something to which a woman would not particularly look

forward. On their honeymoon Harry Annesley tells Florence

Mountjoy Annesley:

Half of your life has gone; you have settled down into the cares and duties of married life, none of which had been so much as thought of when you took me. . . . Every­ thing you possess as specially your own has to administer to my sense of love and beauty.

Pope-Hennessy interprets this statement:

It is thus clear that, in Anthony Trollope’s opinion, romantic love hardly survives the honeymoon, hardly indeed the wedding altar, a view which must basically reflect upon his own experience as much as on his observation of the world around him.®

Pope-Hennessy's statement seems to assume more than Annesley's words would warrant. It is more likely that Trollope is recognizing a type of marriage situation in which romantic love is unlikely to last.

Attitudes like Harry's make marriage unbearable for women like Florence of Lady Carbury, but apparently such views were not uncommon. 79

Expectations concerning marriage in Mr. Scarborough's

Family and in at least two marriages in The Way We Live Now match what Mrs. Ellis told young ladies in Wives of England:

You had better make up your mind at once to be uninter­ esting as long as you live to all except the companion of your home; and well will it be for you if you can always be interesting to him.

Ellis told the girls to "choose wisely, . . . for if you choose ill your life will be a ghastly misery."'"6

Lady Carbury unfortunately chooses ill, which becomes even more apparent when she makes the mistake of forming a friendship with a man other than her husband, thereby incurring her husband's anger. She "was not faithless," but Sir Patrick was jealous and "spoke words which even she could not endure, did things which drove even her beyond the calculations of her prudence,—and she left him" (14).

No woman of the Victorian Age could desert her husband— however well-based the reason for her act—without causing censure from almost all fronts. For a woman to desert her husband is to risk great unhappiness, as other novels of the age indicate. In Dickens' Dombey and Son Mr. Dombey tells his wife she cannot leave him; no longer able to tolerate him, she ultimately leaves him for a life hardly less miserable.

Edith Dombey, who pretended to leave her husband for love of another man, and Lady Carbury, who never contemplated a desertion for that reason, both suffered because of the common assumption: "If a wife left her husband, it was assumed that 80 this could only be with a blackguard of the deepest dye and the longest Dundrearys, who would shortly abandon her, penni­ less, to the Thames or the schoolroom." A "classic instance 11 of this is East Lynne."

The worst is often assumed about any relationship,

Lady Carbury discovers. During the Victorian era an incensed husband could do almost anything short of murder to punish his wife at that time: "A husband had an absolute right over the person of his wife; he could lock her up, and he could 12 compel her to return home if she ran away from him." If he wished to make an issue out of a supposed affair, he could bring a suit against his wife for adultery, as Diana Warwick’s husband does in Meredith's Diana of the Crossways.

If a woman in Victorian England continued to stay with a husband who grossly ill-treated her, her life was miserable, but if she wished to leave him, she found it most difficult, if not impossible. "Even the right of a man to prevent his wife by force from leaving him was not successfully challenged 13 until 1891." The price of a divorce "was prohibitive, being 14 in the neighborhood of six or seven hundred pounds."

Wingfield-Stratford sums up what this situation meant to the woman of the age:

By fearful sanctions was this hymeneal propriety defended. Once the goal was attained and the door closed, the des­ tiny of Flora was regarded as finally settled. Whatever happened, there was no appeal and no escape. For a woman to divorce her husband was next to impossible. For her to leave him was social ruin.1^ 81

If a woman returns home after leaving her husband, as Lady

Carbury does, her name is forever tarnished:

But the scandal of her great misfortune had followed her, and some people were never tired of reminding others that in the course of her married life Lady Carbury had run away from her husband, and had been taken back again by the kind-hearted old gentleman (14).

In this passage Trollope, who is sympathetic toward the long-

suffering Lady Carbury, seems to ironically present society's

view of her.

Yet even after her unkind husband's death, Trollope

does not represent her as regretting her marriage—though

her thoughts may be construed as rationalizations—but she

does resolve not to again marry for convenience. She

did not look upon that [first] marriage as a mistake, —having even up to this day a consciousness that it had been the business of her life, as a portionless girl, to obtain maintainance and position at the expense of suffering and servility (287).

From her youth on she seems to have resigned herself to a

belief that for a woman of her social status, love and happi­

ness in marriage is unlikely, if not impossible.

Her view that happiness cannot come through marriage

impedes progress for a time in Lady Carbury's relationship with Mr. Broune. She feels after Sir Patrick's death that

"the time for love had gone by, and she would have nothing to do with it" (15). When Broune first asks her to marry him, she reflects:

Perhaps the truest aspiration of her heart had been the love of freedom which the tyranny of her late husband had engendered. Once she had fled from that tyranny and 82

had been almost crushed by the censure to which she had been subjected. Then her husband's protection and his tyranny had been restored to her. After that the freedom. It had been accompanied by many hopes never as yet ful­ filled, and embittered by many sorrows which had had been always present to her; but still the hopes were alive and the remembrance of the tyranny was very clear to her (248).

Lady Carbury.'s thoughts on freedom and hope outside of the

married state contrast with other views in The Way We Live

Now. She knows a marriage of convenience was a necessity

for her, but is nonetheless embittered by the experience.

Able to marry early, she did not reach Georgey's level of

desperation. But both she and Georgey essentially were alike

in views as young girls in thinking more of social position

and livelihood than of love. The other women of the novel,

Madame Melmotte excepted, initially hold a more romantic stance

toward love and marriage, although all come to a more realistic

view by the novel's end.

Lady Carbury's view—never romantic in regard to Sir

Patrick—had obviously been darkened as a result of her mar­

ried life, and is really Trollope's most unpleasant presenta­

tion of a character's view of a marriage of convenience in

the novel. As Lady Carbury tells Mr. Broune:

Marriage as I have found it, Mr. Broune, has not been happy. I have suffered much. I have been wounded in every joint, hurt in every nerve,—tortured till I hardly endure my punishment. At last I got my liberty, and to that I have looked for my happiness (249).

Later, reflecting on Mr. Broune's offer, she realizes "she

liked her own way. She liked the comfort of a home to herself. 83

Personally she did not want the companionship of a husband"

(287).

Also, Lady Carbury still feels the disgrace of some

society members' view of her desertion of Sir Patrick, and

feels the disgrace of such a miserable marriage, feelings that indicate the sensitivity of the individual to society’s censure. As she writes Broune in refusing his suit for marriage :

life is subject to wounds which are incurable, and my life has been so wounded. I have not strength left me to make my heart whole enough to be worthy of your accep­ tance. I have been so cut and scotched and lopped by the sufferings which I have endured that I am best alone. . . . I am no longer fit to enter in upon a new home (288).

Yet, she has regrets about refusing Broune—because he repre­ sents security, the kind of security that drove her to hér first marriage and that she seeks in her try for a literary career. In writing her letter of rejection to Broune "She had thrown away from her a firm footing which would certainly have served her for her whole life" (288).

The step she initially rejects, then later takes, is not a step up in society. Trollope's depiction of the ambi­ valence of both Broune and Lady Carbury toward that step, of the gradual deepening of their relationship, and of the prog­ ress of their feelings from shallow self-centeredness to mu­ tually genuine sincerity and heart-felt interest is perhaps his best wrought effort in The Way We Live Now.

High as his position—editor of a successful daily 84

newspaper—is, Broune is definitely a working member of the

middle class; Lady Carbury, widow of a baronet, is classifi­

able as an affiliate of the gentry. Early in the novel, she

is more aware of the differences between them. Though strug­

gling to gain literary fame and though aware she must conde­

scend to wheedle favor from literary editors, she has her pride

and is aware of her position. Thus to "induce some one to

do something which would cause a publisher to give her good

payment for indifferent writing," Lady Carbury "smiled and

whispered, and made confidences, and looked out of her own

eyes into men's eyes as though there might be some mysterious

bond between her and them—if only mysterious circumstances

would permit it" (5). But when Broune misinterprets her

seeming intimacy and kisses her, Lady Carbury interprets his

action as one of the hazards of her condescension:

Of course when struggles have to be made and hard work done, there will be little accidents. The lady who uses a street cab must encounter mud and dust which her richer neighbour, who has a private carriage, will escape (6).

As she comes more and more to respect Broune, Matilda

Carbury ceases to think of her position as the superior one.

From thinking of him as a "dear susceptible old donkey" and

a "susceptible old goose," she advances to thinking of him as "one of the considerable ones of the world; a man than whom few,“-so she now told herself,—were greater or more powerful. Was it not a cause enough for any woman to be the wife of such a man, to receive his friends, and to shine in 85

his reflected glory?" (6, 289, 803).

Her view of happiness as freedom from marriage and

as freedom to pursue a literary career is altered to a con­

ventional view of happiness for the woman as "real peace

. . . within her reach, and that tranquillity which comes

from an anchor holding to a firm bottom" (802). She had come

to think so little of herself, having failed in achieving her

aims for herself, her son, and her daughter, and she "had become so sick of her own vanities and littlenesses and pre­ tences that she could not understand that such a man as this

{Mr. Broune] should in truth want to make her his wife" (801).

His preeminence as a man so pushes aside rank or class con­ siderations that Lady Carbury, "in furtherance of her own resolve, took her husband's name," and had "before the coming winter was over" gone from being Lady Matilda Carbury to

Mrs. Broune (803).

Yet ironically this evolution of Lady Carbury's per­ sonal views culminating in a happy step downward on the scale of social status does not affect her own philosophy of marriage as it relates to her daughter Hetta. Her own loveless first marriage persuades her not in the least to sympathize with her daughter's desire to avoid a loveless marriage and to marry for love. "If there was anything that she [Lady Carbury] could not forgive in life it was romance" (682) , and she felt

Hetta "had her mind stuffed with nonsense about love" (684).

Love, she feels, is an exclusive commodity, for it "is like 86

any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can

afford it" (684).

Lady Carbury's gruesome philosophy, and perhaps the harshest statement about marriage in the entire novel, is:

A, woman, she thought, if she were unfortunate enough to be a lady without wealth of her own, must give up every­ thing, her body, her heart,—her very soul if she were that way troubled,—to the procuring of a fitting main­ tenance for herself (745).

Harsh as the statement is, it is a clear statement of a prevalent view in The Way We Live Now of marriage as sacrifice, whether of the gentle lady who must sacrifice love for security, the wealthy nouveau riche girl of obscure background who must sacrifice love for a title, the titled gentleman who must sacrifice his pride to bolster the family fortunes via the dowry of a tradesman’s daughter, or of the upper or lower class girl who must relinquish aspirations to a titled position for the security of a plebian marriage.

Descending to a lower class than Lady Carbury’s, one finds the philosophy of womanly sacrifice, stated quite simply, in the words of widow Pipkin, who keeps a boarding house.

Firmly believing that "there was nothing a young woman should look to so much as a decent house over her head,—and victuals,"

Mrs. Pipkin asks her niece, "What’s all the love in the world,

Ruby, if a man can’t do for you?" (342). Later, reproving her title-struck niece, Mrs. Pipkin says, "Oh Ruby, Ruby, I hope you'll come to learn some day, that a loving heart is better nor a fickle tongue,—specially with vittels certain" (761). 87

As pragmatic about love and marriage as Mrs. Pipkin and Lady Carbury, Madame Melmotte thinks love "is a beastli­ ness" (233). She enjoys material comfort and security, which was not always her lot in her life with Augustus Melmotte: apparently she and her husband had to leave cities they resided in swiftly to avoid being prosecuted, and her future was often unsure.

Poor Madame Melmotte has the least power and signifi­ cance of the women in The Way We Live Now. In the eyes of society she is "vulgar" and inconsequential, for "from the beginning of the Melmotte era it had been an understood thing that no one spoke to Madame Melmotte" (498). She is apparently at home with and able to function with only a small group of people who are similar to herself.

The death of the man who "had been her merciless tyrant for years" prods her to realize she finally does not have anyone directing her every move and must think of her future. Accustomed to the security of marriage, she takes the initiative to attract Croll. One does not know precisely what motivated Madame Melmotte*s first marriage, though one rumor has it that he married her for her money. Her second marriage, motivated both by a need for security and a need to change her last name, promises a better future for her.

One does not always learn in The Way We Live Now why marriages came about, i.e., whether for money, "vittels," or position, but generally there are some intimations of the 88

reasons involved. Lady Pomona Longestaffe's situation is an

exception, for Trollope does not tell us precisely why she

married Adolphus Longestaffe. Trollope does present enough

amusing dialogue and description for us to see that she is

in awe of her husband and in agreement with him concerning

the appurtenances of wealth necessary to put on the proper

show in society.

Lady Pomona was the daughter of some member of the

nobility, and had retained the title "Lady" after her marriage

to Adolphus Longestaffe. To gentry members like Roger Carbury,

Longestaffe was a gentry newcomer, though Longestaffe's family

had been out of trade for one hundred-fifty years, and had

accumulated the considerable land and other property that may have been what attracted Lady Pomona to him. However much his superior she was in social rank, Lady Pomona is decidedly her husband's inferior in household administration. Like

Lady Carbury and Madame Melmotte, Lady Pomona is the dominated marriage partner.

Forced into austerity in an attempt to unencumber the property he placed in Jeopardy by his own extravagance,

Augustus Longestaffe dooms his family to stay at their country home: the London Season has become too expensive for a family in their financial condition. His daughters, furious at their father's decision, feel he could not be serious and suggest that their mother rebel by telling her husband that she will not go back to the country. Lady Pomona says, "I couldn't 89

say that to him," and states "He does" mean what he says (107).

During the summit conference between Longestaffe and

his son that had preceded the father's decision, the ladies

of the house waited not for the result of the talk, but for

"whatever signs of good or evil might be collected from the

manner and appearance of the squire when he should return to

them" (106). The blustering manner of the squire is apparently

sufficient to cow his wife into submission. When Longestaffe reneges on a promise to let his family go back to London for awhile in exchange for the women's help in hostessing the

Melmottes, Lady Pomona defends his decision:

Well, by dear, if your father says that we can't go back, I suppose we must take his word for it. It is he who must decide of course. What he meant I suppose was, that he would take us back if he could (166).

To her daughter Georgiana-' s - embittered reproaches of her father for his decision, Lady Pomona asks, "what can we do?"

She pleads with her daughter to quit berating Longestaffe, saying, "Don't talk like that Georgianay unless you wish to kill me," and "You [Georgey] are very unjust, and say horrid things" (166).

Apparently Lady Pomona realizes what her spoiled daughters cannot realize, that her husband would not curtail their stay in London unless strongly forced to do so. The

London Season is one segment of the social events the husband and wife both feel to be important to their position, and both of them enjoy being thought of as important. They concur 90

in a social ostentation Trollope delightfully describes—

such as having "three powdered footmen" and a "butler, whose

appearance of itself was sufficient to give éclat to a family"— which Longestaffe thought might net him a peerage, but which

only nets him debts.

Lady Pomona agrees with and defers to her husband’s wishes in regard to social snobbery and the necessity of appearing wealthy. Because both Longestaffes have a power­

ful sense of their own significance in the world, they are disappointed by monetary problems and by difficulties in getting their daughters placed well. Both regret their daughter

Georgiana’s' affiliation with Ezekiel Brehgert, for they share a vehement anti-Semitic view.

Lady Pomona's mode of resistance to her daughter's engagement is a register of her character. Snobbishly, she summarily dismisses Brehgert not because he is middle-aged, vulgar, and father of a sizeable family, but solely because he is Jewish. Further, she considers Georgiana's behaviour so demeaning that even in speaking to her daughter, who pre­ viously had some influence in .the household, "her voice was not gracious, as she was free from that fear of her daughter's ascendency which had formerly affected her" (640). A hollow, status conscious creation, Lady Pomona cannot be at all sym­ pathetic with her daughter's feelings because of her social prejudices that are so like her husband's: life for Lady

Pomona hinges greatly on how acceptable one's actions would 91 be considered to be by society, and on what her husband says.

Another female character in The Way We Live Now who is concerned even more than Lady Pomona about social status, but who is little dominated by her husband, is Lady Julia

Monogram. Portionless, like Lady Carbury, she made a "brilliant marriage" to Sir Damask Monogram, a man who, as Trollope drolly states "had really conquered the world, had got over the difficulty of being the grandson of a butcher, and was now as good as though the Monograms had gone to the crusades"

(256-7). Marriage for the Monograms, but particularly for

Julia, is a social drama in which they in their leading roles strive assiduously to live up to the superior social status they feel they hold. From first (Damask Monogram's very name) to last mention of the Monograms, Trollope seems to enjoy playfully satirizing their consciousness of position and propriety.

At the base of his satire is the fact that their marriage of convenience is so successfully carried through that both the participants and other characters think love figures into the match. Because she "had been without fortune" and Damask "was a man of great wealth," their match was termed a "brilliant marriage" (256). And, though her once close friend Georgiana.. Longestaffe states clearly that Julia did not marry for love (768), Julia had "dispensed champagne and smiles, and made everybody, including herself, believe that she was in love with her husband" (257). 92

In marrying Sir Damask, "Lady Monogram had climbed

to the top of the tree"; however, she "was equal to her posi­

tion, and made the most of it" (257). Trollope creates in

Lady Julia a character lacking individuality. If society accepted a certain person, she would accept him, and were

society to subsequently reject that person, she would follow

suit. Trollope superbly makes Lady Julia's sense of social acceptability manifest in her treatment of Georgiana , Longe­ staffe.

Julie "had been fairly true to friendship" with

Georgiana "while Georgiana— behaved herself" (257). However,

"She thought that Georgiana;, in going to the Melmottes had— not behaved herself, and therefore she determined to drop

Georgiana." (257).

By "absolutely begging for notice, and praying that she might not be cut," Georgiana^. wangles an invitation to visit the pompous Julia. The dialogue between the two ladies that follows is a classical example of Trollope's artful mode of illustrating views on status. Lady Julia deftly ascribes her treatment of Georgey to everything except herself. Julia

"can't know the Melmottes" because the Monograms are in a different set from Augustus Melmotte. She cannot ask Georgey to her house because staying with the Melmottes moves one to a different set. Julia earlier did attend the Melmottes' entertainment because "we didn't know much about the people.

I was told that everybody was going and therefore T got Sir 93

Damask to let me go." But Sir Damask "says now that he won’t

let me know" the Melmottes (259).

Having been at the Melmottes' once, Lady Julia says

she can't ask Georgey alone to a Monogram affair "without

asking them too." Being "very clever in the use which she

made of her husband" (483),—Julia says: "I can't go against my husband" (259). Then, in her vague social jargon, Julia

tries to verbalize what Georgiana knows. Though the Duchess

of Stevenage had dined at the Melmottes', "we all know what

that means." Although according to Georgey "People are giving

their eyes to be asked to the dinner which he [Melmotte] is

to give the Emperor in July," Julia asserts that

Going there when the Emperor of China is there, of any­ thing of that kind, is no more than going to the play. Somebody chooses to get all London into his house, and all London chooses to go. But it isn't understood that that means acquaintance. I should meet Madame Melmotte in the park afterwards and not think of bowing to her (259) .

Though she once would have done the same, Georgey says "I should call that rude." In an effort to clinch what she considers to be a "row" with Georgiana, Lady Julia replies:

Very well. Then we differ. But really it does seem that you ought to understand these things as well as any­ body. I don't find any fault with you for going to the Melmottes,—though I was very sorry to hear it; but when you have done it, I don't think you should complain of people because they won't have the Melmottes crammed down their throats (259).

Julia's husband, entering the room at this point in the dis­ cussion, helps to defend his wife by saying "she doesn't know 94

them {the Melmottes]" (259).

Later on, even though she does not know the Melmottes

and really does not wish to, Julia does drive a hard bargain

with Georgey to get tickets to the entertainment Melmotte is

giving for the Emperor of China. Because "all London chooses

to go,” tickets for the dinner and reception later are at a

premium, and "there was a rush for them," Georgiana, wishes

to get as much as she can from Julia in return for placing

two reception tickets at the Monograms' disposal. That "each

lady was disposed to get as much and to give as little as

possible" (482), and that the Melmotte prestige and credibility

fluctuated makes the bargaining all the more amusing. Even

more amusing, and highly ironic, is the circumstance that

as the credibility gap widens the tickets come to be "hardly

worth anything" on the eve'of the entertainment, and that

Lady Julia procrastinates so long in deciding whether or not

to go see the emperor that by the time she finally gets to

the Melmottes' house the royal party has gone. All Lady

Julia's connivings to make certain she committed no social errors were for naught.

Lady Julia Monogram is totally occupied with living up to her conception of the forms and conventions of society: what she thinks society expects is what she wants. Trollope thoroughly probes the vacuity of such expectations in writing of Julia's efforts to act socially proper, to see the right people, to cut those beneath her, and to attend only socially 95

acceptable events.

Although Trollope writes of the Monograms and other

married couples—and of marriage--in what frequently seems

to be a lightly ironical vein, his intent is more serious than

one immediately realizes, for his tone is deceptive. Whether

a husband and wife are at odds with each other in an at times

brutally patriarchal marriage, as the Carburys and Melmottes

were; whether the couple share views of society though the

man makes the decisions, as in the Longestaffes’ marriage;

or whether since the husband is so good natured that the wife

governs the couple's social calendar, as in the Monogram's

marriage, the marriage of the English upper class woman who

is greatly concerned with her status in society seems to be

somehow incomplete.

Certain attitudes traditionally associated with married women of the era are found in most marriages one sees in The

Way We Live Now—deference, self-sacrifice, and respect.

But when the deference to one's husband occurs because of fear or because a woman has sacrificed herself to a loveless but status-elevating match, that deference is less admirable.

Advancement in society in The Way We Live Now is greatly aspired to, but the personal expense of advancement is consider able because with no base of love and consideration in their relationship, a couple too readily tend to make money, material possessions, and status their gods.

Perhaps the single most significant proof that some­ 96 thing is indeed lacking in the marriages of status-conscious individuals is to be found in the nature of children from such marriages. Steeped in social consciousness from birth,

Dolly, Georgiana, and Sophy Longestaffe, Felix Carbury, and

Marie Melmotte are products of an environment marked by self­ ishness and greed. They are as unwilling to make sacrifices for their parents as those parents were unwilling to sacrifice status for love. That Felix will not willingly return some much-needed money he borrowed from his mother, that Marie

Melmotte will not help her father to save himself from ruin, and that Dolly will not sell an estate to firm up the family holdings serves as proof that generosity, consideration of one's fellow man, and love are not ready products of and are rather hard to come by in marriages based on status, self- interest, and greed. 97

CHAPTER IV

NOTES

1 Robert P. Utter and Gwendolyn Needham, Pamela's Daughters (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1943), p, 36. 9 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame Of Mind, 1830- 1970 (New Haven: Yale Press, 1957), 3 Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Those Earnest Victorians (New York: Morrow and Coi, 1930), p. 158. 4 Robert P. Utter and Gwendolyn Needham, p. 33. 5 Charles Alexander Petrie, The Victorians (London: Eyre and Spottesweode, 1960), p. 199. g Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1937), quoted in Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman iNew York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 157. 7 Anthony Trollope, North America (1862), quoted in Patricia Thomson, The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal, 1837-1873 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 84. p Anthony Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton (London, 1924), pp. 259-60. 9 James Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), p. 98. 10 Mrs. Ellis, Wives of England, quoted in crow, p. 66. ^Wingfield-Stratford, p. 163.

12petrie, p. 207.

13 Crow, p. 147. 14 Petrie, p. 207. "^Wingfield-Stratford, p. 157. CHAPTER V

A SPINSTER

Critical though he may sometimes be of the marriage

of convenience, Anthony Trollope is also sympathetically aware

of the two main reasons why a woman resorted to such a marri­

age—the fear of spinsterhood and the desire to improve or

at least retain her class status. In The Way We Live Now

Georgiana . Longestaffe is an excellent example of the depth

of Trollope's critical sympathies for a woman whose parents

fostered in her both that fear and that desire, while she

is at the same time an example of the ironic stance Trollope

takes toward the female's machinations to make a "good" mar­ riage.

Because marriage is so totally a preoccupation of

Georgiana Longestaffe, the segment of The Way We Live Now focusing on her provides more commentary than segments devoted to other females on what a dowryless woman must face up to in trying to elude spinsterhood. Major issues she must confront are the optimistic aims nurtured in a status-conscious family, the scarcity of available men, the difficulty of finding a mate equal to or better than her own class, the importance attached to marriage, the limits of tolerance for a socially acceptable match, and the stigma attached to spinsterhood.

98 99

Yet, as is always the case, such a bald, matter-of-fact state­ ment of the issues at hand in the development and portrayal of a character seems so ineffective in the face of a complex well-wrought creation like Georgey, whose monomaniacal drive toward marriage completely motivates her thought and actions.

Her fear of spinsterhood as a whole stems from a belief that without marriage there is nothing she can enjoy and no way for her to feel satisfied: as her queries indicate, she feels her life would be pointless if she were a spinster:

"Of course there’s a house to live in and clothes to wear; but what's to be the end of it? ... If I con't marry what's to become of me?" (628). This fear drives Georgiana Longe­ staffe to what, in the eyes of her social equals, would be considered very great lengths.

In the light of comments during the Victorian Age, one sees that her fear has parallels. What would become of a single woman of Georgiana's years was not something to which the usual woman would look forward:

"The position of a single woman of thirty in the middle classes is horrible," confessed a spinster in 1868. "Her cares are to be properly dressed, to drive or walk or pay calls with Mama; to work miracles of embroidery— but for what? What we want is something to do, something to live for."l

According to Cockshut, Trollope, who hed a lonely life until his marriage, empathized with the frustrations of both single men and women:

... he was distressed by the enforced celibacy of the spinster, and the aimlessness of the bachelor. Perhaps 100

unconsciously assuming that everyone's temperament was like his own, he saw unmarried people as the inevitable victims of boredom and loneliness.

In Lily Dale Trollope created a character who could adjust

to the loneliness of spinsterhood, but Trollope's Georgey refuses to accept the fact that she might have to remain single.

Having written so much of single young ladies and their courtship difficulties, Trollope must have been well aware of both the difficulty of finding what would be considered an eligible man and of the importance of the London season, the time at which available and desirable men would be con­ gregated in one place. But even being at the right place at the right time could not be beneficial for all women. Of the woman's problem of finding a mate a little past mid-century,

Holcombe relates,

Drawing upon the census statistics for 1851 Miss Mar­ tineau pointed out that there were over half a million more women in Britain, single women who could not hope 'to marry and be taken care of' and widows who might not have been left provided for by their husbands.3

That the shortage of males and the difficulty of finding a suitable mate were known about during Trollope's time, Crow indicates:

... to find a husband at all was not always easy. Sometimes there was no marriage for a young lady. Even had every marrageable man chosen a wife, there would still have been spinsters, for there were about a half-a-million surplus women in Britain at this period. It was a super­ fluity which worried the Victorians considerably. . . .

For all of those single women in England, the competition must have been close. 101

Georgiana, who had been trying to find a mate for

twelve years and who had so far lost out in the competition, was desperate for constructive action:

Marriage had ever been so clearly placed before her eyes as a condition of things to be achieved by her own efforts that she could not endure the idea of remaining tranquil in her father’s house and waiting till some fitting suitor might find her out (766).

What would have helped her to be more desirable—more than any other factor—as the discussions of eligible men in the novel indicate—would be a dowry sizeable enough to attract noblemen whose family fortunes deeded to be bolstered. A girl without money could hope to become engaged only by trying to appear attractive to men and by being situated where desirable men might congregate, like London. Mr. Longestaffe was aware of the hoped-for utility of his London place: he had

"always given silent adherence to the idea that the house in

London was to be kept open [during the social season] in order that husbands might be caught" (767).

A house in the country like the Longestaffe's Caversham was not considered to be as useful for ensnaring suitable males as a place in London:

Sometimes the country house parties were used for match­ making, perennial preoccupation of womankind. . . . [but] ... it was more usual and generally more productive of results, to play the marriage market during the five or six months of the London season between January and July.

All Georgiana could hope for by staying in the country would be some country-oriented gentleman of modest means, like her sister's George Whitstable. This type of dull catch was 102 beneath Georgey's ambitions, and so she put her hope in London,

She desperately wants to marry, but she does aim high in her marriage ambitions.

Georgiana's fear of isolation at Caversham, of "being buried down in that place, for a whole year" (107), where there is no hope to realize her ambitions, is a very real one for her. At one point, when in the country, she queries, "What is to become of me? Is it not enough to drive me mad to be going about here by myself, without any prospect of anything?"

(767) .

The London Season Georgey felt she could not do without must have been quite a phenomenon. Comments in the Melmotte,

Monogram, and Longestaffe sections indicate that there were certain functions like1 balls and dinner parties that only the cream of society attended. Maneuvers to get invitations to and preparations for these social functions greatly occupied the time of participants in the London Season-like Lady Mono­ gram and season aspirants like the Melmottes.

For all its attractions, the London season had its detractors; prominent among these critics was Beatrice Webb:

In the 70s and 80s the London Season, together with its derivative countryhouse visiting, was regarded by wealthy parents as the equivalent for their daughters of the university education and professional training afforded for their sons, the adequate reason being that marriage to a man of their own or a higher social grade was the only recognized vocation for women not compelled to earn their own livelihood. It was this society life which absorbed nearly half the time and more than half the vital energy of the daughters of the upper and upper- middle class; it fixed their standards of personal ex­ 103

penditure; it formed their manners and. either by attrac­ tion or repulsion it determined their social ideals,®

Certainly a concern for the season absorbs all of the "vital

energy" and thoughts of Georgey. And it almost certainly must have affected the snobbish ideas of Lady Julia Monogram.

Webb herself apparently greatly disliked the effect of the

season on its participants, but many people—like Georgiana— craved to be a part of the social whirl.

Only those people who were at least moderately wealthy or who could sponge off others could be a part of the yearly

London sojourn Georgiana expected as a matter of course.

Coming from a family intent on living "as magnates . . . with all the appurtenances of wealth"—although "they were never able to pay anybody anything that they owed"—Georgiana

Longestaffe’s confidence in having a yearly London season is not unexpected.

Neither she nor the other female members of the Longe­ staffe family, however, fully realize how financially burdened the family properties are or how much money they themselves spend. They do not think they "do anything out of the way," and cannot imagine doing with any less than they have.

Although he did not know enough to keep from overex­ tending his resources, Adolphus Longestaffe is aware enough of the value of money to know he is in financial difficulty.

The cost of the "annual migration" is great, involving ex­ penses related to new dresses for the ladies, maintenance of 104

a carriage and a brougham, dinner parties, and one necessary

ball. Thus he dreaded the season's end, when the bills would

arrive. Ultimately the necessity for the Longestaffes £0 7 "vegetate rurally for the sake of economy" became unavoid­

able. In regard only to himself, he could survive isolation

at Caversham. Longestaffe "would be contented to drag through

long listless days at Caversham, and endeavour to nurse his

property, if only his daughter would allow it" (171), but

her own desperation will not let her forego the whirl of social

events that may bring her to the altar. When he is forced

to say they must stay in the country, what he fears comes

true: his furiously angry daughter Georgey refuses to stay

home.

Georgiana's letter of protest to her father for his

decision, stating among other things that "if I'm to be buried

down here at Caversham, I might just as well be dead at once"

(170), causes him to produce a letter from Melmotte inviting his daughter to spend the season with the Melmotte family.

Georgianna's acceptance of the invitation results in a chain of events rich in social commentary of Trollope's view of the flexibility and rigidity of class structure, and of attitudes toward marriage.

Trollope makes clear from the moment of Georgiana\s decision to go to the Melmottes' that she will be crossing a social boundary. Yet it is a boundary she is determined to be reconciled to crossing if it can bring her any hope of 105 marriage. The details of her stay with the Melmottes—the scorn heaped upon her by acquaintances and particularly by

Lady Julia, the ignominy of staying with the Melmottes^—are all significant in illustrating how very much she will undergo to avoid spinsterhood and attract a suitor no matter how high the personal price.

Georgiana enters into the arrangement of her visit to the Melmottes' with open eyes, though even she—who used to be so critical of those beneath her—does not realize completely how far down the step is that she takes. Before going she tells her mother that visiting with them would be

"dreadful," and "awfully disagreeable,—absolutely disgusting"

(173). Georgey thinks Madame Melmotte so vulgar that she must be "the very sweeping of the gutters" (173). She calls the Melmottes "Horrid, horrid people" and criticizes her father for even considering the arrangement.

Lady Pomona herself wonders how any one could like to live in the house with the Melmottes, but tries to rationalize the arrangement by saying that everybody goes to the Melmottes' house. But a brief afternoon visit is far different from what

Georgians . faces, and she knows it. "Everybody doesn't go and live with them" she tells her mother.

However, when it comes down to the basic issue—Georgi­ ana must stay at home alone and uncourted or spend the season with the "dreadful" Melmottes and perhaps lure a suitor—, she determinedly says, "I must do it. I know it will make me 106

so ill that I shall almost die under it" (174). Georgey

knows there is "disgrace" in her move to London, yet says,

"I must go. It’s the only chance that is left. If I were

to remain down here everybody would say that I was on the

shelf" (175).

Georgiana's old acquaintances readily let her know

in a variety of ways that she commits a social blunder of great magnitude in going to stay with the Melmotte family.

Soon she "perceived that her old acquaintances were changed

in their manner to her" (202) . An old friend will not even

answer a first letter Georgey writes. She finds "that Lord

Nidderdale's manner to her had been quite changed" (202).

She and Nidderdale used to flirt harmlessly, but in their flirtations he had never "spoken to her as he spoke when he met her in Madame Melmotte's drawing-room" (202). And when she was out in public, she could see a change: she "could see it in the faces of people as they greeted her in the park,

—especially in the faces of the men" (202).

Soon after her visit to the Melmottes began she noticed the changed attitudes of others: "Though the thing was as yet but a few days old she understood that others understood that she had degraded herself" (203). Seeing her walk into a room behind Madame Melmotte—the usual sign of deference to one's hostess—Lord Grasslough bluntly asks her "What's all this about" (203). The reproach that most startles Georgey, however, is a visit from her brother, who is generally so in­ 107

different to his family.

Dolly Longestaffe asks the same question Grasslough

had asked of Georgey. Of course what it's "all about" is a,

desperate attempt to secure a base for a man-hunt, but she

gives her excuse that "everyone" goes to the Melmotte's house.

Dolly scoffs,

No;—everybody does not come and stay here as you are doing. Everybody doesn't make themselves a part of the family. I have heard of nobody doing it except you. I thought you used to think so much of yourself. . . . I can tell you nobody else will think much of you if you remain here (203).

As to Georgey's hopes of a stay with the Melmottes being a springboard to marriage, Dolly comments, "I don't see how the Melmottes are to help you. . . . you oughtn't to be here"

(204), and their father "should have known better."

The reaction of Lady Julia Monogram to Georgiana's

London visit illustrates perhaps more completely than any other peer group reaction the toll exacted of those who cross social boundaries. Too, her reaction makes more clear the fact that Georgey's visit to the Melmottes will hurt her marriage chances, for those members of the upper classes who are status conscious will be as horrified as Lady Julia by

Georgey's step down in the social world. They had been good friends while "Georgiana---behaved herself," but Lady Julia thinks that in going to the Melmottes Georgey had not behaved herself, and she decides to "drop Georgiana" (257).

Trollope comments on the reversal of status that took 108

place after Julia's marriage and thus also on the importance

of marriage in determining status. The younger Julia had

"once been lower" than Georgey in terms of social position,

had been domineered by Georgey, and had always entreated her

superior "in reference to balls here and routs there." But

the sudden Monogram marriage drastically reversed their positions, "exalting Julia very high,—just as Georgiana was beginning to allow her aspirations to descent" from "the

Upper to the Lower House" (258).

London social snobbery has changed Lady Julia immensely.

She thinks Georgey has asked to be dropped from the social register by her behavior. And she thinks Georgey's blunder is compounded by her receptiveness to the attentions of a

Jewish frequenter of the Melmotte home whom Georgey wants to have asked to the Monogram's house. Using the Melmottes to try to partake of the London social season and secure a proper suitor is one thing, but carrying on with a Jewish man from the city is quite another matter. In her response to Georgiana:'s request, Lady Julia says much about social biases:

I don't make the lines? but there they are? and one gets to know in a sort of way what they are ... I like to see people come here whom other people who come here will like to meet. I'm big enough to hold my own, and so is Sir Damask. But we ain't big enough to introduce new­ comers (484).

Lady Julia elaborates on her statement by saying that if some­ one as inconsequential as her butcher or hairdresser suddenly 109 would become accepted everywhere, she would have them in her

home. At present, however, Mr. Brehgert, Georgey's suitor,

is as unacceptable as the butcher.

Lady Julia is a conservative in her social behaviour, because unlike some other people she cannot "dare to ask any­ body" she meets in the streets. She is not "inclined to risk" her reputation "on the appearance of new people" at her table.

And certainly a man who is new, Jewish, and from the city would be a "risk" in her view.

One of the more depressing aspects of such a view as Lady Julia Monogram's is that she is so unsympathetic toward and severe on Georgey even though she had been in a similar situation and Georgey's aid had helped head her to Sir Damask.

It is as if the ruthlessness of the world of The Way We Live

Now does not allow friendship or consideration for one's fellowman, or even one's former friend and benefactor. The social views Beatrice Webb found appalling are near their worst in a slave to society like Lady Julia, though Trollope's tone toward Julia does not seem so much condemnatory as ironi­ cal.

That Georgiana had once been just like Julia in social attitudes makes her plight all the more poignant and amusing.

They had shared views and had thus shared their scorn of people who did not measure up to society's dictates. When

Georgiana tells Julia that she plays to marry Brehgert, she does so "remembering . . . how in days long past she and her 110

friend Julia Triplex had scattered their scorn upon some poor girl who had married a man with a Jewish name--whose grand­ father had possibly been a Jew" (488). Biases are clearly not to be forgotten, although one’s own friend goes against the spoken or unspoken rules of society. And, according to the way Trollope presents animosities having to do with social status, acquaintances delight in finding out that someone has not followed the rules.

For the transgressor, alienation is the primary punish­ ment; for Georgianna, the punishment of alienation’means exile from not only the people she knew well and may have felt superior to, but also from the type of enviornment to which she had always been accustomed. This constitutes a humbling experience for a girl of her upbringing. Those she had once snubbed or condescended to, like the Primero girls and Miles

Grendall, ignore her or 'patronise her in a manner that be­ wildered her" (256). Also, "When by chance she danced or exchanged a few words with the Nidderdales and Grassloughs whom she used to know, they spoke to her with a want of respect which she felt and tasted but could hardly analyze" (256).

This kind of treatment "nearly broke her heart" (256) , but what she found equally disconcerting was the change of environment that going fron Caversham to a nouveau riche environment involves. The Brehgert home hopefully would be better, but the Melmotte household provides evidence that she will have an adjustment problem. The Melmottes have "no Ill

Lares, no toys, no books, nothing but gold and grandeur, pomatum, powder and pride" (254). Actually "the Longestaffe

life had not been an easy, natural, or intellectual life; but

the Melmotte life was hardly endurable even by a Longestaffe"

(254).

The nouveau-riche environment is disconcerting to a member of the gentry in another respect. It is peopled by inhabitants who "were antipathetic" to GeorgianaVisitors to the Melmotte home "seemed to be as little akin to her as would have been the shopkeepers in the small town near

Caversham." Yet she met Brehgert in this environment, so people like these visitors, too, are a factor she must reckon with. In the "long evenings she observes them almost speech­ lessly," while she tries to "fathom the depth of the vulgarity of her associates" (255).

And she sees very little of associates from her former realm. Even though she does get to go to the type of party she formerly had frequented, she knows that the few invita­ tions the Melmotte obtained had been secured only with diffi­ culty. Although some sons of the elite court Marie Melmotte, and although many greedy gentry are involved in Melmotte's schemes, the Melmotte family is not welcome in the inner social circles.

All of this suffering Georgiana ? must go through because of her London affiliation is almost as nothing compared to what happens when she begins to let people know she has be- 112

come engaged to a Jewish man. She muses to herself that

she has become more liberal as the years passed, but her views are primarily the rationalizations of a desperate woman, for a person having a Jewish name or known to profess the Jewish religion was not at all acceptable to her social group. This bias of her acquaintances Georgey knows well.

In a paragraph explaining her thoughts, Trollope states she had difficulty mustering the courage to tell her parents because

The man was absolutely a Jew;—not a Jew that had been, as to whom there might be a doubt whether he or his father of his grandfather had been the last Jew of the family; but a Jew that was (486).

Perhaps because she knew of several members of her set who had married Jews as well as because she wants to marry Brehgert, she can make her views sound less anti-Semitic than the views of her parents, and this is of immense help in aiding her to rationalize her affiliation. And her rationalizations, which are a tribute to Trollope's awareness of the psychology of motivation, are superb. Georgiana's line of thinking is that in regard to Jews there is some current "general heaving- up" of society on this matter," and the change would "soon make it a matter of indifference whether anybody was Jew or

Christian" (486). Only as much as this matter "might be re­ garded by the world in which she wished to live" was she re­ gardful of the matter at all, because "she was herself above all personal prejudices of that kind" (486). Lady Julia, who 113

had shared views with Georgiana, would be incredulous at

this line of thinking.

Georgey may have convinced herself she is above certain

biases, but her acceptance of Brehgert’s suit nonetheless

is proof of her lessening aims and aspirations as to the type

of husband she would accept. At nineteen, "lovers . . . are

supposed to be plentiful as blackberries," but for a girl of

twenty-nine they are "rare hothouse fruits." Brehgert "was

rich, would live in London, and would be a husband" (488),

an amusing rationalization indicative of how little she thinks of him as a man. Besides, "people did such odd things now and 'lived them down,' that she could see no reason why she should not do this and live this down" (488).

What she most fears is her parents' reaction. Knowing their vigorous anti-Semitism, she is reluctant to even tell them, and realizes she may become completely alienated from them. Yet Georgey wants to hold to her aim in spite of what they and others think, which is strong testimony to the appalling power of the fear of spinsterhood:

Was it not the business of her life, in these days, to do the best she could for herself, and would she allow paltry considerations as to the feelings of others to stand in her way and become bugbears to affright her? (525).

And so she writes to her mother of the engagement, and indeed brings down, many bugbears.

Reeking of bigotry, Georgiana’s father repeats several times after learning of his daughter's plan—"Heavens and 114

earth;—a Jew! An old fat Jew!" (528), His reaction parallels

that of the rest of the Longestaffe family. They do not care

how wealthy Breghert is, though they reverence wealth; they

are indifferent to his character, being of indifferently

genuine characters themselves; they would probably be indiffer­

ent to his age if he were socially acceptable. All they care

about is the social disgrace^attached to marrying a person

who is Jewish.

Sophia tells her sister that her husband-to-be would

not let her visit the home of Brehgert if she marries him.

Dolly is disturbed enough to even write a note to his father

saying he ought to lock Georgey up rather than let her marry

"that horrid vulgar Jew" (633). Her own mother thinks Jews

are an "accursed race . . . expelled from Paradise" (630).

Old Longestaffe's anti-Semitism matches his wife's: he "was

certain that the glory of England was sunk forever" when

Jews were admitted into Parliament (487) .

As Trollope's ironic tone indicates, he enjoys illus­

trating how Brehgert is a good man as much as he enjoys recording the blatant anti-Semitism of the Longestaffes. In appearance Brehgert is not pleasant, but his character is perhaps superior to that of all other men in The Way We Live

Now. He is a good, honest man of business, and is very humane: he could have exposed Melmotte's forgery.,; but was kind enough to return the forged papers to Melmotte. His greatest claim to the reader's admiration, however, is his "single-minded 115

honesty"—evident in a lengthy letter he writes to Georgiana ,

—and his intelligence and perceptiveness.

But of Brehgert*s really good qualities Georgey is not

aware, and may not be completely capable of comprehending,

and when she is brought back to Caversham from London by her

father, she comes to an environment so negative to her plans

that she again doubts her decision. A "plain-spoken and

truth-telling" letter that comes to Caversham from Brehgert

gives her cause to further question her future plans. Losses

through business dealings with Melmotte cause him to say he

cannot have a London house for three years, and having a place

in London for part of the year is something she thinks she

cannot do without.

Her letter to Brehgert literally demands a London town- house, a demand she does not realize is unreasonable. She does not think he would not meet her demand, for "she so fully recognized her own value as a Christian lady of high birth and position giving herself to a commercial Jew" that she thought he would "be only too anxious to stick to his bargain"

(642). Georgey's letter and thinking in regard to it are certain proof of how permeated she is by Longestaffe prejudice and insensitivity. His reply indicates how clearly he now views her, for he says he sees from the letter that she will not be his wife unless he can supply her "with a house in town as well as with one in the country" (642) . With more than a tinge of irony he writes: "But of course I have no 116 right to ask you to share with me the discomfort of a single home. I may perhaps add that I had hoped that you would have looked to your happiness to another source" (643). He breaks off the match.

Georgey finds this end to her engagement embarrassing because she considers her position to be superior. She almost wishes she could continue the arrangement: "There would have been inconveniences no doubt, but they would have been less than the sorrow on the other side" (643). Marriage at the price of loss of social standing would be better than no marriage at all.

Rather than sympathizing with her daughter's crisis,

Lady Pomona feels only relief—much like Lady Carbury when

Hetta temporarily ends her match with Paul. She just moans about the whole thing being so dreadful. She had never "heard of anything so bad" (644). Lady Pomona thinks more of how

"we must all remain here at Caversham till people forget it" than of how her daughter feels.

The whole Brehgert episode puts Georgiana Longestaffe exactly where she least wishes to be—"buried just like a nun in a convent" at Caversham. Her situation is made even less bearable by her sister's approaching marriage. The toll of familial pressure and Georgey's frustration are represented brilliantly in a lengthy passage in "The Longestaffe Marriages" chapter. In this passage Trollope drops his ironic tone and here her efforts to be married are likened to the efforts 117

of a swimmer in the water struggling to get to the shore.

As time passes she gets further from the shore rather than

nearer, in spite of great effort. Now it seems that the water

is closing over her: "That ultimate failure in her matrimonial

projects would be the same as drowning she never for a moment

doubted," for it "never occurred to her to consider with

equanimity the prospect of living as an old maid" (766).

In her anxiety Georgey vents her frustrations on her mother, who happens at one point to tell her daughter that

she could not have loved Brehgert. This infuriates Georgiana,, who says,

Loved him I- Who thinks about love nowadays? I don’t know any one who loves any one else. You won't tell me that Sophy is going to marry that idiot because she loves him! Did Julia Triplex love that man with the large for­ tune? When you wanted Dolly to marry Marie Melmotte you never thought of his loving her. I had got the better of all that kind of thing before I was twenty (768) .

Of course Georgey's comments are those of an embittered female, but through this passage Trollope effectively questions marri­ age motivations. In her anxiety, Georgiana'S feelings about the place of love in marriage come into the open. She finds it impossible to believe that her mother really considers love to be important in marriage. Her comments just may be the irrational complaints of a frustrated girl: more likely they are that and Georgiana' s.: keen perception of the kind of values that were understood in the Longestaffe household, but not discussed.

Those Longestaffe values come into play in the last 118

chapter about that family. Trollope cannot leave Georgey in

her single state, and she is depicted as being so desperate

that her end is enough in keeping with her character. In a little-prepared-for denouement to her saga, Trollope dis­ penses with her by having her elope with a poor, young, strict, and deeply religious curate. Her mother and sister, in dis­ cussing Georgey's friendship with the man, agree that "anything

. . . would be better than the Jew," though "of course it is a come-down to marry a curate" (770). And, after all, "a clergyman is always considered to be decent" (770).

Country society can sweep into its fold a poor curate, but is cannot tolerate prolonged affiliation with a man from the city who is Jewish. Longestaffe takes for granted his right to make use of such a man as Brehgert in business deals, but cannot ever consider him enough of a social equal to be part of his family. Anything, any man, is better than having one's daughter marry a Jew, for a Jew was not considered a gentleman. Yet the greatest irony of Georgiana's segment of The Way We Live Now is that Brehgert is a far better man than her father or any other men among her acquaintances.

In representing so well the wall of bias against

Brehgert, Trollope seems to be saying that as desperate for marriage as a girl of Georgiana's class might be, there are definite limits to the choice of available men. The mate a woman ultimately ends up with may be far beneath the ideal, but he must not be outside the outer limits of acceptability 119 unless the woman is willing to accept alienation and caustic verbal abuse from her family and peers. 120

CHAPTER V

NOTES

1 ...... Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 204. 2 Anthony 0. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1950), p. 24\ 3 Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850-1911 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1973), pp. 10-11. 4„ Crow, p. 66. 5 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), pp. 98-99. g Crow, pp. 299-300. 7 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, A Study in the Re lat i o n s h ip Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 49. CHAPTER VI

THE LOWER-CLASS GIRL

That Trollope can have as much success in depicting the ambitions, anxieties and problems of the lower class girl as in writing of women in the upper classes is evident in his delineation in The Way We Live Now of Ruby Ruggles. Fas­ cinated by the attentions of a baronet, Ruby Ruggles flees her rough grandfather and dull country lover to try to ful­ fill her aspirations in London. A vibrant, headstrong girl having in common with other women in the novel a romantic and courageous outlook on life, Ruby differs from them in that she is the only important character of the lower classes in

The Way We Live Now. However, she is far more than just a character who provides a different socio-economic dimension to the novel: passionately alive and unwilling to resign her­ self to a mundane existence, Ruby Ruggles is a superb Trollopean creation.

From Pamela Andrews on, lower class girls in novels have looked with admiration on the dashing, handsome man of wealth. "To the farmer's daughter, the young squire is an

Apollo, whom to look at is a pleasure,—by whom to be looked at is a delight" (147). Thus to the farmer's grandaughter,

Sir Felix Carbury is far more attractive than the dusty dealer

121 122

in meal and pollard, John Crumb. In terms of romantic ideals,

"love and John Crumb," she felt, "were poles asunder" (647).

Like Henrietta Carbury, Ruby Ruggles wishes to marry

the more unworthy of two lovers. To a girl who likes "being

in love and dancing," Sir Felix is the great hope for escape

from the drudgery of Sheep's Acre, her grandfather's farm.

Affiliation with Felix involves love notes, excitement, in­

trigue, and romance.

Trollope labels her "miserably ignorant" and "an utter fool" (148), who "required the kindness of a controlling hand" (146), but her romantic vagaries are not clung to without reason. As one sees in her response to John Crumb and Joe

Mixet in the scene where Joe Mixet is the proxy courter for the taciturn John, and as one sees in her suffering under the brutal treatment of her grandfather, Ruby's distaste for

Sheep's Acre life is understandable. As a woman who wishes to be carried away by her lover's ardor, she can hardly be satisfied by a matter-of-fact translation via a voluble inter­ preter. Likewise, she is logically miffed by her grandfather's mode of coercing her to accept Crumb.

Accepting John would mean accepting a continuance of the Sheep's Acre style of living although the atmosphere would be more congenial. As one sees in the superb scene where Ruby fixes and serves dinner to Crumb, Mixet, and old

Ruggles, that style of living requires much of a woman, and

Ruby can do what it requires. She must be, and is, adept at 123

food preparation, going "about her work with sufficient ala­

crity" (263) . When it comes to meal time, she does not pit

at the table with the men, but spends her time replenishing

cabbage and ham dishes and beer glasses. The men give little

thought to her nourishment, which consists of whatever she

judiciously hoards in the kitchen and eats before cleaning

the dishes. Clearly Ruby's role is a subservient one, and life with her country lover, who admires how "homely" she looks

in her big household apron, would be a continuation of that

role.

It is no wonder, as she looks at the "heavy, flat, broad honest face of the meal-man, with his mouth slow in motion, . . . and his great staring eyes, from the corners of which he was always extracting meal and grit," that she remembers "the white teeth, the beautiful soft lips, and per­ fect eyebrows, and the rich complexion of her London lover"

(264). Trollope sets up the contrast between the two men most effectively by partially filtering our knowledge of them through Ruby Ruggles' limited but romantic perception of love.

Unfortunately for Ruby—in terms of satisfaction with her lot—she is not on the same level as men of her class, and thus her perception of life differs from theirs. She is more gifted in speaking and writing skills than "men of the

Ruggles class" (147). A young woman of her class "is better educated, has higher aspirations, and is infinitely more cun­ ning than the man" (147). She is imaginative, and "builds 124

castles in the air, and wonders, and longs," while "his

imagination is obtuse" (147). Her imagination, fed by romances

she reads and by her daydreams, along with her awareness of her superiority of tongue and intellect, cause John Crumb to

look most unappealing to her.

Like Hardy’s reddleman, John Crumb is encrusted by evidence of his trade. During all the time Ruby knew John,

"she had never known him otherwise than dusty" (148) . The meal and pollard he worked with "had so gotten within his hair, and skin, and rainment, that it never came out alto­ gether even on Sundays" (148). Healthy as he was, John Crumb looked more like "a stout ghost than a healthy young man"

(148). Even his embraces were "floury."

Moreover, Crumb does not know how to woo a volatile female like Ruby. Although he is shy in her presence about his infatuation, she knows "he worshipped the very ground on which she trod" (148). She knows how easy to get he is:

John Crumb is thus no challenge to her. Moreover, "there had been a want of prudence, a lack of workly sagacity" in the way he had publicized his romance. To her chagrin he is not taciturn in public about his pride in her beauty, her fortune

(if-500 her grandfather promised for her dowry) , and "his own status as her acknowledged lover,—and he did not hide his light under a bushel" (265). Trollope interprets the psycho­ logical effect of Crumb’s braggadocio attitude on Ruby in saying that "Perhaps the publicity so produced had some effect 125

in prejudicing Ruby" against her once accepted loyer.

As much as she wishes to avoid marriage with Crumb,

Ruby, like Henrietta Carbury, retains some feelings for her old wooer. She is aware of what John likes, as two passages in The Way We Live Now indicate. At one point she fills his beer tumbler "in the manner in which he loved to have it frothed," for "He had been her lover, and she would be as kind to him as she knew how,—short of love" (266). Later, in a conversa­ tion with Sir Felix, she defends Crumb though she says also that she detests him. Trollope interprets her defence, comment­ ing that she "perhaps thought that her honest old lover should not be spoken of as being altogether of no account" (565).

Ruby’s main difficulty is that her old suitor is a better man than Sir Felix, and that she is aware of it. As

Ruby tells Felix, "he has everything comfortable in the way of furniture. . . . And they do say he's ever so much money in the bank" (565). With the money coming to her from her grandfather, she and John would be very comfortable. Too, since Crumb is both successful and promising in his line of work, his prospects are good for a financially secure future.

Clearly Ruby's dilemma parallels Henrietta Carbury's, for each, for all practical purposes, should marry the more honest and more stable suitor.

Ruby, however, is romantic, not pragmatic, and the impetus of her grandfather's violent attempt to coerce her to marry Crumb prompts her to run off to London to be nearer 126

her lover. The attention of Sir Felix so turns her head tha,t

she thinks "a lease of Paradise with the one, though but for

one short year, would be well purchased at the price of life

with the other" (264). She even had plans to get that lease,

by going to London, before her grandfather gave her a definite

reason to leave Sheep's Acre.

After Ruby runs away, four chapters go by without

mention of Ruby; then Trollope lets the reader know she did

not go directly to Sir Felix and the life of sin that her

peers feel she may be coming to by her pursuit of the baronet.

Doubts of her purity continue to be expressed by her peers

until Crumb quells talk by marrying Ruby. Her grandfather

"called Ruby by every name that is most distasteful to a

woman" (369), which causes a rift between him and Crumb.

When Father Barham suggests that if Ruby were Catholic she

would be sent back by a priest to friends, Daniel says she

would come back "with a flea in her lug" (274) .

Paul, who has little justification for righteousness,

admonishes Ruby for trusting herself to "a young man who is

not trustworthy," and tells her "You may be sure he means no good to you. What can become of an intimacy between you and such as he?" (321). When she tells him "I am looked after," he begins to fear what Roger Carbury suspects.

Although Roger tells Crumb "I think she's a good girl (370), he fears for Ruby's future and tells her Felix

"won't marry you, and . . . can only mean to ruin you" (350). 127

Felix would make her "a bye-word and a disgrace," so, if she is not already unfit to be an honest man's wife, "she should go back and beg John Crumb's pardon." Roger, like her other mentors, fears the age old story of the rich young man's seduction of the country lass.

Mrs. Pipkin, with whom she resides in London, has a somewhat different attitude at first. Small as her role in

The Way We Live Now is, she provides a register of a slightly more liberal view about womanly freedom. She "had an idea that young women in these days did have, and would have, and must have more liberty than was allowed when she was young"

(343). She does not try to prevent Ruby from going out until

Roger Carbury asks her to, and she says little about Ruby's late hours, "attributing such novel circumstances to the altered condition of her country" (343).

Yet Mrs. Pipkin, like Lady Carubry, is pragmatic about love, as well as skeptical about the intentions of Sir Felix.

"What's all the love in the world, Ruby, if a man can't do for you?" (342). What a man like Felix can do to Ruby becomes more of a concern to Mrs. Pipkin as the days pass. Perhaps because, though respectable, she lives in a less elegant section of London she has seen many things happen of which her starry-eyed niece is not aware. She tells Ruby she won't have her throwing herself in the gutter (390). To Mrs. Hurtle, her lodger, Mrs. Pipkin declares, "as for her going to her young man,—that's just walking the streets" (392). And she 128

admonishes Felix outright:

You don't mean to marry her. You're not thinking of that. It's just a bit of sport,—and then there she is, an old shoe to be chucked away, just a rag to be swept into the dust-bin. . . . It's all nothing to the likes o' you (566).

To, pressure is exerted from all quarters to induce

Ruby to quit seeing Felix. And her many advisors are right

in their evaluation of Sir Felix's intentions—as Ruby actually

senses. Like Winifrid Hurtle, she is involved in a hopeless

situation. Trollope really stacks the cards against Felix

Carbury. Hopelessly self-centered, his only attribute is his

handsome body, which Ruby admires. The scoundrel of The Way

We Live Now, Augustus Melmotte, is more admirable than Felix,

who does not have a saying grace.

Sir Felix is, of course, just dallying with Ruby,

because he is incapable of sincerely loving anyone other than

himself. He thinks the whole affair "very jolly" and Ruby;

an "awfully jolly girl," though "he liked the feeling of intrigue better perhaps than the girl herself" (346). If

Ruby wants to leave Mrs. Pipkin's house because she is not allowed to go out dancing at night, he will "find a place" for her to stay (347). He enjoys masquerading in unusual attire and escorting Ruby to nearby dance halls frequented by prostitutes and women-hungry men. After leaving a dance hall one evening, Felix is overtaken by John Crumb when in the process of forcing Ruby to find another place to stay, for, as Anthony Trollope euphemistically states, "there had 129

arisen a question as to her further destiny for the night"

(574) .

From the first time Trollope pictures Ruby and Felix

together, Trollope makes clear that nothing good can come of

an affair which Felix carries on "simply because it was the

proper sort of thing for a young man to do" (149); thus his

after-a-dance behaviour is not unexpected. In describing

Ruby's aspirations, Trollope hints at what must come: even

when a Ruggles girl longs for a squire, the "danger" is soon

over when she "marries after her kind" (147). Marriage is

impossible for the two because Felix never would marry a lower

class girl, and, indeed thinks Ruby is impudent to think he would even lower himself to lie about his intentions. The

lower class girl is for amusement only, and "the lower the

culture of the women, the better the amusement" (539).

Like actual upper class men of the Victorian era,

Felix was in a way driven to consorting with women of classes beneath him. He enjoys amusing himself with women, and the women would have to be from the lower class, for one cannot trifle with respectable, well-bred women. The effect of taboos of the era was "to drive the young men" of higher 2 rank "to somewhat sordid intrigues in other quarters."

Another cause of intrigues like Felix's is economic.

Felix could not afford to marry without marrying money. The age was not congenial to couples wishing to live on love alone. "The Industrial Revolution creates the large impersonal 130

city and makes considerable wealth a requirement as well as

a sanction for marriage." This is a factor contributing 2 "to an alarming increase of prostitution."

When wealth is a requirement for marriage:

. . . young men seek the society of girls they respect and admire for gratification of mind and spirit, and turn to the prostitute to satisfy the needs of the body. The two needs are kept separate by impassable barriers and emphasized by significant contrasts.

Two of the women inferior in rank to their lovers in The

Way We Live Now, Mrs. Hurtle and Ruby Ruggles, satisfy to

some degree the more passionate feelings of their lovers who realize fully that Winifred and Ruby do not fit in their class.

Trollope of course does not enter the realm of the prostitute in The Way We Live Now, but he does clearly set up a contrast in two triangle situations between the accept­ able and unacceptable female types. And he does clearly hint at what kind of life society thinks Ruby Ruggles is headed for in accepting the advances of Sir Felix. Reflecting society's view of the Crumb-Ruggles-Carbury triangle, the policemen who arrest Crumb learn "something of the truth" at Mrs. Pipkin's house: Crumb is "respectable" and is "the girl's proper lover," while Sir Felix "was not respectable, and was only the girl's improper lover" (577).

So society recognizes what could happen to Ruby

Ruggles, her peers warn her of her danger, and the danger was indeed an actual existing one for Ruby and during the era,: 131 how does all this pertain to Ruby? Is she really in danger of succumbing to Felix? How strong is her will? Where do

Trollope’s sympathies lie in Ruby's internal conflict?

In the creation of Ruby Ruggles Trollope wrought a spirited character. She is so vibrant that Trollope himself seems reluctant to relegate her to John Crumb, no matter how honest and good-hearted that meal and pollard dealer is. She is willful to the point of perversity and passionate to the point of rebellion against restraints—but, though she goes against some publically sanctioned dicta for ladylike behaviour, she will not willingly do what Felix was trying to force her to do when John Crumb fortuitously intervened.

Ruby is far more complex than her peers realize.

She does not intend to be a "bad girl," for she knows well

"a girl has to mind herself, though she's ever so fond of a young man" (346). She has principles, as Trollope states, and is thus "half ashamed of herself, half frightened" (343), at her own behaviour.

Yet her character is such that she must continue in her infatuation because she is so attracted by Sir Felix that she does not want to believe the affair will not lead to marriage. In behavioral psychology terms, Ruby is caught firmly in an approach-avoidance situation, at the base of which is a headstrong romanticism motivated by passion. She strives to believe that the "delights of life" she reads of in "thrice- thumbed old novels" at the Bungay circulating library are 132

within her grasp.

Even if her desires cannot be achieved, she wishes

to live as if they will be achieved. This is why she is in­

furiated by Felix’s refusal to say he will marry her. In

the books she reads the hero would never do anything like that,

she tells Felix before she angrily runs back to Mrs. Pipkin's

house. Such a one as Sir Felix will "not even make a lover's

easy promise, in order that the present hour might be made

pleasant" (348).

Repeatedly Ruby is angry with Sir Felix, then repents

of her anger in the drudgery of minding "brats" and cleaning

bedrooms at Mrs. Pipkin's house. Cold reality continually

reawakens her romanticism. If this cycle is far more—which

it seems to be—than just a way to draw out Ruby's story through

the length of The Way We Live Now, then Trollope may indeed

be attempting a complex psychological study of the torture

of being torn by ambivalent feelings.

Trollope ascribes Ruby's vacillation to her ignorance

of reality. Yet it is more than that, for Ruby's behaviour,

like Mrs. Hurtle's, and Marie's, represents a struggle against

reality. To realistically deal with Sir Felix she would have

to acknowledge that he is just a symbol, and an inferior symbol at that, of the kind of social level of which she has read and to which she aspires. He represents "beautiful things"

like dancing, being on the arm of a titled lover, sipping a shared hot brandy and water, wearing her best clothes, dining 133

with a handsome man, and feeling like a young girl in ioye.

But he is not all a lover should be and does not intend to marry her—truths she does not wish to face.

Marriage to John Crumb, however, means coming to grips with the role women of her class characteristically play.

Through several statements her peers make, one sees a woman should be grateful about having "vittels certain" and having a man with "real metal" in him. Her critics can not compre­ hend that she, like Henrietta Carbury, does not love a man simply because he is fond of her, has a house of his own, is "well to do all around" in Bungay’s eyes, and means what he says (762).

After Sir Felix is humiliated by John's punches, Ruby faces an alternative to marriage with John Crumb that she finds to be really unpleasant. Mrs. Hurtle schemes to make

Ruby turn to John by getting Mrs. Pipkin to say Ruby must leave and prepare for "service" as a nursemaid. The lot of the nursemaid or governess in England at that time was not pleasant. The women of this occupation were "badly paid," their daily life was one of "great loneliness," and "their isolation was increased by the general reluctance of their employers to allow them visitors.Ruby would receive ¿fl2 a year, which was approximately the standard wage at that 5 time, but she would have to care for five children, and

"find her own tea and wash for herself" (648) .

For a girl who "had been beloved of a baronet," going 134

to service "is such a come down" (648-9) that she does not

even want John Crumb to know of her fate. Abject at having

to care for five "ugly" children under the tutelage of a cross

mother, she lets Mrs. Hurtle write the letter to John that

seals her future.

Mrs. Hurtle, who is experiencing emotions similar to

Ruby’s, is keenly aware of Ruby's frustrations and desires.

Trollope makes Mrs. Hurtle an amateur psychologist and gives her a chance to criticize Paul Montague when he has her comment on Ruby. Ruby's desire for a man above her in rank is natural,

Hurtle feels, because that man is cleaner, softer, and better spoken, but that natural liking is also "one of the evils of the inequality of mankind" (337). The girl may not even mind a love without promise of justification (via marriage) because the man is so desirable: "She can only have her love justified with an object less desirable," like a John Crumb.

Trollope has Winifrid Hurtle say that Ruby's natural liking for one above her is an evil of mankind's inequality, and that proof of men's worth would be more readily apparent if all men's coats and employment should be the same, but one rather wonders where Trollope stands on this issue.

Trollope has Montague change topics after Huftle's statement because Paul did not wish to "discuss the deeply interesting questions of women's difficulties and immediate or progressive equality" (337). Social equality with (along with love for)

Henrietta Carbury does cause Paul to turn to Hetta, and in­ 135

equalities with Mrs. Hurtle do help cause him to turn From her. Given the same coats and the same employment, Crumb and

Roger Carbury would be superior to Felix and Paul. Morally and monetarily Crumb and Roger are superior to their rivals.,

In Ruby's circumstance the inequality that makes

Sir Felix only dally with Ruby actually saves her—once

Crumb ends Felix's dalliance—from a sorry existence. The inequality between Felix and Crumb proves wholly fortunate, however, only in keeping Ruby from Sir Felix. It is not for­ tunate in that she has only one other at all comfortable alternative, marriage to John Crumb, and that she is rushed toward marriage by all those around her. Right or wrong in her willfullness, a young woman has a difficult time getting her way, as Georgey, Hetta, Marie, and Winifrid Hurtle—as well as Ruby—discover. When she does not get her way, which happens to four of these five women, she must "make do" with something not in her romantic dreams.

Trollope describes in a rather ambivalent manner what

Ruby Ruggles must make do with in Chapter XCIV, "John Crumb's

Victory." The chapter title itself implies this marriage means

Ruby's defeat. And in calling John Crumb the "happiest of lovers" the first sentence of the chapter intimates that Ruby might not be. In the rest of the chapter are numerous proofs of her dissatisfaction and of Trollope's slight discomfort at the inevitable resolution of the affair. John Crumb over­ acts the part of the triumphant male. Proud as a peacock, he 136

gloats over his prize. Crumb is "absurdly impatient" about

setting up the marriage day, and arranges proceedings "not

in strict accordance" with wedding proprieties. With "a

sound of many trumpets" he announces his victory to all Bungay.

On the day of the wedding while driving Ruby to church he

points her out with his whip as if she were a prize horse

or cow, all the while smiling and gloating over his catch.

Ruby, overwhelmed by all the preparations for the event

and embarrassed at John’s behaviour, is miserable. She submits

to his embraces "not with the best grace in the world," when

she is formally reconciled to Crumb. On her arrival in Bungay,

his loud expressions of delight at her appearance evoke a

comment from Ruby that he is a fool. She is in such misery

because of his manner that, as they go away from the stations,

she wishes she could escape from the cart. And the wedding brings more unavoidable embarrassment.

In fact no change in her attitude occurs until their one night honeymoon, whose influence on Ruby is "beneficent."

Alone with John, on reflecting of his efforts to win her and on fully realizing he is her husband, "she did learn to respect him" (763). The final statement is promising, though still lacking in loving sentiment: by their arrival home after the honeymoon Ruby "had made up her mind that she would endeavour to do her duty by him as his wife" (764).

The very last paragraph of the book records their situation after a time lapse. What Aitken calls "the usual 137 g sign that all is well" has come about: Ruby is pregnant.

Yet all is not yet harmonious, for when Ruby derides him for

some characteristically foolish statement he makes, he replies

he was "not such a fool as a’ missed a having o' you" (810).

Her reply that she was the fool in the having of him indicates

she is not completely happy with her situation, although

verbal scrapping may just be an accepted part of their relation­

ship.

Perhaps John Crumb is right in saying that after their child is born things will be different, but unless John be­ comes more circumscript in public, one senses that Ruby will always find some fault with him. Her resolve to do her duty will keep her within bounds to a degree; she is too spirited, however, to be a docile, quiet wife. In that respect she is akin to Marie Melmotte. Ruby's volubility and acuteness complement while being at odds with John's obtuseness: as long as she respects him for his admirable qualities, the contrasts in their natures may keep their marriage from vegetating.

Within the framework of The Way We Live Now, Ruby's function is significant. That the idleness and immorality of a young, upper class man like Sir Felix can lead him to lure a lower class woman from the path of propriety provides a tie-in with the prevailing unconscionable corruption in the novel. Each class affects another class in some respect.

That she is from the lower class does not limit her 138

perception or her desires: Trollope endows her with a keen

desire for life and all it offers that makes her frustration

all the more poignant. A difference in rank from Henrietta

Carbury signifies no diminished ideals or subdued romanticism.

She does stray further from propriety, but other women are

condemned as heartily for what they do. Georgianna's atten­

tiveness to Brehgert is not criticized much less by her peers

as a social digression.

Considered separately, Ruby Ruggles is a well wrought

character torn by romantic desires and stifled by class ex­ pectations: considered within the structure of The Way We

Live Now, she serves as proof that Trollope endowed not only the middle and upper classes with anxieties and complexities, and susceptabilities to social errors. Fortunately, the passion and desire that guides Ruby is tempered by sufficient restraint to keep her from the life her peers feel she is headed for and to allow her to withstand an inevitable "safe" marriage to a man within her own rank. 139

CHAPTER IV

NOTES

"''Charles Petrie, The Victorians (London: Eyre and Spotteswoode, 1960), p. 202. 2 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Press, 1957), p. 393. ^Robert P. Utter and Gwendolyn Needham, Pamela1s Daughters (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1943), p. 360. 4 Petrie, p. 203. ^Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 49. g David Aitken, "Anthony Trollope on 'the Genus Girl,'" Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (March 1974), 417-434. CHAPTER VII

AN HEIRESS

More than any other female character in The Way We

Live Now, Marie Melmotte is directly and obviously related to the major themes and concerns of the novel. In the lives of other women, of course, testimony to the decay of values, worship of Mammon, prevalence of corruption and the cost of social or economic advancement is manifest, but these issues seem to converge in the saga of Miss Melmotte. In an age given over to greed, a woman reputedly heir to a vast and measure­ less fortune is a magnet so powerful that human considerations like love, desire, and affection are thrust aside. Her Shady past, her desires, her feelings, and even her appearance are virtually irrelevant; she is viewed by her father as a pawn in a game for social advancement, and by her suitors as a pawn in their struggle for money.

Marie's father and wooers fail to figure Marie, as an individual, into their calculations. At first shy and acquiescent—as Hetta Carbury was at first—Marie is prodded to maturity by circumstances such as her father's attempts to marry her off and her own frustrating attempts to realize her romantic dreams. Innately shrewd and courageous, she weathers the brutality of her father, the indifference of her

140 141

lovers, and the contempt of society, emerging clear-sighted,

skeptical, independent, and self-possessed.

Within the context of The Way We Live Now, Marie’s

emergence to self-assured womanhood appears to be clearly

motivated by circumstance. Perhaps the change in her nature

and the stature she assumes in the novel is attributable also

to another source—Trollope's increasing interest in her as

a character and growing awareness that she can be more than merely a means of illustrating society's corruption. In this case, what is said to have happened in Trollope's delineation of Augustus Melmotte, i.e., that the character began to grow larger than Trollope intended to have him grow, happened also in Trollope's portrayal of Marie.

At any rate, the enveloping concern of those around

Marie is not, however, her or her development, but how much money can be obtained by marriage to her and who will get the money. Marie's function as an heiress is understood fully by her father and her suitors: "Rank squanders money; trade makes it;—and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour" (459).

To Augustus Melmotte, Marie is a ticket to a higher social position. As father-in-law of a lord, he would become more socially acceptable, for "by marrying his daughters into the established nobility many a man of new wealth smoothed the path to respectability."3. As Melmotte becomes more self- assured and proud, Marie becomes less important to him as a 142

means for entering society, and he consequently lowers her

dowry. Throughout his battle for recognition and success<

though, he tries to use Marie to gain acceptance among the

landed classes.

Melmotte had far to go to reach acceptibility. Time after time his gaucherie is painfully obvious to those around him while he is wholly unaware of his social offense. "'Of course they are vulgar,' the Duchess had said [of the Melmottes],

—'so much so as to be no longer distasteful because of the absurdity of the thing'" (33). Errors such as calling Lord

Alfred by his first name, and not knowing the simplest pro­ cedures of the House of Commons point up his incompatibility with and deviance from English upper and upper-middle class conventions. This is the kind of vulgar man Nidderdale or

Felix would have to acknowledge as a father-in-law in accept­ ing Marie.

His crudity and awkwardness, though, are not what offend a personage in The Way We Live Now like Roger Carbury, who is at odds with the prevailing mores. Roger recognizes

Melmotte's character for what it is—worthless in terms of all that is just, honest, and humane. Asked if he knows of

Marie, Roger replies that he has "heard of the great French swindler," her father, "who is buying his way into society" and has "the reputation of a specially prosperous rogue" (60).

Yet Lord Nidderdale and Sir Felix, until forestalled by circumstance of Melmotte's death, are still more interested 143

in how much money Melmotte will settle on Marie than in how

true the rumors of his roguery are. Soon before Melmotte’s

death Lady Carbury would still be willing to let her son marry

Marie if Marie really does have the fortune in her name that

she claims to have. And while Melmotte lies dead, the Marquess

of Auld Reekie is telling his son that if the girl gets all

the money, his son should not mind even if the father has been

at trial for forgery or has been put in jail.

The views of Lady Carbury, the Marquess of Auld Reekie,

Lord Alfred, the Duchess of Stevenage, and others swarming

around Melmotte are similar: Melmotte, who is using them to

gain prestige, exists to be used. His money is fair game,

and his daughter—if she is a way of getting his money—is

equally fair game. Lord Alfred is on Melmotte's firm's board

of directors—at a cost. Parents will accept the Melmottes

in their home—at a cost. And men of rank will consider marry­

ing Marie Melmotte—at great cost.

In actuality her position as an heiress is an anomalous

one, for she is not a typical heiress. Many an Englishman rose through the ranks of industry or commerce to a position enabling him to allot his daughters sizable dowries tempting to impoverished gentlemen. But Melmotte and his family are foreign, and suspect not only for that but for the alleged chicanery of his business dealings abroad and for the uncer­ tainty of the details of Marie's birth.

Thus possible suitors negotiating for Marie "each had 144 treated the girl as an encumbrance he wa,s to undertake,--at a very great price" (31). After all, when she is first men­ tioned, there is little to recommend her except her money.

She is not particularly pretty or smart, and she has not yet developed the personality that brings her the reluctant ad­ miration of Felix and the affection of Nidderdale.

What she is or what she becomes is generally irrelevant to Carbury and Nidderdale: both fear marrying her and not getting the money. Felix has no appreciation of her as a future wife until he finds out she is capable of being conniv­ ing and unscrupulous to get what she wants. He cares "not in the least" for Marie, and "regarded her simply as the means by which a portion of Mr. Melmotte’s wealth might be conveyed to his uses" (141). He really thinks her a fool (191), and

"an infernal little ass" (202).

If all of his hopes would come to nothing after putting up with her and marrying her, though, Felix thinks he would

"kill her" (231). After all, "There would be no 'cropper' which a man could 'come' so bad as would be his cropper were he to marry Marie Melmotte, and then find that he was not to have a shilling!" (329). His mother, too, is fearful of that possibility. Marie without money would be "absolute ruin" and "It would kill her" (242).

Lord Nidderdale is not as indifferent to Marie as

Felix is, but he knows he must be "careful." Nidderdale's inward thoughts about Marie are similar to Felix's: "If 'he 145

came a cropper' in this matter, i,t would be such an awful

cropper!" (502). His fears are realistic, too, in the light

of his family financial status, which necessitates the son's

marriage to an heiress.

Both the marquess and his son, expecting the young

lord's marriage to wealth, add "to the family embarrassments"

(459). They, along with others in The Way We Live Now, feel

the pinch for money, but feel that extravagance is their right

regardless of the effect of that extravagance on the next

generation. When the time would come, the landed classes 9 "married money if it badly needed it."

Emily Dunstables or, particularly, Marie Melmottes

are not resorted to unless necessary, because they are not

on the same level as those who resort to them. Lady Pomona

Longestaffe, for example, is not very upset because her son

it not in the running for Marie's hand (though they need money),

for "After all, why should not Dolly marry a lady?" (145).

If, however, a member of the gentry or aristocracy is one

of those to whom the marriage "market became a desperate

last resort enabling" him "to redeem encumbered lands or to 3 maintain unproductive ones," the question of gentility is

less important. Of Marie, the good natured Nidderdale concludes

and perhaps rationalizes, "though he could not tell himself

that she was altogether a lady, still she had a manner of her own which made him think that she would be able to live with

ladies" (595). 146

Yet ladies are ill at ease with her, for like her

father, Marie says things an established upper class member

would not say. Marie appalls the genteel Henrietta Carbury

by her blunt admissions, statements, and questions. In

spite of the fact that Hetta actually shudders at some of what

Marie says, Hetta is affected by her: Whether Marie "was

good or bad, to be sought or to be avoided, there was so much

tragedy in her position that Hetta's heart was melted with

sympathy" (549). Something about Marie, some quality, can

and often does supersede her vulgarity and her commonness so

that she does eventually move most of those around her to an

appreciation of her or at least an awareness of her as more

than just what has to go along with a dowry.

But that quality is not initially in evidence. When

Marie first appears in The Way We Live Now she is a relatively

docile girl, buffeted about by life, who has become inured

to her father's brutality and her stepmother's indifference.

Like Hetta and Ruby, however, she "began to have an opinion"

and began to question her father's view of her function.

And out of her questioning and a burgeoning desire for inde­ pendence emerges a willful romanticism; this in turn brings out other qualities—courage, tenacity, perceptiveness, shrewd­ ness, and even unscrupulousness.

Like Ruby, Marie Melmotte in the beginning does not really object to the lover she is expected to wed. Men worse than Lord Nidderdale, like Lord Grasslough, she had found to 147

be obnoxious, but in regard to Nidderdale she is willing

to be acquiescent to her father’s demands. Ill at ease in

society, she "had only not been wretched because she had not

as yet recognized that she had an identity of her own in the

disposition of which she herself should have a voice" (35).

In spite of the different backgrounds of Nidderdale

and Marie, they are similar in one respect, i.e., their

deference to their sires or "governers" as Nidderdale calls

his father. Marie of course changes in this respect, but

Nidderdale does not. He lets his father take care of arrange­

ments for the marriage and goes along with his father's word

about the continuation or cessation of the match.

Even though Nidderdale does come to appreciate Marie

and even love her after his fashion, he failed—like John

Crumb—to firmly secure the affection of his intended mate.

He finds this out too late. For Marie and Nidderdale, court­

ship is "almost entirely in terms of a commercial transaction; 4 love is presented as being totally irrelevant." If his father obtains the "tin," as he calls money, from Melmotte, the marriage will take place. When the "tin" seems forthcoming, he discovers Marie is not.

Trollope lets us know Marie's affections could have been with Nidderdale, if he had tried to secure them. She tells him if he really cared "a bit" even, she would have gone through anything rather than break off the match. But by the time he realizes the "plum" will not "fall into his 148 mouth" and he must "stretch out his hand to pick it" (461), she has become convinced of his indifference. "You never cared for me a bit more than for the old woman at the crossing"

(464), she tells him. An ironic touch Trollope adds is that their relationship had been on such an impersonal level that she did not even know his first name until she looked it up in a book some time after she first consented to the marriage.

Lord Nidderdale does say he loves her, but his love is too little and too late, and she has become skeptical of his motivation. Marie knows well the world that produces a loveless marriage transaction such as their sires tried to arrange. That world is somewhat productive in one respect, however, for out of it comes her attempt to escape into roman­ ticism. She, like Ruby and Winifrid Hurtle, tries to ignore the discomforting realities of her life.

Also like Ruby and Hurtle, Marie Melmotte does not want to realistically assess the relationship she desires and is deceived by the man whom she thinks she loves. All three women try desperately to believe their lovers will be faithful to them even after all hope is gone. But Marie excells the other two in the lengths to which she goes to secure Sir

Felix.

Trollope is very successful in depicting Marie's character development. Her father's tenacity, brashness, and unscrupulousness provide the setting for her gentler brand of those qualities. By his brutality, a characteristic of 149

his she does not inherit,, he left her two choices—obey, or

resist and suffer the consequences. Like Ruby Ruggles, she

has read romantic novels and dreamed romantic dreams. So,

when a princely-looking man pays even indifferent court to

the lonely Marie, she is sparked to infatuation and to hope

for a change from her chill existence.

Infatuation for Felix motivates her into "picking

up a little courage" and feeling "that it might be possible

to prevent a disposition of herself which did not suit her

own tastes" and to find a disposition that would suit her

tastes. She gradually comes to realize her separate identity, however, and tries to exert her will as her father exerts his.

The ensuing conflict—because of the differing parent and child views—develops her thought process and her self­ hood. She begins to question parental power, asserting that her father does not have the "right to make anybody marry anyone" (285). Marie thinks times are changing: she tells

Felix her father "can't take me up and marry me, as they used to do ever so long ago" (329). And she wonders, like other women in The Way We Live Now, why a girl is "to be made to marry to please any one but herself" (405).

When her inner questionings about parental power change to verbal defiance, Marie repeatedly expresses her defiance in the same manner. Here Trollope is like Dickens in having a character say almost too frequently words that are peculiar to one figure in the novel. In The Way We Live Now Trollope 150

latches on to Medea and had Marie say at different times that

her father could cut her into bits or pieces and she still would not do what he desires.

Like Lady Carbury, Augustus Melmotte is selfish in what he desires of his child, though "perhaps she was the only person who in the whole course of his career had received indulgence at his hands" (665). He is more right than Lady

Carbury in his criticism of his child's choice. However, though Trollope does make Felix to be wholly contemptible, he does not sympathize with the motivations of Melmotte.

Trollope at one point has Marie question her father's motivations. Mr. Melmotte uses money to get prestige or more money, but his daughter wonders "What's the good of all the money if people don't have what they like?" (406). Yet Marie, fearing her father will force her to marry Nidderdale and desiring to realize her dreams and marry the man she likes, boldly steals money from her father.

The penchant for bravery is an inheritance from her father. To Madame Melmotte, Marie seemed "to have all her father's stubborn, wicked courage, and very much of his power"

(265). This courage is tested when she tries her wings and plans to elope with Felix in fulfillment of her romantic dreams.

Marie's part in the plans and the elopement proves her superiority over Sir Felix, and brings her his reluctant admiration. To his mother's questionings about the plan, he 151

replies, "Marie knows what she is about, ghe’s a great deal

sharper than anyone would take her to be" (398).

She is shrewd, but her romantic desires take prece­

dence over her shrewdness and intelligence in regard to Felix.

Preparations for the elopement excite her, and she is so stimu­

lated by the prospect before her that having breakfast before

boarding the ship is almost unnecessary. Fortunately, Marie

is stopped before boarding. Her calculations for the trip

failed on two counts—she is caught up with for cashing one

of her father's checks and she did not know "how recreant a

knight Sir Felix had proved himself" (404).

The failure of Sir Felix to get to Liverpool is signi­

ficant in two respects. It proves that his immersion in

corruption is so complete that he cannot restrain himself

from drunkenness and from gambling with stolen money even

to gain advantages for himself. And, in terms of Marie's

development, his failure begins to make more clear to her the

truth about his character—although she romantically persists

in trying to believe in him.

Marie Melmotte is akin to the other women in The Way

We Live Now who vainly hope their lovers are true to them:

they simultaneously suspect their lovers while believing in their love. Even before Marie discovers Felix never made it to Liverpool she reflects, "After all I don't know that he cares for me" (405). She had already felt him remiss in acknow ledging her kindnesses. And during their courtship Marie "was 152

by no means contented with her lover's prowess, though she

would not allow herself to doubt his sincerity" (327).

Yet her desire for fulfillment of her dream is so

strong that she tries numerous times to revive the affair.

At the Melmotte dinner for the emperor she tries to find out

from Hetta Carbury whether Felix still cares for her. When

Hetta brings Marie the dispiriting word that Felix does not

love her, she is infuriated with her lover. She can take

her father's beatings and her stepmother's revilings but

Felix's mendacity is more than she can bear.

Shortly after Hetta's visit Marie resolves to give

in to Melmotte, and asks her stepmother to tell him. Her

spirit is not completely quelled, though, for though she will marry whomever he tells her to—"the sweeper at the crossing,

-—or the black man that waits the table, or anybody else that he chooses to pick up" (550)—she will "lead him such a life afterwards" that he will "repent the hour he saw me" (551).

If she must submit, she will not do so graciously or docilely.

The days between the Liverpool fiasco and her father's suicide are trying days for Marie. She is thwarted but not cowed. Her state is one of ennui, restlessness, for she is thrown back to the life of loneliness before she began to dream of Felix. Her isolation, friendlessness, and boredom disturb her more now because she more clearly realizes her position in the world. She complains to Lord Nidderdale that he does not care for her very much, and that it's "detestable 153

not being able to do what one wants. It's detectable haying

to quarrel with everybody and never to be good friends with

anybody. And its horribly detestable having nothing on earth

to give one any interest" (594).

Her experiences have made her more blunt, whereas

earlier she had been afraid to voice her opinion. When

Nidderdale therefore asks her if she cannot take an interest

in him she says "not in the least" (594). His efforts to

interest her in the old family castle are futile. Marie

sarcastically says she wants new things, like a new house,

dress, horse, and lover every week.

Marie does come gradually to appreciate Nidderdale.

Not as much time is devoted to the gradualness of their liking

of each other as to Lady Carbury's and Mr. Broune's, but there

is similarity in their situations. In spite of themselves

they become fond of each other. Nidderdale reflects that he

"certainly had become fond of her" and senses she is drawn

to him in spite of what she says.

As the Melmotte empire begins to crumble chances lessen

that the marriage will take place. Pressure on Marie is

increased, for an act of hers perhaps could help save her

father from ruin. If she will sign a release for theXl00,000

reserve fund he placed nominally—for security reasons—

under her name, he may be able to pull up short of bankruptcy.

Marie refuses at first to sign. She is tired of her father's efforts to make her do things that are to his advantage only, 154

and she has enough of her father's nature in her to make her

realize that that money is hers if she does not put her name

on the release.

Her acquired ability to be courageous helps her with­

stand the beating that follows her refusal—and still tena­

ciously hold to her decision. Why should she do this for a

father who has turned away the only man she ever loved? When

she does change her mind and tell him on the day following

the beating that she will sign, he says it does not matter

and is too late. He had already forged her name, been caught

at it, but not exposed for it.

By this time Marie knows some change is imminent.

She feels certain Nidderdale does not mean to come any more to their house and that some misfortune may occur. Before readying herself for it, Marie makes one final attempt to see whether Felix would marry her.

The day she visits Wellbeck Street to see Felix, also the day her father dies, is the point in the novel at which she becomes genuinely confirmed in a new independence. Visit­ ing Felix and having her suspicions of his total indifference to her verified with finality virtually completes her char­ acter development. She sees clearly Felix's baseness, and is "ashamed of thinking so much of so mean a person" (670).

Leaving Wellbeck Street, she reflects over her past and present, and wonders about the future. Poverty, hard­ ship, and servitude were preferable to the kind of degredation 155 she has experienced in London society. But the ignoble be­ haviour of Felix, whom she finds to be a "golden idol" made of "basest clay," deeply hurts her. She had humbled herself to say she would love the bad clay, "but even the clay had turned away from her and refused her love!" (670). This final experience with Felix and the awareness of an impending catas­ trophe in her father's commercial world brings her to a new resolution: "go where she might, she would be her own mis­ tress" (670).

This moment of decision is the climactic point in the saga of Marie Melmotte. The denouement of her story, however, requires three more chapters that prove she is capable of fulfilling her resolution and place her in a socio-economic rank suitable to her background and capabilities.

The first of the three chapters formally and delicately ends the Lord Nidderdale—Marie Melmotte relationship. The two of them seem more mature for their mutual relationship.

She recognizes Nidderdale's kindness to her, but fully realizes that her father's disgrace is an insurmountable barrier to a continued relationship. To marry a trade heiress (and she indeed has rights to ¿É100,000) is acceptable if necessary to bolster a nobleman's income, but to marry the daughter of a swindler who committed suicide to avoid prosecution is more than Nidderdale can do. Marie and he part amicably in one of the most touching scenes in The Way We Live Now.

Trollope of course cannot leave Marie Melmotte in 156

limbo. He does dispense with her in but two chapters, and he

does little to prepare the reader for her end, but his ending

of her story is plausible. Hamilton Fisker, the enterprising

American who figures in the ninth and tenth chapters of The

Way We Live Now, returns to England to help his business part­

ner Paul Montague settle their company's affairs. In less

than four days he discovers Marie "was still the undoubted possessor of a large fortune," and he subsequently courts her.

Marie is not deluded by Fisker's attention. She realizes quickly his intent, and tells her mother "Fisker's all very well; but he only wants the money. Do you think

Fisker'd ask me to marry him if I hadn't got anything? Not he!" (748). Hamilton Fisker senses her "strength in dis­ covering truth and falsehood" (788), and keeps nothing back from her regarding his intentions and her financial status.

Honesty, Fisker figures, is probably the best approach to

Miss Melmotte.

Within the scope of but a single chapter Trollope writes effectively of Miss Melmotte's decision-making process.

Marie weighs marriage to Fisker and other possibilities, but finds decision-making difficult. She "had now been wooed so often that she felt the importance of the step which was suggested to her" (791). Her experiences with Nidderdale and Carbury greatly altered the romantic concepts of love she read of in novels. Now "the romance of the thing was a great deal worn" (791). 157

Valid arguments for accepting Fisker exist. She likes

him, and determines that his presence in London must mean he

has some "commercial importance." If she marries him she

would not have to "open up an establishment . . . on a scale

commensurate with her fortune," either in conjunction with

Croll and Madame Melmotte or by herself. Also, Fisker already

has a large house, which is something she wants.

However, if Marie cannot retain rights to her money

she does not want to marry. America is said to allow married

women greater control over money, however, so "If she could

see her way clearly in the matter of money," she will marry

him.

Marie's London experiences have filled her with doubts

about many things, which makes her weigh her situation thorough­

ly. She doubts the "hearts" of gentlemen. She is skeptical

about Fisker's proposal that she pool her money with his and

that they should put out their "foot" in America: she does not appreciate risks, having seen too many with her father.

Her attitude is a "wait and see" one. She tells Fisker she likes him, but adds "I'm not going to take a leap in the dark, and I'm not going to marry a pig in a poke" (795). A brief time in San Francisco must have cleared her mind about what she was getting, because "Marie Melmotte did become Mrs. Fisker very soon after her arrival in San Francisco" (796). Thus

Trollope dispenses with Miss Melmotte. But within the context of The Way We Live Now and of how Trollope developed her as 158

a character, his resolution of her segment is credible,

Marie's marriage to Fisker follows the pattern of

other marriages in The Way We Live Now, Generally women and

men marry within their own class or else marry an assimilat­

able mate, such as Georgey's curate, unless forced to do other­ wise. Within the realm of one's own class, the values are known and certain social amenities are generally adhered to by class members.

If one is obliged to marry a man or woman of another rank, one should acknowledge that there are limits of permis­ sibility. Ezekiel Brehgert is a test of the limits of male acceptability, and Marie Melmotte, of female acceptability.

Depending on the degree of desperation, tolerance of an "alien" mate varies. But Nidderdale reaches his limit when Melmotte is verifiably exposed as a swindler.

Purists of the landed class are repelled by a man like Melmotte long before he is proven a criminal. Roger and

Henrietta Carbury serve as touchstones of gentry ideals.

Hetta, for example, thinks Felix abominable for wanting "to marry a girl, the daughter of vulgar people, just because she will have a great deal of money" (36). And Roger thinks no massive amount of money can make a man a gentleman, or, one assumes, make a woman a lady.

Almost all of those around the Melmottes see their vulgarity and commonness, but this would not alienate them as long as Augustus Melmotte is not definitely known to be 159

guilty of foul play and as long as they can gain something

from him. The parasites' greed is really no more contemptible

than his. In fact their greed may be worse, for his lower

class background may give him some excuse—-like ignorance,

or ambition.

The greedy world of The Way We Live Now has both

negative and positive effects on a young woman in the position

Marie Melmotte holds. This world can brook no romance, as

she painfully discovers; it requires maturity, and independence, which she painfully develops; it demands courage, at which

she comes to excel. She changes radically from a girl almost as shy as Hetta was at first to a brave, strong young woman more independent at the novel's end than any other female except, perhaps, Mrs. Hurtle.

Marie does not envision "living alone in perfect in­ dependence" as a pleasant life; however, she "had opinions on women's rights,—especially in regard to money" (792).

No other woman save Mrs. Hurtle has an opportunity to be self- sufficient monetarily, but perhaps because Marie does have that opportunity she comes to have some feeling of self-worth that the other female characters in the novel do not have.

This type of theme, the sense of independence engendered in a woman by the possession^of a fortune, is a recurring one in literature.

Yet even before Marie gains rights to the inheritance, she has started to develop a self-awareness that leads toward 160

a self-respect at odds with her father's treatment of her as

a commercial transaction. She realizes at one point tha,t

if forced to marry Nidderdale she "shall just be as if I

hadn't any self of my own at all" (501). She does not want

to be forced into marriage to someone who did not even bother

to tell her his first name.

Therefore she asks more than once why she cannot have her way in love. "Don't you think," she queries Hetta, that

"if a girl loves a man,—really loves him,—that ought to go before everything?" (499). This question is in the minds of other women in the novel: it is a common bond among them.

Trollope's answer to it seems to be that if real love is involved, not mere infatuation, it should go before everything

In immature relationships like Marie's, other factors are more likely to prevent love from lasting.

Of course it was advantageous for Marie that she did not marry Felix. Perhaps she and Nidderdale might have had a compatible enough marriage, but she was "weighted with her father's blood"—an insurmountable barrier. Time brings her some monetary recompense for her sufferings, but time brings her a life far different from that of which she dreamed.

Even though Marie Melmotte is better suited for life with a Fisker than with an English lord, one ends up feeling regret for her. She has the mettle for the adventurous life that may be in her future, but she commands admiration to such a degree that one rather feels sorry that her high ambitions 161 could not be satisfied, and that she must be a pragmatist about her function in life. One tends to forgive her her unscrupulousness, for her other qualities are written of in such an admiring way that "even her thefts and underhanded 5 strategems become signs of fortitude and character."

Marie is quite unlike the gentler, well-bred Hetta.

And, "compared to girls like Mary Thorne or Lily Dale" or

Hetta, Marie "is vulgar; in her position, no one could wholly escape contamination. But her loyalty and courage redeem her, and when she goes out of the book one wishes her some- g thing better than she is likely to find." She, like Ruby

Ruggles, gets someone suitable to her station in life, but this obviously does not guarantee a pleasurable existence.

Pragmatically speaking, Marie Melmotte did the best could given her circumstances. 162

CHAPTER VII

NOTES

1 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963) , p. 19. 2 Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain: 1851-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 252. 3 Randolph M. Bulgin, "Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: A Study of its Historical Background and Critical Significance," Diss. Princeton Univeristy 1963, p. 142. 4 Charles W. Hart, "Courtship and Marriage in the Novels of Anthony Trollope," Diss. Columbia University 1968, p. 143. c; Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press,¡1960), p~ 148-9. g Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the English Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1943), p. 297. CHAPTER VIII

AN OUTSIDER

If a woman is within the pale of society in The Way

We Live Now, she at times has difficulty avoiding censure from

her peers for any actions not considered proper. But when a

woman is an outsider, an alien by birth and nurture, her

problems are even greater. In terms of degrees of deviation

from the acceptable social norm, Winifrid Hurtle, of all the

women of The Wav We Live Now is farthest from the mean.

Peculiar and vulgar as the Melmottes are, they conceivably

could have been at least barely tolerated in English upper

class society, but Winifrid Hurtle is clearly beyond the pale.

In regard to The Way We Live Now as a novel, her alienation

is instrumental in illustrating how very circumscribed the

society of the novel is; in reference to Winifrid Hurtle as

a character, her alienation from and scorn of genteel English

society, yet her desire to be part of it, is an integral part

of her being.

Mrs. Winifrid Hurtle is a superb Trollope creation.

She is a complex character whose conflicts are so vividly written of that one's sympathies are drawn to her—as

Trollope's apparently were, though she is at odds with English

standards of gentility, refinement, and purity. Her intensity

163 164

of spirit and her ambivalence of feeling are so yividly wrought

that Mrs. Hurtle is perhaps the most successful creation in

The Way We Live Now.

Winifrid's keen perception, intelligence, and intensity

cause her ambivalences to be sheer tortùre to her. It is as

if there are two wholly different beings within herself, two

warring elements violently at odds with each other—elements

that owe the intensity of their existence to Paul Montague

and to dreams of a gentler world, and that undermine her

confidence in a raw, lawless environment like the American

West. In short, the wildcat in her is at odds with the domestic kitten.

Winifrid Hurtle is both "in truth sick at heart of violence and rough living and unfeminine words" (385) and

scornful of softness and womanly weakness. As she tells

Paul, she dreams of "feminine women,—of women who would be scared by seeing what I saw, who would die rather than do what I did" (786). Yet she knows survival made her behaviour necessary, and is proud of her strength. In defense of her past she cries out to Paul at one point, "Shall a woman be flayed alive because it is unfeminine in her to fight for her own skin? What is the good of being—feminine, as you call it?" (415).

Within the context of her milieu in America, Winifrid*s violence and strength are more comprehensible, although even out in Oregon everyone thought her dangerous, for her name 165 had become "almost a proverb for violence" (386), And en route to England her fellow passengers "all said there was a bit of the wild cat in her breeding" and that she was a "queer card" (304). Too, Henrietta Carbury finds her beautiful, but

"that she would be an unfit wife for Paul Montague was cer­ tain" (739).

What others see her to be, how she views the English and their society, what attracts her to Paul and revolts her about him, what attracts Paul to her but also to Hetta, and all her ambivalences of feeling are vividly realized in her character protrayal. And while her function within the novel may be to define the limits of female acceptability within society, she proves to be much more: Trollope's delineation of Winifrid Hurtle is a sensitive probing not of girlhood, of which he is touted as being one of the supreme delineators, but of perceptive, unsheltered, and passionate womanhood.

Winifrid's womanly maturity is clear from first mention of her. Trollope describes her ample, natural beauty: "Her cheeks and lips and neck were full," her "mouth was large," her nose and chin were full, and "her bust was full and beauti­ fully shaped" (207). In several lines of introduction to this description Trollope clarifies, too, that she "was not a beauty after the present fashion," which likes pearl powder­ faced women with stiff, horsehair wigs. Winifri.d's color is natural, and her .blood comes and goes? her emotions are discernible and not masked by powder. 166

Of her beauty she is as well aware as she is of its

uses. To show her body to its best advantage she wears

black dresses "always new, always nice, always well-fitting,

arid most especially always simple" (208). She knows, too,

what feminine arts and wiles to use to entice Paul Montague.

For example, at her first meeting with Paul in two years,

she drops to her knees, leans upon his knees, and asks him if he won’t give her one kiss since she came so far just to see him. Paul readily responds to this maneuver, which no other girl in The Way We Live Now would be likely to use: "Of course he kissed her, not once, but with a long, warm embrace.

How could it have been otherwise?" (208).

The ability to use herself to her best advantage results from experience coupled with intelligence. To survive in the rough American West she had to be ruthless, courageous, cunning, and at times violent—qualities more traditionally masculine than feminine. She shot one man, allegedly dueled with her husband, and is willing to whip, knife, or shoot any other man should the necessity arise. But her pride in her mastery of the art of self-defense and her admiration of people capable of similar behaviour runs contrary to her dreams of gentility and her love of Paul.

In fact, the culture of the West as she knows it and the culture of English society are so contrary to her think­ ing that there actually is not anyone or anything in England about which she feels no sense of ambivalence. Paul, Hetta, 167

English people and their manners and morals, and even Mrs,

Pipkin and John Crumb all contribute to the feeling of polar

tension that tears at her being.

Paul first and foremost is the cause of her ambivalence,

not only because she deeply and sincerely loves him, but be­

cause he is a symbol of a world to which she, an alien, is

unwillingly yet willingly drawn. Her pragmatic and violent

past had not eliminated an intrusive romanticism from her:

But if she could only escape the wrongs, if she could find some niche in the world which would be bearable to her, in which, free from harsh treatment, she could pour forth all the genuine kindness of her woman’s nature, —then, she thought she could put away violence and be gentle as a young girl (385).

If only she could have Paul, and be away from violence, she thinks she would change.

Ironically, because of her keenness, she knows the folly of her dream and senses one of the reasons why she is drawn to Paul. She knows that just as a woman wants a "pretty dog" if she "keeps a dog at all," a woman also wants a man above her in rank because "he is softer and cleaner, and has better parts of speech" (337). And she senses that if all men wore the same type of attire and held the same type of job,

Paul would not be a superior among them.

Further, her conditioning encourages her stronger side to despise Paul, and perhaps with reason. "As well as she loved him,—and she did love him with all her heart,— she regarded [him] as greatly inferior to herself!" (219). 168

Paul is a product of an era and a country in which/ in regard

to what men expected of women, "The stamp of masculine approval

was placed upon ignorance of the world, meekness, lack of

opinions, general helplessness and weakness; in short, a recognition of female inferiority to the male."3 Winifrid

had done so much of man's work and had fended for herself in

such a brutal world that Paul, in comparison, is more womanly

than she is.

Mrs. Hurtle is well aware of Paul's timidity and gentle­

ness, and generally thinks less of him for it. She believes

him "overcivilized," and the "product of a soft civilization"

(381). Paul "was to her thinking a tame, sleek, household animal, whereas she knew herself to be wild" (729). This

tameness of his is the cause of another feeling of ambivalence.

While she despises Paul's softness, it brings out any gentle­ ness in her and causes self-recrimination for her sordidness.

Polhemus speaks to Trollope's awareness of a woman's sense of guilt:

Trollope shrewdly said that a society which kept incul­ cating the belief that women ought to be pure—-that purity is somehow a normal feminine condition like wear­ ing dresses—would cause a strong sense of guilt in women who were wise enough to know just how impure they were and, how impossible it was to live up to the angel in the house ideal.

Winifrid Hurtle experiences this sense of guilt because she fails to measure up to the first principle of prudery, that 3 where innocence is ignorance, 'tis criminal to be wise."

The wisdom Winifrid has is not only of violence but, 169

apparently, of the ways of the flesh. Or at least in the eyes

of English society she is immoral. In the United ¡States Paul

"had passed weeks in her daily company, with still progress­

ing intimacy and affection'.' (209). Their past relationship

is evident in the familiarity with which they greet one another.

But without doubt the clearest statement concerning their

relationship is Winifrid's assertion to Paul: "I have given

you all that I have to give" (212).

Accustomed to his love and their freedom in the United

States, Winifrid is frustrated by English views of morality, while Paul is very sensitive to them. At her bidding, he

commits the sins of taking her to dine and escorting her to

Lowestoffe. Worse yet, he acts at least partially as a lover would while escorting her. And, although he loves Hetta, he "enjoyed it," i.e., Winifrid's "closenesses and sweet ap­ proaches, smiles and nods and pleasant winkings, whispers, innuendos and hints, little mutual admirations and assurances"

(223).

Perhaps because Trollope himself seems captivated by the wild cat he has created, he excuses Paul for enjoying her charms: "His folly in falling at first under the battery of her charms will be forgiven him" (379). To Paul, she is a dark, sensuous seductress very physically attractive to him in the past and still alluring. She "was a witch of a woman," and "like most witches she could charm" (334).

Yet at the same time Paul finds her frightening and 170

appalling. When "what the traveller called the breeding of

the wild cat" actually did show itself, and "when ... he

thought of Henrietta Carbury and her breeding,—he was fully

determined that let his fate be what it might, it should not

be that of being the husband of Mrs. Hurtle" (305). That he

cannot extricate himself from Winifrid's grasp even after

promising himself to Hetta is ample testimony to her siren­

like power, and to the reluctant ambivalence Paul feels.

His reluctance-iwas not long in coming to the fore after his arrival back in England and departure from Winifrid, even

though he renewed his engagement to her on a subsequent trip back to the United States. He began to realize her divergence

from the norm of what a proper mate for a man of his class would be, a divergence more pointedly evident after he meets the gentle Hetta.

One never knows, of course, how much Trollope's own observations or his mother's reactions to her bitter experience attuned him to the differences in English and American women, men, and customs. Paulas sense of divergencies is highly individualized, and based upon the circumstance of his vulner­ ability to a woman he would not be proud of in England, but who fitted into the landscape of and who answered his needs in a different environment. Whether or not Trollope's por­ trayal of Paul's and Winifrid's ambivalence about each other and about England and America is directly attributable to personal views or to his sensitivity to the outsider, it is 171

undeniably effective.

At any rate, Trollope's own view of America, yia,

Winifrid, is not wholly one-sided, although Paul's view of

Winifrid comes to be more negative. What Paul admires about

Winifrid is when she is gentle and feminine, which Winifred

realizes. But she and her country as she knows it are not

gentle. According to her statements her section of the United

States is a competitive one where a woman does not have to

play coy or feign gentleness, and where men and women are not

restricted by polite conventions. Nonetheless there is a

convention in her home environment—violence—and she is a

"dangerous woman even in that environment."

There is no other character from America to provide a contrast to Winifrid since Hamilton Fisker is from the same milieu as she is. Thus no one from the more civilized north­ eastern Unived States tempers the view of America though

Trollope does write that her name was "sometimes scorned and sometimes feared in the eastern cities of her own country"

(386). Trollope does not treat the international theme delicately, as Henry James later would, but he does elicit a great deal of sympathy for Winifrid's viewpoint.

Perhaps Trollope's political biases against democracy cause his tone to be somewhat critical in writing of Winifrid's and Fisker's every-man-for-himself spirit. He did not admire democratic theories. In England, "experiment in political democracy began in 1867," and "like Bagehot, Anthony Trollope 172

saw painful signs of the democratic influence everywhere

Yet even though Winifrid works in a few jibes about English­ men and their deferential attitude, and though Trollope's

tone in viewing his Americans is one of a man looking askance

at the attitudes and manners of foreigners, Trollope's tone

is really not any more critical of the American than of his

English characters.

His use of Winifrid Hurtle is not to criticize, in spite of the fact that he gets a trifle heavy-handed in making her facile with gun and whip. Through Winifrid and Hetta,

Trollope decisively illustrates the difference between a woman unacceptable to and a girl acceptable to English society.

Through the two most divergent characters in the novel, Trollope illustrates the universality of love and anxiety, and probes the male's awareness of English society's standards of woman­ hood.

Winifrid Hurtle's clarity of perception unfortunately renders her well aware of what she is not and what Hetta is.

She knows Paul is attracted by the gentleness of a woman.

As she tells Hetta, Paul likes Hetta's youth and finds Hetta

"softer to the touch" (738). "You are a girl," she tells

Hetta, whereas she, Winifrid, is a woman who has "undergone the cruel roughness of the world" that has not yet touched

Hetta.

Hetta fits the "prescribed" type for better than her rival does. Although courageous enough to rebel against her 173

mother's request in regard to marriage, Hetta is essentially

a gentle, refined young lady. Hetta is in accord with the yiew

that "a woman's charm . . . arises from her grace and ease

of manner, and from her remaining distinctively feminine,"

and that a "loud or rough or brusque" woman "loses her strength, 5 because she puts herself on a level with men."

And after getting to know Hetta, Paul cannot forget how refined Hetta is, and how coarse, by comparison, Winifrid

Hurtle is. Douglas Hewitt comments of Paul, "It is in the lack of femininity that he bases his rejection of her [Mrs.

Hurtle]—not so much on specific acts . . . but on general unworthiness-of outlook and temperamentCertainly Mrs.

Hurtle is not "worthy" of being considered as pure as Hetta, though in her love and devotion she is worthy of a man better than Paul.

If Paul did not reject her, however, but succumbed to her enticements and married Winifrid, their marriage would impose a great hardship on him. People of the better classes would no longer associate with him. "In marrying her he must give up all his old allies, all his old haunts. The whole world must be changed to him" (386). Winifrid realizes this very clearly: "she knew enough of herself, and enough of Eng­ lishwomen, to be sure that when her past life should be known, as it would be known, she would be avoided in England" (386).

She thinks their hope is in like elsewhere, maybe in Mexico, where Melmotte would send him, or in the West. 174

But in her desperate hope that they would settle

abroad if he would renew his interest in her and marry her,

Mrs. Hurtle is departing from the issue of what Paul means

to her. He means England and gentility, which is really what

her mother self craves. "To have been allowed to forget:

the past and to live the life of an English lady would have

been heaven to her" (386). With her "ridicule" of England

"was ever mixed ... as is often the case in the minds of

American men and women, an almost envious admiration of Eng­

lish excellence" (386), an admiration so strong that having

Paul without England would not fulfill her dreams.

Her ambivalance about Paul and England does not deter

her in the least from straining her ingenuity to its farthest

bounds to try to secure him. She loves him, but she will use

any deception, tell Almost any lie, to win him back to her.

Trollope’s tone toward her is sympathetic as a whole, but

Trollope makes her true to her wild background while on Eng­

lish soil. Winifrid Hurtle is a manipulator, and playing her

hand to win Paul is to her a game involving deceptions of which

both are aware.

This game between the sexes is a complex affair in

which turn-about is not fair play and the double standard

is an occupational hazard of a woman like Mrs. Hurtle or Ruby

Ruggles. A man, Paul thinks, has some special dispensation:

"a man may break a promise and yet not tell a lie" (214).

Although he knows his behaviour with each of his women would 175 displease the other, he finds their criticism of him to be more than his lies and behaviour should warrant.

Winifrid Hurtle accurately assesses the situation between herself and Paul. He "could look about for a fresh flower and boldly seek his honey," but "she could only sit and mourn for the sweets of which she had been rifled" (781).

But she too had played a game in matching herself and her wits against Paul, and it is a game she is more aware of than he is. Each had deceived the other, Winifrid at one point tells

Paul, though neither of them had "at first meant to deceive."

She even says to him that she did not dare to quite tell him all of the truth, and the rumors and half-truths were more than enough to indict her. Simply because he is a man, though, he wins the contest: "they had played a game against each other; and he, with all the inferiority of his intellect to weigh him down, had won,—because he was a man" '(781) .

He wins, although she is the stronger character: perhaps since Paul does lack courage and initiative and she is the stronger person, Winifrid Hurtle is lucky to lose him. Surely the wild cat in her so frequently in evidence, and sometimes uncontrollably so, could not have been muted enough to transform her to the domestic kitten capable of making Paul feel masculine, comfortable, and secure.

At least the wild cat element that is at odds with

English society will serve her in a future without Paul.

Already scheming for her future, Winifrid tells him she will 176

be "hand in glove" with the MeTmotte-Croll-Fisker entourage

by the time of her arrival in the states. She figures her

ship companions will be useful in some "job of work" she has

lined up there that will require the backing of friends.

And she tells Paul that she may marry again.

Any rationalization or plan she devises to lift up

her feelings, however, is not enough to heal the hurt inflicted

by Paul's desertion. Even if she marries again she will still

wear the locket he gave her, and she will wear it for as long

as she lives. The most poignant display of her sorrow and

passion occurs after she watched her lover retreat from the

Pipkin boarding house:

When he had turned the corner she came back to the centre of the room, stood for a moment with her arms stretched towards the walls, and then fell prone upon the floor. She had spoken the very truth when she said that she had loved him with all her heart (787).

Yet her control of herself is so complete that she does

not allow this display of her vulnerability to last long.

By evening time of the day she said good-bye to Paul she was

"More than usually pleasant" to the Pipkin tribe. Her emotions are deep and real, but she can cloak them.

This last little scene and the final scene with Paul attest to her psychological complexity. Though "she despised herself for loving him," Winifrid still "loved him for his very faults" (781). Her revenge against him is not the whip or pistol, but bitter words that "cut" him "to the heart," as she intends them to do. "Every word" she says "is a dagger" 177

to him (781). But Paul has someone to salve the scratches her words make in his feelings, while Mrs. Hurtle, alone of all

the women of The Way We Live Now,: must face the future alone.

Fortunately she is by nature an adventurer, willing to step back into the awesome American West and capable of*handling,

by herself, that which-she will face.

The final omniscient comment by Trollope about Winifrid

Hurtle does not have a pitying tone. To Mrs. Pipkin's remark that Winifrid was a fine lodger and "had that good nature about her she like to see the bairns eating pudding just as if they were her own," Trollope adds: "I think Mrs. Pipkin was right, and that Mrs. Hurtle, with all her faults, was a good-natured woman" (788). As a mature, too-worldly-wise woman she could not hope to compete for Paul's affections with the gentle

Hetta, nor could she have been assured of marriage to him had

Hetta not rivalled her. As Winifrid tells Paul, "You had allowed yourself to be talked out of your love for me by English propriety even before you had seen her beautiful eyes" (783).

With English propriety and society against her, she never really had a chance: "the reek of the gunpowder from that first pistol shot still clung to her" (385). 178

CHAPTER Vili

NOTES

'"Charles Alexander Petrie, The Victorians (London: Eyre and Spotteswoode, 1960), pp. 205-6.

-) Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World Of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 104. 3 Robert P. Utter and Gwendolyn Needham, Pamela1s Daughters (new York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1943), p. 50. 4 Herman Ausubel, In Hard Times: Reformers Among the Late Victorians (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1960), P-. 11. 5 J. H. Wildman, Anthony Trollope's England (Providence: Brown University Press, 1940), p. 108. g Douglas John Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), p. 28. CHAPTER IX

CONCLUSION

In the first chapter of Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction he writes of the disability every theorist about the novel has—the difficulty of keeping all elements of a novel in the mind at one time. It is far too easy for one’s approach to a novel to be fragmentary, for one to separate the dancer from the dance. Because of sheer length and a complexity of interwoven plots, many nineteenth century novels provide an excellent opportunity for a fragmentary approach, novels like The Way We Live Now, for example. And yet by looking at some significant element of this novel, one hopefully can get a sense of at least part of the inner workings of it, and by knowing the part hopefully can come closer to under­ standing the whole.

Each object of art owes its origin to how its creator perceives life around him and to how the creator chooses to represent it. In The Way We Live Now the author seems to see life as a complex structural framework filled with varied types of people each essentially relegated to a certain sphere yet interlinked with people of other spheres. Trollope chooses to represent these complex and often anxiety-ridden people by probing their relationship to their sphere or class,

179 180 and to other classes, and by probing the relationships between men and women.

The plot, characterization, and execution of thematic concerns in The Way We Live Now all ppeak to Trollope's perception of class and class interrelationships. So also do major concerns of Trollope—the re-creation of the struc­ ture of society and its intricacies, the depiction of the

English girl, and the creation of characters who are average human types—correlate with his perception of class relation­ ships .

The women of The Way We Live Now do prove to consti­ tute a variety of human types from different environments, and they do have a relationship to the age. There were, then as now, women young and in love, and women older and in love.

There were and are women, too, who are attractive because their names are associated with money, or because they are physically beautiful and/or morally ethical, or who are unattractive because they are too worldly-wise and foreign-seeming. And there are many women who fear spinsterhood.

But Trollope's achievement is not just that the women of his novels have parallels to the women of the age, or of any age, i.e., that they are realistic: his creations are far too individualized for hhat. Thus, though other women from America no doubt found their way to English soil, there could only be one Winifrid Hurtle. And his other female creations, too have distinct qualities that render them more 181 than representatives of some prototype.

And an important part of his achievement, too, is

Trollope’s ability to see and depict the interrelatedness of these distinct characters. They all have conflicts, they all struggle against the dictates of society, they all love or are ambitious in regard to marriage. In short, though

Trollope individualizes them he clearly delineates the common human nature of them all.

In baring the common human nature of the women, and men as well, of The Way We Live Now Trollope has not romanti­ cized life. In fact, one could interpret the actual happen­ ings of The Way We Live Now as grim, and one can see why the novel is spoken of as having an embittered view of life.

But the factor ignored in this kind of.assessment of the novel is the tone Trollope takes toward his material.

It is with tongue-in-cheek that Trollope sets up situ­ ations that are heart-rending to his female characters, and makes clear that the women are caught in abominable situations, are frustrated, and are anxiety-ridden. His view is always tempered, however, by an ironic stance that varies according to the character he is portraying. This stance differs also in accordance to his sympathy for his characters. His por­ trayal of Georgiana is more ironic than his treatment of

Hetta, for example. And though he seems heavy-handed in his characterization of Winifrid Hurtle, Trollope's sympathy for her inner conflict saves her from being a caricature. A proof 182

of the validity of his ironic stance is that though the

struggles of the women against society are for the most part

futile, the women as a whole are probably better off for being

forced by society to give up some of their struggles. Marie,

Winifrid, Ruby, and Georgiana all lose a little something in

not marrying as they wanted, but they do retain their vigor

and individuality and they do escape situations that would

be unpleasant for them in some respects.

The psychological realism of The Way We Live Now

dictates, however, that characters are not necessarily heartened

by even a dim awareness that they might be getting a mate or

entering a life style that, in the eyes of society, would be

better for them. While the stance Trollope takes toward his

female creations is ironic, his presentation is realistic.

Trollope’s average human types prove to be entities

caught up in a world that for the most part fails to satisfy

individual romantic aspirations and desires. One cannot love

freely or live freely. Monetary or personal gains are to be

achieved only at a price a person is almost unable to pay.

Decaying mora,l values percipitate a failure of humanitarian

considerations.

At the root of most of these ills is an inescapable

fact that Trollope himself had ambivalent feelings about: different people belong to different classes, and people's

class origins can never really be forgotten. As Lady Julia

Monogram says, "I don't make the lines; but there they are; 183

and one gets to know in a sort of way what they are" (484) .

If, as Mrs. Hurtle says she wishes, "all men wore coats of

the same fabric, and had to share the soil of the work of

the world equally between them" (337), life would be different.

But typically of Trollope's illustration of his own and Hurtle's

dichotomous feelings, she aspires to another class herself

while simultaneously scorning her aspirations.

The class structure is simply an inescapable phenomenon.

And the effect of class structure on the individual, and

particularly on the women of The Way We Live Now, can be

devastating. Not that it has little influence on the men in

the novel, but running through the warp and woof of the novel

is a significant thread expressed in different ways by differ­ ent characters. Men of whatever class are somehow different

from women, and different and less stringent rules apply to them. This double standard greatly complicates the situation of the women in The Way We Live Now.

Men like Paul and Felix can love two women? the ideal girl, such as Hetta is and Marie after her fashion tries to be, loves once. Men like Nidderdale and Felix can love dif­ fidently; a woman, such as all women of the novel save Georgey, loves intensely and totally. Men like Sir Patrick Carbury,

Paul Montague, and Felix Carbury can sin many times and be forgiven; a woman like Winifrid Hurtle or Lady Carbury need sin only once to be forever tainted in the eyes of the world.

Not all men are bad in The Way We Live Now. Marie 184

Melmotte is right, though,, in saying "Gentleman’s hearts are

things very much to be doubted. ... I don't think jnany

of ’em have 'em at all" (794). Only two men's hearts in

The Wav We Live Now are undoubtedly genuine, Roger Carbury's

and John Crumb's.

The intensity and emotionality of the women of The

Way We Live Now in some measure makes up for the absence

of sincerity and vigor of the men's hearts, which is what

compounds the problem that women in the novel face. They are

so vibrant and courageous and sensitive that the strictures

of society and its component units (social class groups and

family units, particularly) cause tremendous conflicts and provoke drastic recourses much at odds with those strictures.

Yet whatever the individual woman does to escape society's rules is almost wholly futile.

Almost across the board in the novel the spoken and understood laws of class structure prevail. Not one female character fails to be touched by these laws during some part of her life. The effects of class structure are different depending on the girl involved and her specific situation.

The effect may even be somewhat beneficial, as in helping to bring Marie to maturity and saving her from a self-centered fortune-hunter.

Generally speaking, however, the effects of class structure on the female characters of The Way We Live Now are several and complex. The norms expected within societal groups 185

and classes a,re often at odds with individual needs and desiresf

and require some type of sacrifice on the part of the indivi­

dual woman. This may cause mental conflict, because deviation

from the norm by refusing to sacrifice one's personal desires

is not tolerated well-or at all—by one's peers. The conflict

may resolve itself in acceptance of the norm, or the conflict,

and the strictures that cause it, and dissatisfaction with

one's class and its values may inspire a romanticism that

tries to ignore the values and rules of one's class. Generally,

the end result of a woman's rejection of societal values is

an essentially futile rebellion from the reality of the world

that tries to restrict her.

The representative element of society that first

and foremost is likely to place restrictions on the female

character is the same in all classes—the family unit. De­

ference to parental authority is expected, and sacrifice of

self to the parental will is anticipated. Hetta should marry

Roger, Marie should wed Lord Nidderdale, Ruby should marry

Crumb, and Georgey should not even consider marrying a man like Brehgert. Opposition to the parental force nets verbal, physical, and mental punishment all calculated to bring the offender in line.

Agreement to parental wishes requires a sacrifice of some sort. Hetta and Marie would have to ignore the commit­ ments of their hearts to other men, Ruby would have to deny her passionate infatuation for Felix, and Georgey would need 186

to turn her back on a chance for marriage and economic security.

Primarily the sacrifices required of the woman re­

present a relinquishment of personal desire and feeling, but

not all sacrifices of individuality are ones directly related

to parents. All sacrifices, however, relate to what marriage

brought, or will bring, to the individual woman. If Winifrid

Hurtle would marry Paul and sincerely try to become the womanly

type he respects, she would lose her strong selfhood. Lady

Carbury discarded any hope of romantic love in settling for a marriage of convenience with Sir Patrick Carbury; her second and happier marriage resuls only in a loss of status.

If one does make a sacrifice of one's innermost feel­ ings and desires and marries for security, the woman must stay with her husband or suffer dire consequences. Even if the husband is abominable, the woman is greatly slandered if she deserts him, as Lady Carbury does. It affects her less, but Winifrid Hurtle's reputation follows her to England, a reputation ruined partly by her reputed relationship with her husband.

Society judges and punishes not only in regard to marriages. Ruby's peers, knowing that the baronet will not wed her, condemn her for her association with Felix. And even in the name of old times and friendship, Mrs. Hurtle and Paul cannot dine together or go to Lowestoffe without causing con­ demnatory reactions. Georgey is scorned by her class members for demeaning herself in going to stay with the Melmottes, and 187

is scorned even more for engaging herself to Brehgert.

The scorn of and censure of peers, however, tends to

cause not acquiescence but rebellion in The Way We Live Now.

After all, marrying just for money or just because of the

wishes of one's parents and peers is not very attractive to

readers of romantic novels like Marie or Ruby. Rebellion,

though, requires courage, particularly when one is at odds

with a father like Melmotte or Adolphus Longestaffe, a grand­

father like Daniel Ruggles, or a mother like Lady Carbury.

The force of peers and parents is not the only force with which one must contend or against which one might rebel.

Women of The Wav We Live Now are pitted against themselves as well as others. Winifr-. d Hurtle rebels against her own inner feelings in looking to Paul's type of world for happi­ ness. And in addition to opposing her parents, Georgiana

Longestaffe must come to grips with her own inner feelings about the lengths to which she will go to be married. Hetta

Carbury is forced to re-evaluate her inner beliefs about giving one's self to one person alone to be able to accept a man who has loved before. And Marie Melmotte must hear the inner voice that tells her she is wanted for her money, and not for herself.

Marie Melmotte's particular situation has a relation­ ship to the difficulties of the other women of The Way We

Live Now. Confronting each of them is a very real world con­ cerned more with money, status, and security than with morality, 188

love, or ethics. One can come readily to embrace that world

at the risk of later regrets, as both Lady Matilda Carbury a,nd

Georgiana do in seeking marriages that will reap the best

benefits.

One can, however, try to escape that world by recourse

to romantic dreams about happier times and other worlds.

Thus Marie and Ruby dream;;about the romantic ways of life in

the novel, and seek a materialization of their dreams in lov­

ing a man above their own rank. The world Mrs. Hurtle en­

visions is poles apart—or at least an ocean apart—from her

experiences in the American West. She dreams of a world with

"better . . . softer people" and "things that should be clean

and sweet and gentle" and "fair feminine women" (786) .

When people or situations interfere with dreams or a woman’s tentative attempts to realize them, the women of

The Way We Live Now are thrown into mental conflict, and from

thence to varying types of rebellion. Hetta, Marie, and Ruby

all adamantly refuse to be parties to arranged marriages.

Gentle Hetta changes to a woman "savage to the point of re­ bellion against all authority" (727). Ruby runs off to London to be nearer her lover, and Marie gets through the first stages of an elopement plan. Thwarted in one attempt to edude spin­ sterhood, Georgey confounds her family by running off with a poor curate. Foiled by Paul Montague's attentions to another woman, Winifrid stifles hfer .rebellious and angry feelings and taxes her feminine wiles in an attempt to lure him back. 189

Ultimately reality thwarts romantic rebellion in the lives of four out of six main female characters in The Wey

We Live Now. Society is a powerful force and class and family biases are not to be denied. To remain within the circle of London and country gentry society, or any other cir­ cle, a woman must reckon with that circle’s structural rules.

Also, to be respected for her character, a woman cannot be thought impure or worldly.

The man of The Way We Live Now need not worry so much about his lot. He can remain unwed—forever, loke Roger

Carbury, or just until a sufficiently wealthy heiress comes along, like Nidderdale. The man of the leisure classes can find pleasure enough in hunting and gambling, or could hunt up a country-bred lass like Ruby at one of the dancing halls.

The woman of The Way We Live Now, though, looks only to marriage for some semblance of happiness or security.

Novels extol marriage, parents expect a good marriage, and the girl dreams of the romantic, well-bred, and wealthy lover she will meet. But generally in The Way We Live Now marriage turns out to be beneath expectations.

Given the milieu of the novel, what else could be expected? The ambition, greed, and corruption of the novel's society has a permeative effect on its members. The strong- minded yet too often ineffectual women are caught up in a drama not in accord with their innermost desires and they are virtually forced to play assigned roles or they will be left 190

to a less desirable position in society.

The woman’s place is essentially in the home, but in

the home of a man of her own or a compatible social class»

Technically, social advancement is possible through marriage, but only Marie Melmotte has a real opportunity for advance­ ment, for Ruby Ruggles and Winifrid Hurtle never really had a chance. The class structure of The Way We Live Now is essentially rigid, and gives little chance for fulfillment of a woman's unrealistic dreams of reaching a higher strata of society.

Thus class structure limitations are a mighty force, exerting great pressure against the women caught within its grasp. The class limitations give the women higher levels to aspire to, incite them to rebellion against strictures, and encourage growth to an awareness of class biases and intri­ cacies. But ultimately circumstances bring the women of The

Way We Live Now to face the irrefutable fact that they must relate to and be a part of a particular class unit within society's structure. There is no one way they all are to live, but rather one realistically plausible alternative for each woman of each class in The Way We Live Now. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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