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

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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. DiscussingCousin 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 prop- erty 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 inMacmillan’s Magazine. © 2019 Leeds Trinity University • 106 Gender and Inheritance in Cousin Henry • 107 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 iden- tity 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 read- ability 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 profes- sional 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 circum- stances 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’ reveal- ing Trollope’s ‘reverence for a settled social order embedded in their conservative and trad- itional 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.
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