Anthony Trollope’s Small House at Allington, serialized in Cornhill (1862-64, illustrator John Everett Millais)
Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, weekly 6 penny parts (1866-67, illustrator George Housman Thomas)
Dear Friends and readers,
As I wrote on Reveries under the Sign of Austen — and [now] occasionally of Trollope, I’m engaged in reviewing a recent collection of essays on Anthony Trollope for an academic peer-edited Victorian journal (The Politics of Gender, ed Morse and Markwick et aliae). As part of my project, I’m reading essays and skimming in books cited by the authors in this collection as well as catching up on reading about Trollope I should have been doing for the last couple of years. I’ve delighted my mind and heart by reading a wonderful biography of and book by the woman Trollope loved, the American woman journalist, Kate Field,
Scharnhost’s biography (which I’ve not yet read),
and I found my notes on a paper about a much superior, one-quarter again as long and (even now) not yet published text of the last Palliser novel,The Duke’s Children
A typically cut page from the as yet published full Duke’s Children
Well, the last two days I have been reading a intelligent well-written and at least in the last fifth, to me surprising study of Anthony Trollope’s 1860s fiction in the context of the periodicals it appeared in during that decade: Mark Turner’s Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain.
Let me first turn to the surprising part of the book, and then contextualize Turner’s argument.
Mark Turner argues that Trollope’s “An Editors Tales” is hiddenly (but clear to those in the “know” especially the men who bought periodicals aimed at men like St Paul’s and the Fortnightly Review) soft core porn. We have been reading Trollope’s short stories on Trollope19thCStudies at Yahoo this year (the second time round), and at least two of us who posted were aware of how much bawdy as well as accompanying misogyny there is in Trollope’s stories. For example, the send-up of tourism in “General Chasse’s Relics” (relics refers to the numinous man’s balls which a harpy-like old maid wants to take a scissors to); “Mrs General Talboys” (an ill-natured depiction of adultery among the demi-monde in the English colony at in Florence); and “A Ride Across Palestine” (a downright story of cross-dressing dramatizing homoerotic intimate gestures between two supposed male tourists).
I had not noticed any increase in the amount or frequency of this kind of thing in An Editor’s Tales (7 stories altogether), but certainly “The Turkish Bath” seemed to suggest a desire for a homosexual encounter on the part of the narrator which was thwarted when the target turned out to be a man trying to get the narrator to publish a manuscript. I remember that Trollope’s wife Rose is said to have declared “Mrs General Talboys” “spiteful,” but quite why (or who the spite was aimed at) she did not say.
Davies’s He Knew He Was Right, a story exploring male sexual anxiety (Louis Trevelyan’s) over an aggressive corrupt male (Colonel Osborne), a Turkish Bath scene
Bill Nighy inimitable as the (in the film) despicable and perhaps impotent fake sexual predator, Colonel Osborne — he is justifying his pursuit of Emily Trevelyan and then turns with a glimmer of sly laughter
My good and perceptive friend, Nick kept being puzzled by how Trollope’s narrator-editor referred to himself as “we.” I took this pronoun be a joke referring to Trollope in his capacity as editor and head of team of contributors; it turns out (according to Turner) Nick was right. Turner says the “we” is meant to nudge other male readers. Anthony Trollope is our comical ever thwarted sexual predator.
I felt then and still do now that Trollope was hinting that he got involved sexually with his contributors — if not actively sexually exploiting them, at least vicariously through an emotional sensual kind of preying on them. There is something peculiar about “Mary Gresley” and “Josephine de Montmorenci:” I took Trollope to be more than hinting to us that he indulges in sex with pretty young women in return for publishing or pretending to publish or pretending to consider publishing or helping with manuscripts. We are told he went round to see Josephine de Montmorenci to see if she was a good candidate; alas, crippled (this is suppose somehow comic at first) and chaperoned by a sister-in-law — who our editor is attracted to (we are told) but alas a husband is not far. “Mary Gresley” has a salivating older editor who meets long nights with her and her manuscripts.
There are other non-predatory sexual explanations for these stories. Now that I’m reading a superb biography by Eileen Fauset about the 19th century woman of letters, Julia Kavanagh
while I realize that while there may be some unkind teasing of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes in the portrait of Josephine de Montmorenci, it’s more likely Trollope had in mind the genuinely crippled Kavanagh who did write aggressive letters and had her mother as her companion-messenger (instead of a sister-in-law as in the story). And “Mary Gresley” may be a kind of rewrite of Jane Eyre, where Trollope uses his grandmother’s name and invents a male wet-dream for himself in an adoring pupil at the same time as showing us the tragedy of what happens when a young woman does marry someone like St John Rivers, does repress herself savagely.
Turner doesn’t deny the second explanation and, like most people (because Kavanagh is not a household name), he hasn’t thought of the first. His interest is to show that first in the Fortnightly Review and then in St Paul’s Magazine Trollope cultivated a male readership where he could be free to respond to and voice male desires (like not marrying if you are not rich, because it cramps a man’s style), anxieties, and political interests. The “Editor’s Tales” just takes this further into soft-core porn. The joke is the “we” of the narrator is man as sexual predator and the reader is supposed to enjoy a host of analogies, allusions, puns and hidden subtexts which add up to a rather foul sexual play. I had thought that “The Spotted Dog” was another profound tragedy (like “Mary Gresley”), of a noble spirit who, excluded from his milieu for marrying beneath him and living a debauched life, becomes a depressive alcoholic. Rather Julius Mackenzie is having an affair with the landlady of the inn and between him and our narrator develops a homoerotic relationship (perhaps physical). “Mrs Brumby” is not just a vicious bully whom the editor outwits (he does not publish her stuff, and the only person who makes moneyis the lawyer to whom the editor pays 10 pounds), but the portrait of a vagina dentata who emasculates her husband and all men. Diligent looking for puns turns up sexy jokes in The Panjandrum. Manuscripts are “phallic daggers sodomitically piercing” the editor/narrator;” the misogynistic tone I felt (and Nick concurred) is endemic in porn.
But Turner goes much further than this. He reads all the Editor’s tales as soft core porn. “The Spotted Dog” is homosocial-erotic, Mrs Brumby is a story of an vagina dentata who our editor beats out. Diligent looking for puns turns up sexy jokes in The Panjandrum. Manuscripts are “phallic daggers sodomitically piercing” the editor/narrator;” the misogynistic tone I felt (and Nick concurred) is endemic in porn.
Part of Turner’s argument is that in the Victorian period editor’s tales as a title and trope were often a cover for soft-core porn. So “The Adventures of Fred Pickering,” not part of the series, and lacking the narrator-editor with his “we” is not to be read for a subtext of sex and pornography. Nor “General Chasse,” “Mrs General Talboys,” or “A Ride Across Palestine.”
I found two reviews of Turner’s book. Judith Knelman likes the first four-fifths (on which see below) but finds this section preposterous. Barbara Schmidt writes the kind of review that stays on such a level of generality that you never know this content is in Turner’s book. The book I’m reviewing quotes Turner’s thesis, and alludes to it with reverence and delight; for its writers Turner shores up their findings of incest and gender subversion (especially somehow for women). Nick thought the stories were often misogynistic, and projected a kind of cruel conservatism: of “Fred Pickering” he wrote: “in my view its political and ideological heart lie in the fact that Fred and Mary are subject to brutal social control. They therefore have all my sympathies and I find the story extremely poignant.” I asked but it’s hopeless to get an answer from the people on the Trollope listserv as to what do they think. I know the time we read the stories a couple of conservative males disliked any talk of bawdy and seemed to see none.
I have to admit the stories often have an odd atmosphere. A number of them (beyond those already mentioned) hint at affairs Trollope had while traveling and unsavury realities in Trollope’s professional life though why he’d want to give this away in stories was not at all clear. It made me wonder what is Rose Trollope’s function here; it’s said she made fair copies of his manuscripts for him sometimes. Well, was he needling her? getting back for something.
I’m not one who sentimentalizes a marriage where the man stays away for years, and the woman show no intellectual capacities or interests at all, and he writes a supposedly robust comical letter to a woman imagining Rose dead so he can remarry this woman. And he had an open love affair with Kate Field which turns up in novellas as stories with him as old man with a nagging ugly housekeeper (with ugly names too as in The Fixed Period and An Old Man’s Love).
Turner say that the pornographic imagination is a continuum and on the edges of many male respected books today one finds misogynistic passages and pornography. I’ll agree. He says this kind of thing has been in respected literature since the enlightenment in France with its libertine novels. Agreed again. I know this kind of ugly stuff is found in Nabokov, Naipaul (scenes of violent hatred in sex against women), and not infrequently prize- winning male books (Coetzee) and some female ones too. He instances as a good argument which takes pornography into “the fold” of what we can acceptably study, Susan Sontag’s essay, “The Pornographic Imagination.” I’ve read Sontag’s piece not convinced. She does say that it is absurd the way we define and treat as clinical or unacceptable pornography. (She doesn’t say why: she avoids getting into (so to speak) what women in particular find objectionable: cruel violence to women as vicarious thrill.)
I think Turner stretches his interpretation though and like Jill H-S in her Unbecoming Conjunctions (a similar book in some ways looking for sex and wanting to “undermine” assumptions about gender behavior) does not do enough close reading, is often far from the text. More to the point: for me, if he’s right, he makes these stories of exploitation — Trollope is laughing at and taking advantage of pathetic desperate people and inviting us to laugh likewise. Could this be?
Here is Anthony Trollope as painted by Samuel Lawrence in 1864
I prefer Nick Hay’s view that Trollope is self-flagellating when he writes this way about desperate young man, lost geniuses thrown away and unconsciously releasing his own libido in his stories of young women. But maybe not. I have written a book claiming high ethical vision without taking this side of Trollope into account. To me if just some of these stories are autobiographical they present someone prepared to take advantage of his contributors. Is the autobiography a desperate cover-up not only of the years of continual loss and failure from the later 1870s but of Trollope’s sexual life? Maybe. In the final paragraphs of his Autobiography he says his conscience is clear about his sexual encounters. Maybe it should not have been.
I’ve just posted on the real lives of disabled women on Reveries, and had been reading Josephine de Montmorenci” as a story about a disabled, a badly crippled, undergrown (because of the disease she had, writing woman who actually made a life for herself worth living. The tone of the story is not kind, indeed mocking but he does show her hardship and tries to help her. It’s cruel. I do hate how he presents the alcoholic wife as a monster in “The Spotted Dog,” and now it’s degraded from pity and terror to prurient jokes. I prefer to think what Turner finds is an undercurrent in the stories.Turner calls all this playful. Do we have a gender fault-line here? He’s a male. In Politics of Gender the writers often reference Turner on “The Turkish Bath” as if it were undoubtedly correct.
A connected book of essays, The Erotics of Instruction (which contains an essay on He Knew He Was Right by Morse and has similar contributors) comes out boldly to tell of love affairs these women instructors fantasized or had affairs with students (if so, I reprobate this highly); in the case I mentioned boasts she went for Trollope because she had an affair with a Trollopian professor. There is a review of this book which excoriates this attitude as destroying the ethical basis of literary teaching (it partly appears as a remark on the back cover of the book, was it Kincaid?).
All this made me look again at Robert Polhemus’s essay about Lot’s daughters, and incestuous patterns in Trollope (according to him that’s what “Mary Gresley” is about). If that’s what’s going on here, it may be truthful about an important area of life (emotional incest in family life) but can rescue it by suggesting Trollope sees the men taking advantage so it’s about how the powerful can destroy the powerless — poor Mary destroys her writing. In these books, the language of abstraction functions to hide actual content. Tortuous style shows unease: A more powerful or older person with connections or money or who has something the young person doesn’t have (the professor) can persuade the younger one to allow his or her body to be used. I did know women students in graduate school who had affairs with the professors; one girl paid for her own abortions three times. And women allow themselves to be raped (the Polanski case) for jobs as actresses, so to get into print you get into bed?
Is this the way modern fashionable Trollopian academics will bring Trollope into the modern world, make him post-modern. It’s true he is more sexy than people who read him often say but to turn him into punning porn reminds me of Pope’s “Epistle to Arburthnot” (a Horatian satire — Trollope liked Horace) where he says people compensate for his disability by telling him how another writer was short, another ugly, a third a cripple:
“All that disgrac’d my betters, met in me …”
A coda: I noticed something odd in Markwick’s chapter on bawdy in her book, New Men in Trollope. She keeps repeating the same few puns and only refers to one story, “The Turkish Bath;” in Politics of Gender she adds “Ride to Palestine.” I’m thinking here is an area she doesn’t read Trollope: these short stories. Everywhere else she knows the novels by heart, line by line, but here no. Despite the patina of modernity in her new book I discern an old fashioned Victorian, Browning-type: how many times she refers to male sexuality as “healthy” with a kind of heartiness and approval, sex is just great and God’s in heaven and all’s right with the world fundamentally and Trollope knows this. I wonder if she finds the stories not stomachable. (The editor of her Trollope and Women managed to edit out this aspect of her tone of mind.) If so, maybe they are more porn-like than I’ve ever thought.
Far from making Trollope a proto- or any kind of feminist in my eyes, this approach ignites my sense of his deep lacks when it comes to class and gender; he may feel ontologically superior, apart and these powerless people “other” so he and his readership can make jokes of abuse and where people hurt, are miserable and twisted. I remember how in Castle Richmond he argued the Irish should not be fed during the famine (a position one of the contributors to Politics of Gender in her book on Ireland did not seem troubled by).
One has to remember that because others are X and misread according to X, that does not mean the author is the way they admire. This is a problem I’ve had with Austen and others I’ve read with people on line.
I wrote this week on Austen-l, Janeites and WWTTA about Mrs Smith in Persuasion as the portrait of an impoverished disabled woman (from 1995 BBC film)
I’d say there is a strong strain of overt sexual awareness in Trollope (as there is in George Eliot); it’s not censored out and it’s mature and adult. This is one reason he was never given to children as Dickens and Twain were. There’s a deep and until very near the end humane understanding of sexual anxiety in men, jealousy, the vulnerabilty of women, with Emily standing in for a beaten wife in real life in He Knew He Was Right. That sort of thing is not found elsewhere that I know of in Victorian middle class novels.
*******************
Now until Until Turner gets to the concluding section (the last fifth of the book), Turner’s book is excellent. It’s even elegantly written, makes plain a point of view not brought out clearly in Politics of Gender. We are studying sociology, history, culture, through close readings of literary, non-fictional and non-literary texts.
He opens by showing new fashionable approaches of old Trollopians as legitimizing his. Then “this study is not only (or even primarily) about Trollope; it is not a traditional single author study … figure that unifies discussion … [older] narrow ones … Trollope as a case study which grounds a theoretical consideration … magazines as cultural form. So Trollope is a link, a way for Turner to bring his perspective and interpretation of the magazines’ readership to the fore. For he is not writing a history of magazines nor even all the magazines with which Trollope associated, he focuses on a select range; he asks what does it mean to read fiction in this context (1860s, periodicals with niche audiences), what do we learn about the novels, the magazines, the cultural life in books of the era.
For those interested, read on [in the comments].
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
In the second, third and fourth chapters Turner shows how the readership of a group of magazines as envisaged by their editors and contributors were served. He looks at how the readership can predict the text, and the interconnections of non-fiction with fiction. So the Cornhill marketed as a periodical aimed at women, but edited by men so that the women’s issues are presented in a muted way and all the non-fiction is not about women’s issues at all. At the same time we find Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset published with great fanfare. All three are capable of being read as conservative pro-establishment texts.
The chapter on Good Words is fascinating as about a religious magazine trying to be liberal. Macleod, the editor, had a hard time. Popper tells us if you are for toleration, there is a limit you can tolerate the intolerant: that limit is reached when they seek to shut you up and destroy you. It is revealing that Trollope was seen right away as a novelist no religious magazine would want, and especially evangelicals.
I’d say the mischievous spirit that made Trollope write Rachel Ray which attacks this audience is in character with the man.
Then we get to the Fortnightly Review. This is superb because Turner makes it relevant to our own time. He shows this so-called radical liberal periodical was s cosy intricately networked mostly men- controlled club, and makes an analogy with publishing and academia (hinted) today, equally cosy and intricately networked — though in some places women do have power. Now this is fodder for those who want to attack liberalism and he does look askance at liberals for we can see their limitations, no?
He references in his notes a 1993 article by Naomi Wolf which describes a situation that has changed little today, and if at the end, she seems to say opening up all female forums is not the answer, it’s the only one that has been possible (e.g., The Orange Prize, Women’s Art Journal) or women who write as if they are male or books with male voices (such as Mantel’s Wolf Hall which wins a prize, not her memoir books):
http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/fem03.htm
The Fortnightly Review, an important monthly with central Victorian voices, thought radical, positivist, edited at first by Lewes and then Morley (friends of course) in 2 years had 131 contributors; of all the articles in the 2 years, 6 were written by women, 2 with a name (George Eliot — partner to said Lewes), one anonymous (Catherine Helen Spence), two on music by Leonora Schmitz and one on housing by reformer, Octavia Hill.
I was not be surprised to learn this radical liberal journal defined women’s best functions as in the home. Hardly any articles devoted to women’s causes (including marital violence, property rights, custody)
And in this it was very like the French Le Revue des Deux Mondes (as Trollope said): controlled and written by men and with men’s views in mind.
Curiously (revealingly) while also dominated by men wholehog, the supposedly conservative Edinburgh Review had three regular women reviewers (Oliphant, Yonge, Norton) whose work was a small percentage but regular, ditto Blackwood’s (3 regular women, again Oliphant one). I don’t have the percentages of these, but more like what we see say in the New York Review which each issue may have one woman or even two writing in comparison to the say 13 men, male editors.
Figures for Westminster show in two years all men but two long articles, one on (not by) Francis Cobbe (Trollope mocked her mercilessly in novels; he was an editor at Fortnightly), an anonymous woman and Harriet Martineau
Popular magazines doing well have a lot of fiction by women — not prestigious fiction though some have recognizable names today. So here we have Macmillan’s.
A wee bit of revenge: Fortnightly did badly and when Morley took over he began to change the policy, did include slightly more frequent articles by women and (especially) novels for women.
Trollope’s Belton Estate was the only novel that considered women’s issues during time of serialization in FR; revealingly, it makes a strong argument for the pleasures of bachelorhood through (the vicious male drones), Aylmer and his father who would want to marry? you have your sexual appetites curtailed, you have to go home to the woman and don’t see your friends. Only necessary Aylmer and father decided for heirs. Against this we do have Will Belton.
One can see why Turner moves to see the short fiction Trollope produced as coming out of the atmosphere Aylmer and his father live in. To me though Colonel Osborne is a caricature of this drone type; he is despised by Hugh Stanbury as a dangerous annoyance. Ayler is after all the horrible person of Belton Estate and it’s his obedience to social norms of masculinity that should have warned Clara to stay away from him; he also insists on ostracizing Mrs Askerton, the friend who lived with someone as his mistress, and whom Clara refuses to give up. Will disapproves of her too (alas).
The Fortnightly: it did not so much break with custom on anonymity since it was breaking up already. The concept of amateur gentleman writer and brilliant genius had died; the notion that it was important to be able to discuss topics anonymously still held as well as the idea one should not introduce personality into criticism, but new forces prevailing:
Fiction and poetry were signed by mid-century; celebrity sells (Byron); there were mass adulated stars, e.g., Dickens the first perhaps. Mass public cares more about lives and gossip than achievement; stars adulated for emotional affinity, identification, imitation, projection. Lionizing a way of showing off. And it brought money to those who were “lucky” enough to suit. In 1870s a series of Celebrities at Home, complete with photos of faces. I remember Harriet Martineau living with this kind of thing in order to support herself. By 1880s demand for celebrities so great, periodicals were launched just to do this.
Fortnightly still had prestige and it backed author-signed articles just in the 1860s — also the period when illustrations improved, painters and artists did them, and they helped sell the books.
Authors begin to try to empower themselves in ways not possible in culture of anonymity; also fight publishing and selling practices.
Enter Mr Trollope. His Hunting Sketches reviewed as selling because of his name. Trollope now a commodity, a “idol of consumption” Trollope attempted to create a second identity, but “author of Nina Balatka” didn’t sell. The point made that the economic value comes from symbolic value and an author’s name by itself is valueless; it’s all it’s done around it, the institutions and cliques that push it. Stardom comes as a result of the struggle and only sometimes So cultural commodities are consecrated by hegemonic intimate network of individuals who have ability to create value through economic or social capital. Authors today try to create a second persona.
St Pauls, the name a male part of London; Trollope, having quit his job, negotiates high pay; and is in control and the star and himself meant to dominate as the star novelist. Turner shows Trollope to have been at the time very ambitious, biding for Parliament in Beverly and failing. He had seen this magazine as a platform for himself and friends when in office. He saw this periodical as political, and for it wrote Phineas Finn first novel to make male Parliamentary story central. Intertexual connections between Phineas Finn and articles include an article urging an “old maid” to make herself attractive; article refers as symbol to diocese of Killaloe; garroteers not that dangerous in non-fiction, turn up very dangerous in fiction.
It was a magazine devoted to male subjects and a male reader. First issue has an article which insults women’s taste. When Trollope left a move was made to include and appeal to women readers.
The depiction of Trollope here is the one that emerges from Raven’s Palliser films: male anxiety as it seeks to fit itself into parliament, into social and cultural success. What it means to be a man; in books he ultimately returns to Ireland away from center of power. Suffering to success; vanity to honesty (p. 150). Trollope talks of passing of time as central to series. (pp. 149-50). A middle class urban upwardly mobile norm of masculinity for Phineas He shows unwillingness to mimick the maneuverings of a previous generation. Trollope means to critique the cliquish nature of establishment politics. Phineas must distinguish himself from the women. He becomes fully realized as a speaking subject: high point of series too. Ideas of masculinity of Trollope shared by Raven. Chiltern: to fight, to fight, to fight, what else? the angry displaced aristocrat against the rising middle class man.
Ralph the Heir, the second and last of Trollope’s novels to appear in St Paul’s is an older man’s story of aging, failure, being cut short, loss of life’s savour, the tiresome ordeals domesticity. So here we have a portrait of Trollope after his project as editor for men failed, having to write on to keep his lifestyle up and his sums going down all the time. Ralph the Heir versus Ralph Newton rehearses his concerns of Chiltern and Phineas with the election and new men bringing out other rivals for old order. Turner has Trollope resolute in keeping the periodical aimed at male’s anxieties and desires, but once he was gone Morley reverted it to women.
So what is the subtext of Turner’s book: Trollope was no feminist. And his Horatio Alger success-story Autobiography hides the realities of the second half of his life altogether, a bluff to forestall the life of himself he feared someone might write.
E.M.
From Tracy Marks:
“Hello! This is Tracy Marks, a very inactive member of the
Austen-L list who emailed you a few times in the past.
I’m on a Trollope reading kick and have found your website and the archives of the Trollope mailing list to be invaluable. I just finished reading Framley Parsonage (Allington will be next) and printed out the archives to “talk to” while I read.
I got interested in Trollope after watching Barchester Towers (one of the greatest mini-series ever made in my opinion) and The Pallisers on dvd.
How do you do all you do? I don’t have time to keep up with mailing lists but do check in every now and then….
Tracy”
To which I replied:
Thank you, Tracey. I appreciate knowing others read what I write and find it useful and appealing.
I do it all because this is a central part of my life. It helps keep me going — a hedge against suicide. The people who made the two recent books (Politics of Gender as well as New Men in Trollope) never cited my book anywhere though they cited just about everyone else’s. When talking of Macdermots of Ballycloran, Markwick cited by two articles and I know she knows I have two chapters on Trollope’s Irish novels in my book.
I’m despised because I am an adjunct and include as significant and even equal to scholars, the views of my peers on lists. I break a taboo to regard common readers as existing and their opinions as valuable. But I do exist and am not invisible. My book went to 1200 members of Trollope Society and I know was read by common readers and scholars alike (so I have “impact”). One edittor asked me to write an article for his periodical on Trollope’s travel books but I don’t have money to travel myself to do it.
It’s hard for me to say which is my favorite mini-series nowadays. Perhaps still the non-Trollopian Brideshead Revisited. For the Trollopes I’m beginning to love Davies’s He Knew He Was Right and think the Pallisers a masterwork beyond most — not comparable because of the length and complexity and depths.
Thank you again,
Ellen
A postscript: When in the 19th century males succeeded in keeping women out of public spaces, they of course were keeping these spaces for males only. In a recent book, Patrick Leary talks about this wonderful table the British Library where the all male contributors to Punch would gather and talk. In her Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf talks about how it feels to be a woman not only kept out of most librarians, but even urged to get off the grass. In his book Trollope and the Magazines, we see Trollope when he left his job made two concerted efforts to start periodicals addressed chiefly to men, whose contributors were 99% male (they failed commercially when this was tried and so had to be abandoned)
In his book Turner says the books of Eva Sedgwick most fully and candidly map what we know about male relationships in fiction : Between Men and the Epistemology of the Closet.
Turner implies her analysis of texts helps demonstrate his thesis about Trollope’s soft-core porn joky-nervous stories. Since a number of books have been written about masculinity in Victorian and other times since Turner, her book is no longer so central; but she does write in a decently unembarrassed and reasonable style without becoming insistently upbeat.
So I went back and read in both. Between Men is a feminist book and tells how the relationships between men in books shapes how the women are seen and presented. It’s in her Epistemology of the Closet, that she has a chapter (“The Beast int the Closet”) where she goes over a number of acute sketches of bachelors in Thackeray which strike me as very like Trollope’s and what he enjoyed intensely and were in his mind when he rated Thackeray’s fiction so highly. These are the drones Trollope identifies and seems so to castigate, but, truth to tell, he often castigates what he in another part of his mind sympathizes with or is attracted to.
I’m not going to scan in the many passages she quotes from Thackeray’s texts: they are in a jokey style where we see a semi-debauched idle male (gentleman by trade) justify himself and sketch out (by implication) his sexy gambling pleasure-filled life. The pleasures come out as sordid and petty and the type reminds me of one of the speakers in Rameau’s Nephew, an idle conceited but desperate man who lives off others (and writes porn on the side).
Not that Sedgwick’s Between Men is not relevant to Trollope’s real depiction of men (not the idealised one we usually get — as in Letwin’s Tory book on gentlemen), for she analyses Henry Esmond there in an analogous light and that Trollope thought the best novel in the English language.
E.M.
[…] Jean begins by alluding to Mark Turner (they all do, his book is on Trollope in the Marketplace which apparently is about gender issues too), and then says she wants to show that Trollope cared […]
[…] Mark Turner’s book, Trollope in the Magazines shows the importance of male audiences to Trollope’s narrator’s sexual stance. […]