The Bad and the Good

The Bad and the Good: How The Eustace Diamonds Changes Representations of Femininity in Vanity Fair

Since Anthony Trollope published The Eustace Diamonds (1872), readers have associated Lizzie

Eustace with Becky Sharp of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) (John Hall 378). Both

Becky and Lizzie perform a femininity made all the more dangerous by contrast to the femininity of their idealized counterparts, Amelia and Lucy. Both novels involve a man’s choice between satisfying his sexual desire for the dangerous girl and fulfilling his promise to the ideal girl. As is typical in Victorian novels, the narrators spend more time exploring the bad girl option than the less-exciting alternative.1 In the context of denying the novel’s focus on Lizzie, Trollope’s narrator furthers the connection between the two bad girls by recalling Becky:

Although the first two chapters of this new history have been devoted to the fortunes and personal attributes of Lady Eustace, the historian begs his readers not to believe that opulent and aristocratic Becky Sharp is to assume the dignity of heroine in the forthcoming pages (57).

Given the difficulty of imagining how Trollope could have spent more time telling Lizzie’s story, the novel itself belies this statement; readers know that the bad girls are the heroines of both novels.

Critics have noted the similarity between the two novels, but they have not really explored it. I want to argue that to understand the relationship between the good girl and bad girl in each novel, we have to move out from the dichotomy itself to the third term that determines the meaning of the other two: the woman who comes from abroad.2 I will argue that it is the shift that occurs in the presentation of femininity from abroad that changes the value of femininity at home. Miss Swartz, Thackeray’s woman from abroad, is like a representational object of the moral corruption of the British middle class. Becky and Amelia’s values are determined by their similarities to Miss Swartz, and they both reflect aspects of

1 In Woman and the Demon: the Life of a Victorian Myth, Nina Auerbach explains that demonic women “generally provide the momentum for the works in which they figure” (101). 2 Some of the critics who have discussed the similarity between the two novels include Nancy Armstrong in “Gender and the Victorian Novel,” Andrew Miller in Novels Behind Glass, and Kathy Psomiades in “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology.” Page 2 what Miss Swartz represents; they are not true opposites. These three female characters, then, form a continuum of moral corruption. Lucinda Roanoke, Trollope’s woman from abroad, has a dangerous interiority that makes her much more than a representation. The implications of her interiority create the need for Lucy to be a truly good girl. This change from seeming good to being good creates a true dichotomy between Lucy and Lizzie.

This shift in how femininity is valued is both literary and historical. In “Gender and the Victorian

Novel,” Nancy Armstrong has described a historical shift during the nineteenth century in conceptualizing the dangers of reproduction—from the danger of overpopulation earlier in the century to the danger of degeneration at its end. For Armstrong, this shift coincides with a development in literature that presents “the struggle between femaleness and femininity” (110). Lizzie and Lucy represent this struggle between “traditional femininity” (Lucy) and “female nature” (Lizzie) (108). What I would like to add to this argument is an account of the role Lucinda Roanoke plays in the struggle. As a figure both racialized and “savage,” Lucinda seems to represent the possibility of degeneracy directly. Lucy relates to Lucinda because she seems to represent the ideal, self-regulated woman. Lucy’s characterization supports Armstrong’s explanation that the self-regulated woman, as an idealized figure, was a correlate to the fear of degeneracy.

I. The Three Birds of Vanity Fair

The capitalistic world that Thackeray depicts in Vanity Fair would be incomplete without Rhoda

Swartz, the mulatto from St. Kitt’s in the West Indies; she creates the standard by which the values of

Amelia and Becky are measured. Her body displays many objects that have monetary values, yet the narrator characterizes Miss Swartz as worthless. Displaying goods without having any inherent worth herself makes her a symbol for consumerist culture. Consumers buy goods that have monetary values, but Thackeray does not value consumerism. In Novels Behind Glass, Andrew Miller writes,

Among the dominate concerns motivating mid-Victorian novelists was a penetrating anxiety, most graphically displayed in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, that their social and moral world was being reduced to a warehouse of goods and Page 3

commodities, a display window in which people, their actions, and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others (6).

Vanity Fair is concerned that money replaces morality as a determinate of value, and the way George’s father and sisters value Miss Swartz, who is like the window Miller describes, is indicative of this shift in determining value.3 The narrator says that Miss Swartz is “the object of vast respect to the Russell Square family” and, immediately afterwards, describes her property: “many plantations in the West Indies,” “a deal of money in the funds,” East India stock, “a mansion in Surrey,” and “a house in Portland Place”

(217-218). As an “object,” Miss Swartz gets respect from her monetary value. When Thackeray writes,

“Love may be felt for any young lady endowed with such qualities as Miss Swartz possessed,” his sarcasm indicates his disapproval of the Osbourne family’s value system that renders Miss Swartz’s pieces of property her endearing qualities (231).

Without beauty or any sign of an inner life, however, how can Miss Swartz have any “endearing qualities,” other than her property? Miss Swartz’s lack of dialogue, combined with the narrator’s virtual silence about her thoughts, creates a character with hardly any interiority. The narrator says that she has a

“very warm and impetuous nature,” but he does not really substantiate this statement with frequent dialogue from Miss Swartz or glimpses into her state of mind (234). Miss Swartz’s one-dimensionality, then, contributes to her status as worthless; her lack of depth represents the shallowness of what her body symbolizes.

Consumerism and imperialism are linked in Miss Swartz’s body because she is a mulatto from the West Indies. The mention of her name alone associates her with British imperialism. “Swartz,” comes from “Schwartz” which means “black” in German (812). “Swartz” is also a very common Jewish name (her father is a German Jew) (229). Thackeray thinks of Jews as active members of the capitalistic society he criticizes, so Rhoda’s name is meant to signify greed and racial otherness.4 As if her name

3 Miller leaves both Miss Swartz and Lucinda out of his discussion on the similarities between The Eustace Diamonds and Vanity Fair. (I am drawing the parallel between his discussion and Miss Swartz myself.) He focuses on how The Eustace Diamonds, “Trollope’s most Thackerayan novel,” does not exhibit goods but has an “appreciation of subjectivity as property” (12). My argument has a different focus because I think that both novels intertwine subjectivity with property to discuss values of femininity that are linked to a third term. 4 Thackeray’s association of Jews with materialism comes across in little comments the narrator makes, like “the celebrated jewel called the ‘Jew’s-eye’ diamond” (764). He also connects Jews with jewels when the narrator Page 4 were not enough, she is also “woolly-haired,” “woolly-headed,” “that Creole,” “the Black Princess,” “the dark object,” and a “Hottentot Venus” (10,12, 20, 228, 234, 240). All of these descriptors and her name itself indicate that Miss Swartz’s importance to the novel comes from the significance of her racialized body.

Thackeray emphasizes Miss Swartz’s status as the racial other through an interesting pre-

Darwinian bird metaphor that links Becky, Amelia, and Rhoda together. Thackeray writes,

No, indeed; the life of a good young girl who is in the paternal nest as yet, can’t have many of those thrilling incidents to which the heroine of romance commonly lays claim. Snares or shot may take off the old birds foraging without —hawks may be abroad, from which they escape or by whom they suffer; but the young ones in the nest have a pretty comfortable unromantic sort of existence in the down and straw, till it comes their turn, too, to get on the wing. While Becky Sharp was on her own wing in the country, hopping on all sorts of twigs, and amid a multiplicity of traps, and pecking up her food quite harmless and successful, Amelia lay snug in her home at Russell Square (127-128).

This passage seems to say that Becky and Amelia are the same kind of bird, but at different stages of development. Becky and Amelia are, however, the same age, and readers know that Amelia will never be around the same kind of hawks as Becky. They are the same bird because they are the same race. Miss

Swartz is a totally different kind of bird. George tells Amelia that with “a plume of feathers in her top- knot she [Miss Swartz] would look a perfect Belle Sauvage” (227). He then tells her that she did wear

“white feathers in her hair” (228). The narrator tells readers that “she went to great expenses in… prodigious feathers” and lists “countless” “feathers” among her adornments (235, 236). She responds to the Osborne sisters’ affection with a “tropical ardour,” so Miss Swartz is like a tropical bird (234). Just as a tropical bird, Miss Swartz’s race and extravagant attire distinguish her for her unique exterior.

Miss Swartz’s body, according to Thackeray’s narrator, makes her an unfit option for a British gentleman to marry. The narrator says, “The contrast of her [Amelia’s] manners and appearance with those of the heiress made the idea of the union with the latter [Miss Swartz] appear doubly ludicrous and odious” (233). Miss Swartz remains, however, an option for men with mercenary motives, and thus acts describes “Belinda’s diamonds” by quoting from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. They are diamonds ‘which Jews might kiss and infidels adore’” (559). Both of these quotes relate to Becky’s questionable acquisition of jewels: the first from Lord Steyne and the second from Sir Pitt Crawley. Miss Swartz’s name, then, connects her with associations like these of greed and theft. Page 5 as a symbol for consumerism. After George marries Amelia, George’s father, whose concern for money is the basis of his morality, tries to marry Miss Swartz (493); miss Swartz attracts people who exemplify

Thackeray’s fear, as expressed by Andrew Miller, of the corruption of the British middle class. Her lack of interiority and characterization as harmlessly ridiculous does not allow for any judgments about her own morality; she reflects other characters’ immorality, which makes her symbolize the corrupt morals of the British middle class.

Amelia and Becky are largely deemed good and bad for how much each reflects the moral corruption that Miss Swartz embodies. We already saw the narrator’s comment that Miss Swartz is a

“ludicrous and odious” option when compared to Amelia (223). On the surface (and only on the surface),

Amelia is good because she does not reflect corrupt morals. Amelia is characterized as a giver of objects, rather than one who consumes them. For example, she gives Becky “the white cornelian and the turquoise rings, and a sweet sprigged muslin” when they first arrive at the Sedley house (24). When

Becky leaves, Amelia “ransacked all her drawers, cupboards, reticules, and gimcrack boxes—passed in review all her gowns, filchus, tags, bobbins, laces, silk stockings, and fallals…to make a little heap for

Rebecca” (71).

Becky acquires goods through Amelia’s generosity, thievery, and the selling of herself on the market; she repeatedly renders herself for sale to the highest bidder. In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff

Nunokawa differentiates between the “zone of circulation” and the “zone of possession” (12). The “angel of the house” is in the “zone of possession,” whereas “the prostitute of the parlor or the streets” is in the

“zone of circulation” (12). The angel is good property, and the prostitute is bad property. Becky is like the prostitute because she sells her affections for money and gifts; she is bad property.

One has to ask, however, if anyone partaking in Vanity Fair is good property; the novel criticizes everyone, including those that seem good. Amelia might seem like she remains in the “paternal nest,” but she really circulates between paternal nests to get support (127). She goes from her father’s nest to her husband’s nest back to her father’s nest to her father-in-law’s nest to her brother’s nest to her son’s nest and ultimately to Dobbin’s nest. There is a lot of nest-switching going on here. Like Becky, Amelia also Page 6 puts herself for sale; she just does it in more subtle ways. Dobbin supports Amelia without her questioning how her husband, who she saw gamble away his savings, could have left her any financial support. The narrator writes,

About these expenses old Sedley had never given himself any trouble to think, nor any other relative of Amelia, nor Amelia herself, indeed. She trusted to Major Dobbin as an accountant, took his somewhat confused calculations for granted: and never once suspected how much she was in his debt (456).

In exchange for his monetary support (and many gifts he sends from abroad), Dobbin gets to spend time with Amelia. Is this not like Becky providing the amusement so that Rawdon can make money off the gamblers that come to their house? One might argue that Amelia is unaware of what she is doing, but she seems to choose oblivion, just as she chooses to ignore Dobbin’s confession of love. After Dobbin professes his love for her, Amelia says she will always be married to George (699). Dobbin responds, “I will not change, dear Amelia…I ask for no more than your love. I think I would not have it otherwise.

Only let me stay near you, and see you often” (699). Amelia responds, “Yes, often” (699). She knowingly exchanges her company for Dobbin’s love and support. Amelia, after all, is not unfamiliar with market exchange; she is the daughter of a British merchant.

In Vanity Fair, the difference between the ideal and dangerous models of femininity exists only on the surface. Upon closer exploration, these differences are not very distinct because both Becky and

Amelia resemble Miss Swartz, who is the embodiment of moral corruption, in varying degrees. Amelia is, however, comparatively better than Becky, who is comparatively better than the one-dimensional Miss

Swartz; the three women form a continuum of consumerism. The relationship between Becky and

Amelia, then, is much less of a dichotomy than that between Lucy and Lizzie.

II. Two Cats and a Bear

Like Amelia and Becky, Lizzie and Lucy’s value is determined by how they act on the market.

Unlike Amelia and Becky, however, Lizzie and Lucy are represented as a true dichotomy between good and bad versions of femininity. 5 Like Becky, Lizzie circulates herself to attract men; she simultaneously

5 See William Cohen’s “Trollope’s Trollope” for a discussion of how Lizzie is bad property that circulates and Lucy is good property that remains like an “heirloom.” Page 7 engages the affections of Frank Greystock, Lord George, and Lord Fawn. The novel characterizes Lizzie as bad property, and this characterization conforms to Nunokawa’s model of the bad girl being in the

“zone of circulation.” Despite switching homes, Lucy does not circulate because she does not act as people’s property while in their homes; she works for her keep and will thus actually be good property, from the viewpoint of the novel, as a wife. Trollope, then, revises the relationship between the two main female protagonists in Vanity Fair. Lizzie remains the consumer like Becky and Amelia, but Lucy is a worker. Her work, her status as producer rather than consumer, makes her good. One way to understand this change from a comparatively better girl to a truly good girl is to view Lucy’s character as being a necessary correlate to the presentation of the new third term, Lucinda Roanoke. Like Miss Swartz,

Lucinda is a racialized, colonial woman, who provides a way of understanding the relationship between the two main female characters.

Like Thackeray, Trollope uses animal imagery to link his three feminine figures. Lucy tells

Frank that Lizzie is “very beautiful” but “almost frightful to look at” (147). Frank asks her to explain, and she says, “She looks like a beautiful animal that you are afraid to caress for fear it should bite you; – an animal that would be beautiful if its eyes were not so restless, and its teeth so sharp and white” (147).

Frank suggests that “she’s like a cat,” and Lucy responds, “Something not quite so tame as a cat” (147).

Lizzie tells Frank, “that little thing at Richmond is everything to you. She is tame and quiet – a cat that will sleep on the rug before the fire, and you think that she will never scratch” (274). Lucy and Lizzie, then, are two different kinds of cats: a domesticated one and a wild one. Lucinda, Frank’s third option, is totally outside of the feline family; she is a bear. Mrs. Carbuncle tells Lucinda, “When a man comes near you, you’re as savage and cross as a bear” (411). The narrator also says, “Sir Griffin was a bear—and so also was Lucinda” (414). This “ferocious” bear “would snap and snarl, and almost bite” (425, 432).

“Nobody could ever break her in,” and she has “an intractable spirit in harness” (426, 414). Miss Swartz may be a different kind of bird from Becky and Amelia, but she is still a bird. Trollope goes to great lengths to make the point that Lucinda cannot even be classified as the same type of animal; being like a Page 8 snarling bear is an indicator that she is both a different race and represents a different, more dangerous model of femininity.

Lucinda has racial features like Miss Swartz, but her danger shines forth in her physical attractiveness to the British eye. The narrator says, “Her hair was very dark – almost black – and very plentiful. Her eyes were large and bright, though too bold for a girl so young. Her nose and mouth were exactly like her aunt’s” (367). Her aunt has “a well-formed broad nose, thick lips, and regular teeth”

(366). He also says, “She had sat for her portrait during the last winter, and her picture had caused much remark in the Exhibition. Some said that she might be a Brinvilliers, others a Cleopatra, and others again a Queen of Sheba” (367). All of these women are strong, erotic, dangerous, and foreign. Lucinda’s exterior, then, reveals an interiority that Miss Swartz lacks, and this interiority is dangerous. Her beauty, although connecting her with dangerous women through association, also masks the danger of Lucinda.

She is so beautiful that British men desire her, and so she is an option for them in a way that Miss Swartz is not.

Even though Lucinda is an option for British men, however, they are not an option for her.6

Lucinda “cannot fail to dislike” “all men who came near her” (Trollope 401). When she jilts Sir Griffin, she ultimately refuses to participate in heterosexual exchange; she takes herself off the marriage market.

Her original reluctance and this ultimate refusal to participate in the marriage market could contribute to the frequent use of epithet “savage” to describe her. According to the account of John McLennan, a

Victorian evolutionary anthropologist, the most “primitive” society was matrilineal. Kathy Psomiades explains that Lucinda’s acceptance of Sir Griffin’s proposal “for the sake of female-female bonds” and her ultimate refusal to marry him because of her body’s disgust for him is indicative of her representing a form of feminine desire that is based in “primitive” matrilineage (111).

Lucinda’s body reflects this “primitive” status because, unlike Miss Swartz, her exterior is not just racial, but also temporal. People associate her portrait with dangerous women from history, and the

6 This situation reverses the situation of Miss Swartz, who would like to be possessed but cannot be by a true British gentleman. Page 9 narrator says, “She…was tall, and was as one used to command, and walked as though she were a young

Juno,” who is another primitive, dangerous woman (367). Lucinda not only reminds the British of these ancient women, but she also has “a savage gleam in her eye” (390). Because of the development of evolutionary anthropology, “savage” in the 1870s meant more than being a part of a current “savage race;” it also indicated a past time period in which the British people were as “savage” as current

“savages.” John McLennan writes,

And since the historical nations were so far advanced at the earliest dates to which even philology can lead us back, the scientific investigation of the progress of mankind must not deal with them, in the first instance, but with the very rude forms of life still existing, and the rudest of which we have accounts. The preface of general history must be compiled from the materials presented by barbarism. Happily, if we may say so, these materials are abundant. So unequally has the species been developed, that almost every conceivable phase of progress may be studied, as somewhere observed and recoded (3).

McLennan explains the method of evolutionary anthropology; by looking to current “barbaric” races, scientists can develop a record of human development. This method allows Lucinda to be both racialized and a symbol for a more primitive stage of the development of British people. Miss Swartz does not represent an earlier stage of history. She is racialized but not primitivized.

Because of the implications of evolutionary anthropology, it is Lucinda’s status as “primitive” that makes her so much more dangerous than Miss Swartz. Miss Swartz’s status as the racial other representing consumerism is threatening only because many British people do not guard themselves against her; they replace their moral values with a desire for the accumulation of wealth. Lucinda is much more threatening because she represents a savagery that is inside of each of them. In Physics and Politics

(1876), Walter Bagehot modifies McLennan’s understanding of human development by explaining that all people carry all the stages of human development with them in their bodies. He argues that humans pass down their nervous systems, and so a “connective tissue” exists that “binds age to age” (432). The

British can not only look to “barbaric” races to see themselves in earlier stages of development, but they also carry some of the same characteristics of the earlier stages with them. Bagehot writes, “Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is in many respects Page 10 not at all suited to civilized circumstances” (563-564). Layers of customs might mask British people’s primitive origins, but, as Bagehot notes, there is always the possibility that people may regress into their primitive nature that will not be appropriate for modern civilization. Lucinda represents this threat of regression. When British people find her attractive, they are, in some sense, finding the primitive nature inside themselves attractive. This situation is very threatening because Lucinda’s primitive femininity is ultimately “not at all suited to civilized circumstances” (Bagehot 564).

When she is faced with the pressures of the marriage market, Lucinda’s primitive femininity is murderous to men. Her strong disgust for Sir Griffin leads her to think of murder as a way for her to remain true to herself. She first expresses her potential for murder when she tells Lizzie, “I sometimes think I shall – murder him [Sir Griffin]” (640). Lucinda expresses this murderous desire three more times before the wedding day and once more after it. She also, in Bertha Mason like fashion, violently vents her anger over the approaching wedding day on her wedding gifts. The narrator says,

Nobody knew it except Mrs. Carbuncle and the maid – even Lizzie Eustace did not know it; – but once the bride absolutely run a muck among the finery, scattering the laces here and there, pitching the glove-boxes under the bed, chucking the golden-heeled boots into the fireplace, and exhibiting quite a tempest of fury against one of the finest show of petticoats ever arranged with a view to the admiration and envy of female friends” (664).

Lucinda expresses her murderous desires by wrecking these objects. She wants to remain outside the market, and so she vents her frustration on market goods, which are really being offered to Sir Griffin in exchange for marrying Lucinda.7

Lucinda’s murderousness, then, is in a more primitive form than Becky’s because it is outside of the market. Becky murders Jos in order to get money to buy on the market, but Lucinda wants to murder

Sir Griffin to keep herself from the torture of being possessed.8 The difference between Lucinda and

7 Sir Griffin delights in the “show” of gifts for the wedding and questions Mrs. Carbuncle about why some of the same gifts were displayed on Saturday and Sunday (665). Mrs. Carbuncle struggled “to maintain her good humor” during his probing questions about the presents. This scene shows how Sir Griffin values the presents; they are a part of the bargain of marrying Lucinda. 8 The shift from the bad girl being the murderess in Vanity Fair to the other girl being the murderess in The Eustace Diamonds occurs because Lucinda will not participate in the market. Despite the danger of women, like Lizzie, having too much power on the market, Trollope idealizes the market in The Eustace Diamonds. No matter how bad Lizzie is, then, she is still not the savage chaos that would exist without a market. Page 11

Becky’s relationships to murder and the market can be seen by comparing Lucinda’s destruction of her wedding gifts with a scene of the destruction of Becky’s goods. After Rawdon ransacks Becky’s room to find signs of her affair with Lord Steyne, the narrator says, “The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about—dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in wreck” (624). The “heap of tumbled vanities lying in wreck” could also describe the room displaying

Lucinda’s wedding gifts after Lucinda’s “tempest of fury” (664). The difference between these two situations is that Lucinda destroys her own possessions, whereas Rawdon destroys Becky’s possessions as a punishment for her willingness to exchange herself for the goods on her person and in her room. By the end of the novel, Becky uses murder to accumulate the kind of goods Rawdon wrecks. Lucinda, on the other hand, is willing to murder to remain off the market.

These different relationships to murder and the market help explain why Lucinda seems to have more of her narrator’s sympathy than does Becky. Becky is a part of the corrupt system that Thackeray criticizes in Vanity Fair. Her murder is a sign of her total corruption. Lucinda’s destruction of her wedding gifts is a protest against the corrupt system, and her willingness to resort to murder shows how far she will go to preserve her integrity to herself.9 Trollope’s narrator portrays a potential murderess somewhat sympathetically because she seems nobler for following her inclinations of disgust for Sir

Griffin than following mercenary motives, like everyone that surrounds her.10 Lucinda goes back to

America after going insane, and so she ends up in what Trollope considered a more primitive society. 11

Considering this return to America and the narrator’s ambivalent treatment of Lucinda, Trollope could be

9 The narrator says that Lucinda has “sincerity” and also describes Lucinda’s disgust with herself when she sees herself in the mirror after kissing Sir Griffin (401). Trollope says, “Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself” (422). 10 In her talk, “Transatlantic Indians: the British and the Native American, 1830-1860” (given at Notre Dame on November 19, 2002), Kate Flint described a doubleness in the characterization of the American Indian; the American Indian was both debased and a noble savage. As a noble savage, the American Indian has more admirable qualities than the British. Trollope’s ambivalent characterization of Lucinda Roanoke (an Indian name) could be an example of this doubleness; Lucinda is both dangerously savage and admirably noble. 11 See John Hall’s biography on Trollope for a discussion of Trollope’s perspective on America as a more primitive society than England. Although Hall does not record Trollope using the word “primitive” to describe America, the descriptions of his travels there and his statement that there is “no life like life in England” gives the impression that Trollope considered America more primitive (251). His belief that the Australian aborigines’ were fated to be abolished because of their savagery is also indicative of his general stance on native peoples (Hall 374). Page 12 making the point that Lucinda’s primitive femininity is not inherently bad, but is dangerous to the more civilized society of Britain.

The fear of British people reverting back to their primitive natures paralleled the emergence of the ideal of a self-regulated, middle-class woman. In “Gender and the Victorian Novel,” Nancy

Armstrong describes a shift in the British concern over overpopulation to degeneration in the Victorian period. She writes, “The degeneration of the national population, from this late Victorian perspective, appeared to pose a far more serious problem than the ‘misery’ and ‘vice’ Malthus had predicted for the poor in nations whose reproduction outstripped their productivity” (121). This fear of degeneration meant a fear that the British people could return to the primitive habits from which they had arisen. The late-

Victorian middle class woman had to control her desires, lest her primitive nature should emerge. The self-regulated woman, then, was the ideal, and the best way she could demonstrate her self-regulation was by choosing a fit husband, whom she could make herself desire (Armstrong 112-113). The self- regulation needed to choose a fit husband and make herself desire him was so important because the fate of the nation depended on her choice. Armstrong writes,

During the 1850s and 1860s…fiction made the selection of a husband into the most important thing a woman did. On her choice of a love object, a man she could both marry and desire, depended not only her identity as a white, respectable English woman, but also the integrity of the family unit, on which in turn rested the well-being and longevity of the nation. To regulate the female body thus became imaginatively bound up with the internal order and external authority of Great Britain itself (113).

Lucinda represents the danger of degeneracy, and so Lucy emerges as the needed example of what British women must do to combat what is inside of them that could transform them into Lucindas. Trollope must make Lucy truly good, which means self-regulated, because the welfare of the British nation could be impaired without such a model, and he demonstrates her self-regulation by how she operates on the market.

Cohen and Psomiades both discuss Lucy’s value as stemming from her status as non-circulating property, and I want to add Lucy’s status as a worker is a major source of her value. She operates as a successful economic agent, while keeping the proper role as a self-regulated woman. In Vanity Fair, the Page 13 bad girl was the governess, but Trollope makes the good girl the governess; he puts value on honest labor.

Every home that Lucy enters before she marries is a workplace for her. When she will become Frank’s wife, she will be especially valuable because she will continue to carry economic values into the home; she is a good property acquisition for Frank because he knows she will be productive and self-regulated.

Her potential for productivity is seen by her having things to give (her small savings or the little ring that she buys Frank) that are products of her own work. She is self-regulated because one has to be to work and because she does not take money that she does not earn. She refuses payment from Lady Linlithgow, saying “Oh, dear no. I haven’t earned anything” (737). According to Armstrong, an ideal woman will accommodate her desires to the good of society, and, because Lucy works, she is disciplined enough to do that. She understands market value, and thus she is an ideal, British woman because she is self-regulated enough to operate in an exchange system.

Trollope, then, offers three models of femininity that interact with each other. Lucinda and Lizzie do not work and are not self-regulated at all. Lucinda represents the primitive passions that, if not kept in check in British women, could destroy the British system by killing off the men. Lizzie represents the moral corruption that will occur if women are given more power as economic agents.12 Lucy is a truly ideal, British woman because she keeps her passions in check (in contrast to Lucinda) and knows her proper place on the market (in contrast to Lizzie). Trollope’s hope for the British nation, then, is that middle-class women follow Lucy’s example.

The difference between Vanity Fair and The Eustace Diamonds is that there really is no positive value in Vanity Fair because there is no truly good girl. Thackeray and Trollope both use a woman from abroad to critique the corrupt morals of the British, but the relationship between their respective models and the two main female characters in each novel is totally different. Miss Swartz is a virtually one- dimensional character, a representative object of what corrupts the British. She defines the value of

12 At the moment when Trollope was writing The Eustace Diamonds, women were gaining more rights. The 1860s saw debates about women’s property laws, reaction against the Contagious Diseases Acts, and John Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1861) in which he argues against England’s unfair and illogical treatment of women. Through Lizzie, Trollope gives an example of what could happen if Mill’s ideas were taken to their full potential. The fact that he idealizes Lucy as a workingwoman is not a problem in this line of reasoning because women had worked as governesses for a long time already. Page 14

Amelia and Becky by placing them on a continuum of consumerism. Amelia and Becky are both bad

(because they are selfish consumers), but Becky is worse because she is closer to the moral corruption that Miss Swartz represents. Lucinda, on the other hand, critiques the corrupt British market because she refuses to participate in it. She defines the value of Lucy and Lizzie because Lucy’s status as a self- regulated, economic agent is a necessary correlate to Lucinda’s primitive femininity. Lizzie is Lucy’s truly bad opposite, and thus a dichotomous relationship, instead of a continuum, exists between the two female characters in The Eustace Diamonds. Page 15

Works Cited

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