Gender, Inheritance and Sweat in Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2019, Vol. 24, No. 1, 106–119 doi: 10.1093/jvcult/vcy057 Original Article

Gender, Inheritance and Sweat in Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry (1879) Alexandra Gray* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 ABSTRACT This essay explores Anthony Trollope’s engagement with excess sweat as a metaphor encod- ing a complicated nexus of cultural attitudes towards class, gender, and inheritance in Victorian fiction. Discussing Cousin Henry, a lesser-known text written towards the end of Trollope’s career, I posit that scholarly readings of Trollope’s concerns with inheritance laws can be further complicated by closely examining the function of sweat as a somatic signifier. Through close readings of the primary text, I consider the function of sweat as both a potent physical symbol and a narrative device destabilizing Victorian understandings of gender and class in relation to inheritance law. Cousin Henry questions the extent to which free will and individual character can ever be fully self-determined in a society so dependent on legal and bureaucratic frameworks to produce and endorse identity. Trollope explores, in 1879, the crucial role of the threateningly abject body in undermining restrictive systems of regulation and control, anticipating work by authors of the Victorian fin-de-siècle in ways that have yet to be examined. KEYWORDS: Trollope, primogeniture, gender, inheritance, sweat, hyperhidrosis, Victorian literature, history of medicine

1. INTRODUCTION Deborah Denenholz Morse notes that scholarship has typically examined how for Anthony Trollope ‘the landed gentry and the country estate are nearly sacred’.1 Despite this, Morse argues, many of Trollope’s novels explore the ‘“cost of civilization” borne by disinherited Englishwomen’ through a ‘probing of the institution of primogeniture’.2 For instance, in Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1870), the fatal consequences of keeping it in the family, so to speak, come into view when Sir Harry engages his innocent daughter to his profligate second-cousin George (who eventually jilts her) so that the family name might be joined with the family estate.3 The Victorians were a society increasingly concerned with questions of inheritance and posterity, and Trollope’s oeuvre reveals a significant preoccupation with the peculiarities and absurdities inherent in the modern will and its interpretation by both testators and heirs. After the Wills Act of 1837, new laws surrounding the disposal of property offered a significant tropological prism through which the realist novel could interrogate the nature of character, free will, subjectivity, national identity, the family, and the law. As Catherine O. Frank explains, the modern will

* University of Portsmouth, E-mail: [email protected] 1 Deborah Denenholz Morse, Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 71. 2 Morse, Reforming Trollope, p. 71. 3 Anthony Trollope, Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871). A serialized version of the novel was first published in 1870 in Macmillan’s Magazine.

comes into existence through the would-be testator’s interaction with legal codes gov- erning the inheritance of property – and with the lawyers who understand them . . . These opposing functions suggest a paradox of the will: it is at once a testament to pri- vate, autonomous character and a bureaucratic tool of legal identity . . . which raises the important questions, first, of how much control any individual has in the construction of his own subjectivity, and, second, how much pressure such a legally sanctioned identity must exert on his beneficiaries' own powers of self-definition . . . The written will became a means of making people legible as legal subjects and in this sense participated in a shift towards identity, yet by emphasizing conscious volition, it appealed to ideas more properly associated with character.4 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021

In Trollope’s 1879 novel Cousin Henry, the will’s enduring paradox is played out through an examination of the titular character’s battle for self-definition and legibility as a subject. Henry Jones’s attempt to define himself through ownership of property is foiled by the readability of his character and the lack of conscious volition embodied in a range of somatic signifiers, most prominently his excessively sweaty forehead. An example of Trollope’s noted ambivalence about primogeniture, the text’s central preoccupation with the body’s fitness to inherit property – a preoccupation that manifests itself in gendered terms – implies that social identity, and consequently character, is inextricable from property and its disposal. Thus, when Indefer Jones, landowner and uncle of the eponymous anti-hero, muses on his responsibilities, it is with reference to the national character:

It was religion to him that a landed estate in Britain should go from father to eldest son, and in default of a son to the first male heir. Britain would not be ruined because [the estate] should be allowed to go out of the proper order. But Britain would be ruined if Britons did not do their duty in that sphere of life to which it had pleased God to call them; and in this case his duty was to maintain the old order of things.5

Subject to the whims of testators and the lawyers employed to interpret their wishes, potential heirs like Henry Jones unavoidably found themselves exposed to pressures and abuses by the apparatus of a rigid and punitive system of conservative morality. Trollope’s novel begins with Henry Jones’s visit to his uncle Indefer Jones and his cousin, Isabel Broderick, at the former’s Cumbrian estate Llanfeare. During the fraught visit, Indefer Jones repeatedly revises his will, unable to decide whether Henry should inherit. Since the unentailed estate can be easily passed to Isabel, the dying man vacillates between his sense of English duty to preserve the male line of succession, and the impulses of his heart, which motivate him to give Isabel the property she calls home. After suggesting that (a horrified) Isabel marries Henry to resolve this predicament, Indefer Jones changes his will to favour his female heir, but dies before the new will can be presented. The location of the document, which lays hidden in a book of Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, is unknown to all but Henry. Henry is incapable of revealing or destroying the new will; neither is he able to enjoy his inheritance while it remains hidden. Both Henry’s conscience and his perceived guilt are narrativized through others’ responses to his excessively sweaty body, and eventually, when the will is found, Henry is removed from his position as squire and the estate is given to Isabel.

4 Catherine O. Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925 (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 3–4. 5 Anthony Trollope, Cousin Henry: A Novel (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 9. 108 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry

Trollope’s ‘well-known penchant for rule by old, landed families . . . undergirded by his belief that gentlemen also have the training, the service ethic, and the personal disinterest needed for running the nation’s affairs’ underscores the necessity of an aristocratic yet professional gentleman at the head of Llanfeare.6 However, while Henry is part of the professional middle class, he is also the result of an elopement between his father and a married woman – his father had ‘disgraced the family’ – and is tainted by the implication of both illegitimacy and poor breeding.7 English common law stipulated that a child born before his parents had married was ineradicably illegitimate, yet the bastardy implied by Henry’s repellent physical traits presents a far greater problem for Indefer Jones than the potentially suspect circumstances of his nephew’s birth.8 Added to this is Henry’s inability to perform as a gentleman, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 his poor management of the estate and staff, and Isabel’s clear fitness to inherit the house and lands she has managed for her uncle since childhood. Primogeniture laws in England were based on an ancient feudal institution requiring that property was passed to male heirs unless unentailed, limiting the capacity for a female heir to benefit upon the death of a male relative.9 As a narrative salve to the question of women’s unfair exclusion from ownership of heritable properties, the transmission of Llanfeare to an unsuitable male heir is accompanied by what Allan Hepburn describes as ‘a taint that cannot be expiated’.10 Rowland McMaster observes in Trollope and the Law (1986), that along with an ordinary entail ‘primogeniture is an almost holy feature of Trollope’s male-dominated world’ revealing Trollope’s ‘reverence for a settled social order embedded in their conservative and traditional features’.11 Despite this, in more than one of Trollope’s novels, the author combines what McMaster calls ‘the mystique of pedigree’ – a form of innate breeding making the gentry particularly fit for positions of rank and (political) responsibility – with deep mistrust of the entail system when alternative (usually, more authentically and innately aristocratic) heirs present as fitting beneficiaries.12 According to Saul Levmore, ‘Trollope’s novels expose the weaknesses of prevailing inheritance rules . . . without advancing particular social reforms’ noting that disinherited women must be ‘constant in their affections and modest in any calls for change’ to prevail.13 However, in Cousin Henry Trollope goes further than merely to regis- ter his equivocal response to inheritance laws with regard to gender. Trollope delineates the problem of the law’s mediation and interpretation of character, and the paradox of autonomy

6 Susan E. Colón, The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2007), p. 52. 7 Trollope, Cousin Henry: A Novel, p. 7. 8 See Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Legitimacy and Illegitimacy’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Deborah Deneholz Morse, Margaret Markwick, and Mark W. Turner (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 100–110, for reference to bastardy laws and legal framework for understanding legitimacy in England and Scotland. 9 For a detailed account of the history of inheritance laws in England, see: Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 10 Allan Hepburn, Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 5. 11 Rowland. D. McMaster, Trollope and the Law (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), p. 4. 12 McMaster, Trollope and the Law, pp. 12–14. Morse explores this tension in her discussion of Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblewaite, an analysis which points to the problems inherent in earlier work on Trollope’s preoccupation with primogeniture. See Morse, Reforming Trollope, pp. 71–90. 13 Saul Levmore ‘Primogeniture, Legal Change and Trollope’, in Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel, ed. by Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 216– 29 (p. 221). Levmore discusses primogeniture in Lady Anna (1874), in which the eponymous heroine possesses gentility and other womanly credentials, making her the most deserving recipient of wealth and land. While this reading could be extended to include Cousin Henry, Isabel Broderick arguably fails to convincingly enact the requisite qualities of constancy, submissiveness and womanly charity that allow Lady Anna to eventually prevail. Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 109 within a bureaucratic system predicated on inflexible class and gender binaries. He does so through narrativizing the body’s unintentional responses to demands for self-determination made impossible from the start by a body politic that insists on legal intervention. In turn, the community reads deviance from accepted social codes as either a lack of will, or worse: an embarrassing inability to embody self-government. Henry’s moral and psychological predicament is expressed through somatic clues which metonymize his guilt and his unsuitability for the forms of ‘labour’ required by his role as a landowner. As the novel progresses, Henry increasingly exhibits symptoms of hyperhidrosis, a form of severe sweating un-associated with physical activity that visually encodes his discomfort. His body literally transposes his unfitness for membership of the landed classes Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 through signifiers revealing Trollope’s concern with the body’s role in metaphorizing the fraught, enigmatic relationship between free will and the law in Victorian culture. Trollope manages this through the metonymical relationship between the sweat of Henry’s brow and the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains, wherein his excessively sweaty body comes to represent – albeit in reverse – the fruits of his immoral labours. In the discussion that follows, I show how, through an interrogation of the relationship between bodily self-governance and inheritance, Cousin Henry problematizes understandings of the role of character in the operations of English law.

2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF VICTORIAN SWEAT In The Social Life of Fluids (2010) Jules Law makes the case for the centrality of liquid as a vehicle through which Victorian literature mediated nineteenth-century concerns about the frightening permeability of the body and, ultimately, the body politic:

Fluids were regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Because these substances provided limiting and transitional cases in assumptions about property (both in one’s self and in one’s environment), they offer an important lens through which we can reconsider the vexed problems haunting Victorian conceptions of civic order, family structure, and citizenship . . . As fluids out of the body are subjected to progressively greater rationalization, analysis, and manipu- lation, bodily fluids become increasingly the emblem and vehicle of that which is inalienable, irrational and individual.14

For Laws, blood, breast milk and water are the fluidspar excellence of the Victorian novel- ist – deployed to literalize the ‘fungibility’ of fluids and worked out through the realist novel via ‘circuits of limited circulation’ that demarcate and guard against the threat posed by such substances.15 Like blood, milk and water, sweat was also an emblem of irrationality and indi- viduality in Victorian culture. However, its representational history was equally, if not more, fraught than that of other substances; it was threateningly abject and had to be controlled, but it was also celebrated when embodied appropriately by those with an inalienable – and thus legally recognized – claim to its potent symbolic properties.

14 Jules Laws, The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk and Water in the Victorian Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 2–4. 15 Laws, The Social Life of Fluids, p. 3. 110 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry

Victorian attitudes towards sweat were complicated. Perspiration was indicative of hard work, of the rugged, athletic masculinity required by the Empire, and of the honest labour performed by the lower classes which kept the Victorian economy running.16 The ethos of Muscular Christianity, which emphasized the piety of health and vigour popularized in the fiction of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, lauded sweat as a natural by-product of religiously motivated works.17 It was also represented as having been sanctioned by God in Victorian literature and culture, as demonstrated when John Barton, paraphrasing Genesis, hopes that his daughter Mary will earn ‘her bread by the sweat of her brow, as the Bible tells her she should do’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848).18 While Barton understands the sweat of Man’s brow as a divine endorsement of human labour, he misreads the bibli- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 cal reference in so much as the sweat of Man’s brow constituted God’s punishment to Adam for violating His command. Moreover, sweat was a gendered punishment, since God fated Man to live by ‘painful toil’ while Woman would bear children through ‘painful labour’ – each punishment was thus to summon a form of gender-specific sweat.19 In Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) the villain Roger ‘Rogue’ Riderhood is described (ironically) as dis- playing ‘the sweat of an honest man’s brow’ in a reference to such problematic appropriations of biblical constructions.20 Meanwhile, in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), sweat performs a different narrative function when the wicked Uriah Heep – whose fingers sweat uncontrol- lably – ‘made clammy tracks along the page . . . like a snail’.21 Sweat thus operated in complex and multi-faceted ways in Victorian fiction, as a sign that legitimated working-class suffering, yet also delineated social inauthenticity by questioning biblical misinterpretations made by characters like John Barton. As I will show, Henry Jones’s sweat reworks the sorts of gendered biblical constructions that appear in nineteenth-century fiction to problematize prevalent Victorian understandings of the body’s relation to the law. Working-class sweat was associated with hard work, but also with poor working conditions, since the increase in both sweated labour and sweat shops developed alongside the expansion of urban spaces and manufacturing throughout the nineteenth century.22 Similarly, understandings of sweat had a racial trajectory which read European hygiene standards as

16 See, for example, Henry Mayhew’s interviews during the 1840s (but published in 1851) with working-class men, one of whom describes his masters as making ‘money out of my sweat’ (Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York, NY: Cosimo, 2009), p. 278). 17 See Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity Embodying the Christian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) for comprehensive discussion of Muscular Christianity in Victorian fiction. See David Skilton ‘The Construction of Masculinities’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Carolyn Deve and Lisa Niles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 128–41. 18 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 10. See Genesis (3:19), Ezekiel (44:18), and Luke (22:44) in The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) for biblical references to the value of sweat. 19 See Genesis (3:16–19) in which Adam is punished with ‘painful toil’ for listening to Eve and eating fruit in the Garden of Eden. 20 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 114. 21 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 227. 22 See Sheila Blackburn, A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 15–68; Richard Donkin, Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of Work (London: Texere, 2001); Richard Donkin, The History of Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Geoffrey Russell Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 100 and Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 5–9, and William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds, Filth, Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 111 superior to those of other cultures.23 While the sweat of the brow was tolerable in citizens who contributed to Britain’s economic prosperity, the vice and degradation implied by the dirty living conditions in which sweaty bodies congregated was seen as abject, and was subject to control by philanthropic and governmental campaigns alike.24 As Mary Douglas has convincingly argued, dirt occupies a precarious place at the margins of the body as ‘matter out of place’ which ‘offends against order,’ yet, ‘certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagion’.25 Sharing a metonymical relationship with dirt, sweat was associated with poverty and poor hygiene, and was part of broader nineteenth- century discourse on the problems of modern urban spaces. Sabine Schülting points out ‘con- sumer culture was closely intertwined with the Victorian veneration of cleanliness. To keep Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 one’s body and one’s possessions clean was considered the precondition of both civilization and capitalism’.26 Nevertheless, the ideological work of policing dirt is complicated by sweat, a naturally occurring bodily function indicating good heath, yet also a source of discomfort and shame. Lippincott’s 1865 Medical Dictionary listed four disorders of excessive sweating, and by the 1892 edition this figure had increased to ten.27 The proliferation of Victorian terminologies to account for sweat-related conditions indicates a substantial breadth of medical knowledge about the pathology of perspiration around the time that Trollope was writing Cousin Henry. Indeed, such dialogic multiplication indicates a growing socio-cultural anxiety about sweat, requiring its own descriptive lexicon through which it could be observed and regulated.28 Victorian physicians connected physical symptoms to psychiatric causes, but understandings of psychosomatic disorders were limited; they were systemic and, rather than seek internal causes, drew on gendered assumptions which placed femininity at the centre of diagnosis.29 Victorian doctors were convinced by the conversion of internal problems into external bodily signs. William Godwin’s belief that ‘there is nothing of which the physician is more frequently aware, than the power of the mind in resisting or retarding convalescence’ continued to be

23 See Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 99 and Bridget Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), pp. 132–3 for discussion of eugenics and hygiene. See Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 68–93 for discussion of race. 24 For example, Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: House of Commons Sessional Paper, 1842) and the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–69) were highly influential in shaping the ways in which ‘dirty’ bodies were policed. 25 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 2–3, 44–5. 26 Sabine Schulting, Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 17. 27 Joseph Thomas,A Comprehensive Medical Dictionary (London: J. B. Lippincott, 1865). The 1892 version featureschro - midrosis, desudatio, ephidrosis and hyperhidrosis, but also bromidresis, anlodrosis, hyphidrosis, chromidrosis, haemidrosis, meridrosis, and osmidrosis (Ryland W. Green, Lippincott’s Pocket Medical Dictionary (London: J. B. Lippincott, 1897)). See also Kristina Semkova, Malena Yordanova Gergovska, Jana Kazandjieva, and Nikolai Tsankov, ‘Hyperhidrosis, Bromhidrosis, and Chromhidrosis: Fold (Intertriginous) Dermatoses’, Clinics in Dermatology, 33:4 (2015), 483–91. 28 See Michèl Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Vol 1 (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 18. 29 Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 9; Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 12. Lacking their own distinct pathology, men’s psychosomatic disorders could only be imagined in relation to feminine weak- ness. That is not to say that such illnesses in men were not widely diagnosed or treated, but that they were, rather, imagined as an interruption to normal health, as opposed to an inevitable feature of their gender. 112 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry shared by doctors well into the following century.30 Medical approaches to the body have always reflected the socio-cultural and historical dimensions of the period in which doctors and patients lived, and the aetiology of disorders such as hyperhidrosis were shaped by these dimensions. By the early 1880s, when Trollope was publishing his final novels, fictional and anecdotal accounts of excess sweating would have drawn on widely accepted and negatively encoded medical discourses indicating moral or psychological deviance. Making character legible through bodily secretions was not new to Trollope; as Clara Park argues, Jewishness in Trollope’s novels was often signified by a greasy forehead, a character- istic which could imply a combination of commercial acumen and dishonesty.31 In Cousin Henry, Trollope extends this type of critique to problematize the relationship between gender, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 inheritance and the body in ways which have yet to be explored. Michael Riffaterre posits that Trollope deploys metonymies which displace denotation with connotation, allowing parts of his narrative critique to appear ‘less motivated in context [and] more loosely connected with the sequence of events’.32 I take as my starting point a similar assumption. Specifically, I want to show that Trollope’s work deploys sweat strategically in order to schematize Victorian concerns about the paradox of autonomy and legal dependence intrinsic to the question of property and its legacy.

3. SOCIAL AUTHENTICITY AS HERITABILITY While Trollope’s protagonist, Henry Jones, cannot be described as a typically dissipated or decadent figure, nor does he affect theennui and malaise with which the aristocracy would be fictionally associated later in the century, his inability to convincingly enact masculine nobil- ity calls into question his authority as a landowning patriarch. This inability is emblematized by Henry’s sweating, and by the somatic production of anxiety inherent in his responses to external demands for definitive masculine action. Trollope draws on centuries of literary productions of the marked body, on the demands of the body-as-cipher, to produce the corporeal testimony which both grounds character in narrative and stretches beyond to the world in which such texts are produced.33 Thus, Isabel is athletic, yet never to be found breaking into a sweat, and Henry is ‘odious’, ‘incapable of action’, ‘servile’ and ‘cringing’; under pressure his hands ‘quivered’ and his body ‘trembled’.34 Questioning Henry’s gender and class status, Isabel muses that ‘had he even seemed like a man, [she] could have made him heartily welcome’

30 Willaim Godwin, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice Volume 1 (London: C.C.J. and J. Robinson, 1793), p. 722. See Erwin H. Ackernekt, ‘The History of Psychosomatic Medicine’,Psychological Medicine, 12.1 (1982), 19–22, for discussion of the prevalence of such thinking well into the nineteenth century. 31 Clara Park, ‘Grease, Balance and Point of View in the Work of Trollope’, The Hudson Review, 60 (2007), 437–40. Park points out, as does Amanda Anderson (in ‘Trollope’s Modernity’, ELH, 74 (2007), 526, 509–39) that Trollope’s depictions of Jews were not always anti–Semitic. Anna Peak makes a strong case for a misreading by contemporary critics of both Melmotte’s Jewishness in The Way We Live Now (1875) and Trollope’s perceived anti–Semitism. See Anna Peak, ‘Rethinking Trollope and Anti–Semitism: Gender, Religion, and “the Jew” in The Way We Live Now’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed by Deborah Deneholz Morse, Margaret Markwick, and Mark W. Turner, pp. 325–35. 32 Michael Riffaterre ‘Trollope’s Metonymies’,Nineteenth–Century Fiction, 37.3 (1982), 280, 272–92. 33 See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 1986), Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fictions from Below (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986); Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (London: Harvard University Press, 1992); Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (London: Harvard University Press, 1993) for respective discussions of Classical, Renaissance and Victorian literary dramatizations of the marked body. 34 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 32, 50–51, 62, 75. Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 113 yet ‘he had been altogether unlike, what, to her thinking, a Squire of Llanfeare should be’.35 Indicative of Trollope’s attempt to ‘naturalize distinctions of class by undermining and re- evaluating their performance’ Cousin Henry interrogates how ‘part of the function of class culture and society is to generate, produce, and maintain socially organized appearances’.36 In presenting Isabel as a natural aristocrat forced from her proper sphere by a middle-class usurper, a man whose sweaty, unconvincing performances of gentlemanliness destabilize his claim to social mobility, Trollope both critiques social performance and signals its importance. Isabel’s lack of womanly obedience and her undeniable ability to manage the estate and tenants, alongside Henry’s ineptitude in the role of patriarch, exemplifies the reversal of gender roles at the heart of this text which in turn, reify Trollope’s insistence on what Kevin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 Swafford terms ‘social authenticity’.37 However, such authenticity is reliant on a genuine claim to property, which ‘in a capitalist state means making property the condition of subjectivity and social identity’. This is a problem that Trollope highlights in making Henry the unlikely hero of a novel in which he ostensibly plays the villain and by undermining the inalienability of his rights under the law.38 More socially authentic than Henry, Isabel is ‘always full of poetry and books’, bold, stubborn, combative and repeatedly described as ‘unlike other girls’; with ‘a courage about her which nothing could dash’ she has also ‘something of the pride of a martyr’.39 Penniless after the property passes to Henry –who is, contrastingly called ‘a sly boy, given to lying’ – and forced upon her begrudging parents, Isabel defies convention by refusing two marriage pro- posals.40 One is from Henry, with whom a match would secure her dominion at Llanfeare and ease the burden on her struggling family. The other is from William Owen, a man she loves but is too stubborn to marry, recognizing in herself qualities which make her an unsuitable wife:

She knew, – that she was not possessed of those feminine gifts which probably might make a man constant under difficulties . . . She gave herself no credit for feminine charms such as the world loves. In appearance she was one calculated to attract attention, – somewhat tall, well set on her limbs, active, and of good figure . . . But there was withal a certain roughness about her, an absence of feminine softness41

Trollope’s representative of aristocratic femininity lowered to bourgeois circumstances, Isabel is blameless yet not wholly likeable; the reader, according to Robert Tracy ‘is not encouraged to be very interested in her’.42 Henry’s lack of honesty is in many ways understandable; it is transformed into a form of (albeit uncontrollable) somatic protest at impene- trable Victorian class hierarchies. Henry demonstrates the ‘firm associations Trollope makes . . . between dishonesty, class and social desire’ which ‘help explain the value of those characters who find acceptable ways to lie, as a means of asserting desires that they must deny’.43

35 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 122, 125. 36 Kevin Swafford, ‘Performance Anxiety, or the Production of Class in Anthony Trollope’s The Claverings’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association, 38.2 (2007), 45–58 (pp. 47–8). 37 Swafford, ‘Performance Anxiety’, p. 53 38 Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture, p. 167. 39 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 5, 22–3, 22, 130, 11, 38. 40 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 8. 41 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 21–2. 42 Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Late Novels (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 255. 43 John Kucich, ‘Transgression in Trollope: Dishonesty and the Antibourgeois Elite’, ELH, 56 (1989), pp. 539–618 (p. 605). 114 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry

Trollope is clearly critical of Henry’s sweat-inducing moral opacity. However, his unenthusi- astic depiction of Isabel signals that his preoccupation with, and ambivalence about, primogeniture went beyond the injustice of women’s legal position in relation to property. His portrayal of Henry’s (albeit self-inflicted) sufferings challenges society’s internalization of the legal and social regulations that made social mobility impossible for those unable to persua- sively somatize expected markers of identity. Unlike other Trollopian men who fail to perform adequately either masculinity or gentlemanliness, Henry remains largely unpunished. Although he must give up Llanfeare to Isabel at the end of the novel, he is relatively pleased to return to his life in London and suffers no long-term social or legal consequences. As Hyson Cooper explains, ‘no man who follows his Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 less noble impulses can ever be contented’ in Trollope’s works, and Henry is a sympathetic figure precisely because he feels the full weight of his errors and is tormented by his own moral turpitude.44 Although Henry’s lie by omission is wrong, the moral low ground is complicated by Henry’s justifications in light of his family’s unkindness and, by extension, the actions of a society that continually questions his legal right to inherit. Indefer Jones’s cruelty in inviting Henry to Llanfeare for the purpose of giving him the estate, only to decide against doing so at the last minute, and Isabel’s harsh words in refusing Henry’s proposal of marriage provide the impetus for Henry’s deceit. As Robert Polhemus has argued in his discussion of what he sees as the novel’s radical desertion of causality, Trollope ‘makes the reader sympathize with the weak and disreputable side of human nature and distrust the supposedly virtuous and respectable side’.45 Isabel’s pride; her reluctance to ameliorate her own position as an unmar- ried daughter in a large household; her desire for William Owen and her resultant poor conduct towards him; and her outright snobbery in relation to her cousin, is, while not overtly critiqued, presented as morally questionable. Significantly, Isabel is unflappable, immovable, and never ‘sweats’ under difficult circumstances, yet this positions her desires and actions as potentially more troubling than Henry’s, whose motives are easily readable through his suspect perspiration.

4. INCREDULOUS SWEAT: THE LIMITS OF HENRY’S INTELLIGIBILITY Isabel’s actions exemplify perfect gentlemanly conduct throughout Cousin Henry. She disin- terestedly rejects any claim to the property once Henry is announced as the heir; she refuses to accept money which she suspects is tainted; and she adheres to homosocial rules by not directly accusing Henry of lying, an act ‘in violation of the code of gentlemanliness’ espoused by Trollope’s best-loved male characters.46 Henry’s character, however, is rendered legible by his body, and such readability is achieved by the narrative attention paid to his notable perspiration. At the reading of Indefer’s will, the family lawyer, Mr Apjohn, notices ‘great beads of sweat standing on [Henry’s] brow’, the passage below appearing as part of the same scene:

44 Hyson Cooper, ‘Anthony Trollope’s Conduct–Book Fiction for Men’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Deborah Deneholz Morse Margaret Markwick, and Mark W. Turner, pp. 63–75. Arguably in Cousin Henry, transgressions that are tantamount to ungentlemanliness are resolved with far less severity than elsewhere in Trollope’s oeuvre. For example: the charismatic yet parasitic and sadistic George Vavasor faces exile beyond the margins of the novel in Can You Forgive Her? (1865); Louis Treveylan dies following his hysterical illness and ungen- tlemanly conduct in He Knew He Was Right (1869), and Sir Harry fails to protect his daughter and is punished with her death and the end of his own bloodline in Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1870). 45 Robert M. Polhemus, ‘Trollope’s Note from Underground’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20 (1966), 385–89. 46 Polhemus, ‘Trollope’s Note’, p. 512. Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 115

Again the drops of sweat came and stood thick upon his forehead. But this Mr Apjohn could understand without making an accusation against the man, even in his heart. The unexpressed suspicion was so heavy that a man might well sweat under the burden of it . . . ‘He never spoke to you about another will, – a further will, that should bestow the estate on your cousin?’ ‘No,’ said Cousin Henry, with perspiration still on his brow. Now it seemed to Mr Apjohn certain that, had the old man made such a change in his purpose, he would have informed his nephew of the fact.47 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 Briefly allowing Henry the benefit of doubt, Apjohn first reads the protagonist’s sweaty forehead as an involuntary expression of understandable, pitiable nervousness. Characterizing Henry’s suffering as distinctly Christian, Henry’s heavy burden is aligned with Adam’s punishment in the Garden of Eden for his consumption of forbidden fruit through reference to the sweat of his brow. The notion of Christ-like spiritual burden is undermined by the worldly avarice implied by the parallel between Henry’s sin and Adam’s unauthorized consumption, an act for which Adam was fated to suffer ‘painful toil’ to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Describing drops of sweat which ‘came and stood’, Apjohn attributes to Henry’s perspiration an aggressive agency almost apart from Henry, suggestive not of his guilt, nor of a morally-inflected psychosomatic response. However, later in the passage as Henry is further questioned, the characterization of his sweat is less permissive. Henry’s sweat remains symp- tomatic of stress, yet the act is transformed from innocent anxiety to a bodily manifestation of culpability. Such a transformation is produced largely by Apjohn’s incredulity at the sweat which ‘still’ adorns Henry’s brow. Henry’s sweat, its description as an embellishment indicative of both conscious choice and deliberate offence, resists credulity and tests the limits of intelligibility. Like Apjohn, Isabel, at first, takes a largely sympathetic view, noting: that [Henry] should shiver and shake and be covered with beads of perspiration during a period of such intense perturbation did not seem to her unnatural. It was not his fault that he had not been endowed with especial manliness.48

Isabel’s patronizing response, concomitant with the other characters in the novel, positions Henry’s sweat as beyond the scope of reasonable masculine and aristocratic responses to anxiety. While she does not yet connect Henry’s sweating implicitly to guilt, she does read it as embarrassingly unmanly. Isabel aligns Henry’s sweat with both feminine hysteria and with the working-class bodies whose perspiration naturally reflected their poor condition, thus questioning both his gender and class status. After the will is proved and Isabel begins to suspect, erroneously, that Henry has destroyed the later document, she

could not help but think of that pallid face, those shaking hands, and the great drops of sweat which from time to time had forced themselves on to the man’s brow. It was natural that he should suffer. It was natural that he should be perturbed under the con- sciousness of the hostile feeling of all those around him. But there had hardly been occasion for all those signs of fear which she had found it impossible not to notice . . . Had he not been guilty the beads of perspiration would not have stood upon his brow.49

47 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 63–70. 48 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 72. 49 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 75, 126. 116 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry

Like Apjohn’s, Isabel’s language is of aggressive agency – the drops of sweat forcing themselves as though Henry can be seen fighting to keep them under control. Rather than from within Henry, the sweat appears as a foreign substance: as matter out of place, an intrusive signal, unwanted and unlooked for (yet produced) by the subject. In her study of complexion in nineteenth-century novels, Mary Ann O’Farrell explains that bodily responses to anxiety or embarrassment are ‘a temporal phenomenon that has been taken to imply causality [which] partakes of both body and language, supplementing language with an ephemeral materiality’ and ‘an implicit promise to render body and character legible’.50 Mirroring the language through which she first frames Henry’s sweat, Isabel discursively others Henry in her explicit foregrounding of the natural. Whereas previously Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 Henry’s response is ‘not unnatural’ and it is ‘natural that he should suffer’, Isabel begins to believe that ‘there had hardly been occasion’ for continued sweating.51 Her unease is located in the hyper-expressivity of her cousin’s body, his unintentional transgression of Victorian class and gender dictates, and the threat of the abject as thematized by his breach of corporeal and moral containment. Henry’s obsession with the hidden will – itself ‘matter out of place’ both hidden and not hidden, lost but not destroyed, at any moment both real and unreal – begins to elicit sweat when: considerably after midnight, [Henry] got up from his chair and began to walk the room. As he did so, he wiped his brow continually as though he were hot with the exertion, but keeping his eye still fixed upon the books. He was urging himself, press- ing upon himself the expression of that honesty. Then at last he rushed at one of the shelves, and, picking out a volume of Jeremy Taylor’s works, threw it upon the table.52

Exertion might be one acceptable context for Henry’s sweat, yet no such activity excuses the incessant perspiration he produces when not engaged in strenuous activity. Unable to assume the appearance of honesty that he desperately attempts to affect, Henry cannot control the one expression of character which he so urgently needs to hide. His fixation on the book which conceals the will materializes the sweat which is elsewhere called forth in social interactions. The emergence of excessive perspiration, in this instance, is discursively embedded in the context of moral condemnation metaphorized by the book of sermons, which in turn points to Indefer Jones as an emblem of unattainable aristocratic masculinity. However, the example of masculine honesty set by Indefer Jones is undermined by the inevitable parallel with Jeremy Taylor – a notoriously slippery and morally ambiguous historical figure, whose survival of both the dissolution and restoration of the English monarchy was due to both cunning and patronage.53 When a search of the room in which the book of sermons is hiding is conducted, the narrator describes Henry’s fixation:

50 Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth–Century English Novel and the Blush (London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 3–4. 51 O’Farrell, Telling Complexions, pp. 72, 75. 52 O’Farrell, Telling Complexions, p. 77. 53 See George Worley, Jeremy Taylor: A Sketch of His Life and Times with a Popular Exposition of His Works (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2008) which traces Taylor’s movements under Cromwell and Charles I and Charles II. New edi- tions of Taylor’s works were published during the 1830s and Trollope would have been aware of the implications of referencing Taylor. Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 117

[a]s he made short turns upon the gravel path, he endeavoured to force himself away from the close vicinity of the window; but he could not do it . . . Why could he not go away? Why must he stand there fixed at the window? He had done nothing, – nothing, nothing; and yet he stood there trembling, immovable, with perspiration running of his face, unable to keep his eyes from what they were doing.54

Henry’s disquiet about the possible discovery of the will is matched by his anxiety about maintaining secrecy; this duality is reflected in Henry’s extreme physiological response, and his inability to move or avert his gaze. Similarly, when he is threatened with cross examination by the infamous barrister Mr Cheeky we learn that ‘sweat broke out on Cousin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 Henry’s brow’ at the moment he both denies possessing a secret yet accepts its possibil- ity.55 The paradox of the written will – a means of making persons legible as legal subjects yet, simultaneously, a vehicle through which individual character might be determined – is reflected by the inconsistent nature of Henry’s secret as extant and undefined, guessed at and hyperbolized, yet also real. Since it is Henry’s hyperhidrosis through which the con- tradictions and ambiguities of inheritance and its relation to subjectivity are literalized, Henry is judged through widely held beliefs in psychological causes for physical symptoms. Symptoms such as excessive sweating were negatively encoded as exemplifying degenera- tive character traits in line with the suspicions of the medical profession, especially in reference to moral conduct.

5. DANGEROUS TESTIMONY: MASCULINITY, HYPERHIDROSIS AND THE LAW Henry’s vacillating and feeble nature, his inability to meet the eyes of others, his sweaty forehead, and the guilt implied by this, all contribute to his failure to impose the aristocratic imprimatur necessary to his new position. He is ‘not subject to be spoken of as being unlike a gentleman, if not noticeable as being like one’, and is openly insulted by his tenants and serv- ants as well as by his own family.56 Henry conceals himself, sweating, in the room in which the will is hidden, refusing to engage with his neighbours or enter into ‘normal’ masculine activities such as tending his estate. He fails to effectively command his staff, and in response they either leave his employ or take liberties he cannot punish. The deepest and most widespread critique of Henry’s lack of masculinity is grounded in his inability to take part in activities which might call forth normative signs of bodily exertion – permissible sweat, so to speak. Hence Trollope’s narrator explains of Henry:

He knew well enough that it behoved him as a man to go out about the estate and the neighbourhood, and to show himself, and to take some part in life around him, even though he might be miserable and a prey to terror whilst he was doing so. But he could not move from his seat till his mind had been made up as to his future action . . . He was sure that Mrs Griffiths whispered about the place the fact of his constant residence in one room.57

54 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 83. 55 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 209. 56 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 15. 57 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 94–98. 118 • Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry

If manhood in Trollope’s novels is ‘a state in which a character fits without effort into his family and the society of men and women, and, importantly, into the masculine institutions of his fellows’ then Henry disappoints on all counts.58 In a reversal of the ‘distant propri- etorship’ practised by the convincingly noble Plantagenet Palliser in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876), when Henry traverses beyond the domestic space he struggles to success- fully manage homosocial encounters.59 When required to defend himself from accusations, Henry weeps and refuses to be cross-examined, and Apjohn insultingly likens Henry’s refusal to womanliness. He advises Henry to ‘let men hear you, instead of sitting here like a woman’ yet, despite this, Henry ‘could not rise in indignation and expel the visitor from his house’; Henry is unable to break any sweat in service of his own honour.60 Moreover, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 Henry is contrasted unfavourably with other male characters who perform manly physical activities without notable productions of sweat. For example, Mr Apjohn is ‘serviceable with a gun, . . . always happy on horseback [and] could catch a fish’; Mr Cheeky is ‘a strong, young-looking Irishman who had a thousand good points’ and even the lowly tenant Joseph Cantor is ‘a strong man’.61 However, Henry is given little opportunity to assert his own will, because the mechanisms of the law seeking to regulate character cannot accept the deviance from the norm embodied in Henry’s physical responses to anxiety. The law, personi- fied in Mr Apjohn, Mr Cheeky and Isabel’s father Mr Broderick (notably, also a barrister), continually intervenes to re-interpret Indefer Jones’s wishes. Despite no proof of an extant new will, Apjohn reasons that:

though there could be no doubt . . . as to the sufficiency of [Indefer’s] mental powers for the object in view, still I do not think that an old man in feeble health should change a purpose to which he had come in mature years, after very long deliberation, and on a matter of such vital moment. . . . though no man in strong health would have been more ready to acknowledge an error than Indefer Jones, of Llanfeare, we all know that with failing strength comes failing courage.62

Overwriting the testator’s wishes with his own assumptions, the lawyer imposes his view of the matter by presupposing and lending credence to the conditions under which Indefer Jones may have altered his position to favour his niece. In doing so, Trollope’s fictional lawyer demonstrates the impossibility of Henry’s position as an heir subject to the intervention of the law in the interpretation of his (perceived) character. Apjohn fails to act in the interests of his client, instead engaging in a range of schemes firstly to find the newest will, and secondly to implicate Henry in its assumed destruction. Similarly, the law becomes the vehicle through which Henry’s somatic testimony must be unwillingly induced, when Apjohn encourages him to bring a claim against the Carmarthen Herald for libel. Offering to act in Henry’s interests since (legally speaking) he remains responsible until such time as Henry might appoint alternative counsel, Apjohn insists that:

58 David Skilton, ‘The Construction of Masculinities’, p. 130. 59 Sara L. Maurer, ‘England’s Vicarious Enjoyment in the Palliser Novels’, in Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance, ed. by Allan Hepburn (London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 61. 60 Maurer, ‘England’s Vicarious Enjoyment’, pp. 150, 53–86. 61 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 155, 191–92, 113. 62 Trollope, Cousin Henry, pp. 64–5. Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 119

There must be no thinking. The time has gone by for thinking. If you will give me your instructions to commence proceedings against the Carmarthen Herald, I will act as your lawyer. If not, I shall make it known to the town that I have made this proposition to you; and I shall also make known the way in which it has been accepted.63

Threatening Henry with exposure – a grievous breach of his professional and ethical obli- gations – Apjohn blackmails his client into appearing before a court to defend himself, hoping that the truth of Henry’s assumed deception is elucidated by the undeniable physical mani- festations of his guilt. Henry’s family, his peers and his community ground their responses to his confessional physiology in the hegemonic ordering of his body in line with traditional Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/24/1/106/5288430 by guest on 01 October 2021 class and gender dictates. They demand a convincing bodily performance of innocence that is impossible for a man suffering from hyperhidrosis. Henry’s sweat is ‘matter out of place’; the consensus of belief in the dangers of contamin- ation which enforce Victorian societal norms, in turn, rely on clear cut dichotomies in order to make sense of his transgressions.64 Trollope’s novel seems to suggest that such distinctions are far too unstable a foundation upon which to cement the British class system, and while Isabel does eventually prevail, her characterization is in many ways no more generous than Henry’s. If Henry’s sweat emblematizes nineteenth-century fears about moral and social con- tamination, and the need to contain excessive desires and liminal bodies behind legal and bureaucratic boundaries, it also destabilizes rigid class and gender categories as possible containment strategies. Trollope’s use of excessive sweat as a metaphor exposes his deeply held belief in the importance of gentlemanliness – as opposed to rank or wealth – as a pre-requisite for success, yet Isabel’s gentlemanliness is oddly jarring, and she fails to develop as a particularly likeable heroine despite her comparable honesty. Henry fails to deserve the position to which he aspires, and his sweaty body eventually reveals the location of the hidden will to two of the novel’s lawyers: Mr Apjohn and Mr Broderick. Within the narrative, Henry’s hyperhidrosis is the most salient of confessional signs, yet it is the glance of his eye that finally alerts his persecutors to the will’s location. In Cousin Henry, sweat metaphorizes Trollope’s anxieties about those appropriate to manage the country, through engagement with the unfit male body as a locus of anxieties surrounding the dangers of inheritance. However, Trollope also acknowledges the instability of gender and class identity, and questions whether relying on the character – and thus the ‘will’ – of an indecisive testator can be a better alternative to the entail system. Trollope’s fictional treat- ment of sweat demonstrates an investment in physiological causality, but also suggests new ways of mediating moral judgments in light of the legal, political and socio-cultural structures that allow society to impose its own will in matters of property. In deploying sweat as a complex and complexifying metaphor, Trollope addresses nineteenth-century anxieties about gender, class and inheritance, supplementing the legal debates of the mid-nineteenth century and anticipating widespread fictional explorations of bodily transgression, subversion and abnormality at the fin de siècle.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

63 Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 161. 64 Lillain Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany, GA: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 6.