Phineas Finn: The Uprootedness of the Irish Member

Phineas (Donal McCann) off to his election campaign in Loughton, for a 2nd time (1974 Pallisers 5:9)

Dear friends and readers,

I have come to the end of teaching the second Palliser novel, Phineas Finn, or the Irish Member, and, as with the close of my teaching of the first Palliser, Can You Forgive Her?, I find so much was said of serious, and yet in such varied areas, that it would take a full chapter in a book to begin to do them justice. So, as with my first blog on teaching the Pallisers, I’m going to single out two threads or themes. One of them links Palliser 2 back to Palliser 1 and indeed many of Trollope’s novels; the other led us to some insights into Trollope’s modernity, the feeling as you read a good many of his novels, that they are not picturesque or pastiche history, but living vital modern-sounding texts.

In Can You Forgive Her? I suggested that we find heroines who seek autonomy, liberty, a way to remain true to their seemingly innate instincts by self-negating. If you refuse to be aggressively after desires that are presented by our society as instinctive, natural, normal and as it were retreat into yourself, refusing all these you gain autonomy and self-ownership, a space to be yourself in –- or to find or create an identity for yourself in. A secret self, another authentic existence. These natural desires are social constructs, not natural for all of us; many of us just don’t want for real what we are assumed instinctively to want. This is Alice’s standpoint: she wants out of the choices on hand; so too Lady Glen, for when confronted with Burgo’s demand she elope with him now, for there will never be another chance, she does not.

Phineas as the beginner, walking through the park to reach the Pallisers’ apartment, taking a cab only for the last 2 minutes (Pallisers 4:7)

In a book about a young man building a career for himself, making a place in the world quite different from the one he was born in, this following of the innate self or desires takes another form: Bill Overton (The Unofficial Trollope) described the pattern of action as self versus society. Again and again in Phineas Finn, he decides to do something, say not follow a legal career with Mr Low, but rather go into Parliament based on one man, Barrington Erle, finding a place (a rotten borough) he thinks Phineas could win. Everyone he talks to outside the Parliamentarians and his mentor and patroness, Lady Laura Standish, tells him how wrong and self-destructive such a choice will be. We move from his father (who doesn’t mean it), to Mr and Mrs Lowe, to Bunce, to Phineas himself. Late in the novel when he decides to vote for Irish tenant rights, and thus leave his gov’t place (and salary) and then Parliament itself (as he cannot afford it), everyone but his then admired mentor, Mr Monk, tell him how wrong, self-destructive and counter-productive such a choice will be. We get two sets of chapters of people “attacking” him.

Phineas stalking Violet (Mel Martin) (Pallisers 5:9)

He is not alone. Violet Effingham has four suitors, two she is drawn to, Oswald, Lord Chiltern and Phineas, and two she is not, Lord Fawn (very foolish) and Lord Appledom (very old), and each time she draws near a choice, she is surrounded by voices who urge her against her determination, be it Chiltern, a violent idle man, or Phineas, a poor, non-ranked needy one. Lady Laura marries Lord Kennedy in spite of her father and brother’s advice, distaste; then she leaves him in spite of not only her father and brother’s reluctant approval, but the hostility of the rest of her world.

This repeating pattern is what fuels the patterns and rhythms of many of Trollope’s novels, from Mr Harding in The Warden, Josiah Crawley in Framley Parsonage and Last Chronicle, Mark Robarts and Lucy (against different people but mostly Lady Lufton) in Framley, Lily Dale against so many when she refuses Johnny Eames, and nowadays legions of readers. I could go on but I’ve said enough: it is a pattern of alienation, of resisting the pressure to socially conform. The character does not have to be making the ethical choices: Lord Chiltern resisting his father and Violet. Sometimes a character acts this way, and were we not convinced that Mary, Lady Mason did the right thing in defying and disobeying the law, forging a codicil to a will because her mean selfish elderly husband would not leave any property to the son she had by him so he could not have been educated to be a gentleman, we might say she is hardening herself in her crime.  When late in Orley Farm Lady Mason is anticipating her trial the next day Trollope raves over John Everett Millais’s depiction of her earlier in the novel:

Found in Orley Farm, Volume 1, Chapter 5, “Sir Peregrine Makes a Second Promise”

She was now left alone, and according to her daily custom would remain there till the servant told her that Mr. Lucius was waiting for her in the dining-room. In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room—that pleasant room, looking out through the veranda on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned upon her elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart, and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength,—more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her … As she now sat thinking of what the morrow would bring upon her,—thinking of all that the malice of that man Dockwrath had brought upon her,—she resolved that she would still struggle on with a bold front. It had been brought home to her that he, her son, the being for whom her soul had been imperilled, and all her hopes for this world destroyed,—that he must be told of his mother’s guilt and shame. Let him be told, and then let him leave her while his anguish and the feeling of his shame were hot upon him. Should she be still a free woman when this trial was over she would move herself away at once, and then let him be told. But still it would be well—well for his sake, that his mother should not be found guilty by the law. It was still worth her while to struggle. The world was very hard to her, bruising her to the very soul at every turn, allowing her no hope, offering to her no drop of cool water in her thirst. But still for him there was some future career; and that career perhaps need not be blotted by the public notice of his mother’s guilt. She would still fight against her foes,— (Orley Farm, Vol II, Chapter 63, The Evening Before the Trial)

We may seem to have gone far from Phineas: we have not. He too holds out, holds firm, stands for his version of integrity.

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Now for Trollope’s modernity:

Phineas and Mr Monk (Bryan Pringle) in Ireland around Christmas discuss the coming vote in Parliament for Irish tenant rights (Pallisers 5:10)

To move to the thesis I presented to the classes, which enough people found interesting to discuss: after all the reasons we’ve come up with to explain why after hundreds of pages of struggle to get into Parliament, please and make friends with colleagues, and thence into office, and do a good job, to show what an able orator he is, Phineas decides to do what others and he himself regard as self-destruction, self-engineered defeat from his adherence to his Irish constituents (he does not seem very Irish, let alone Catholic) and principles (Trollope will not allow him so much as a peep to curtail landlord’s property rights), to feeling he is Irish (I used McCourt’s book, Writing the Frontier, & Owen Dudley Edwards’ long article on Trollope as an Irish writer) and should have a seat which is not rotten, to sheer melancholy (self-berating, disillusioned appraisals of everyone around him and himself), I suggest Phineas behaves the way he does because he feels he does not belong to the upper class English world all around him; then when he comes home, he discovers he has become an alien of sorts there too. He belongs nowhere and yet can function everywhere: in London he can plan a good railway for western Canada. He and Madame Max are uprooted people, like many of us.

The book I suggested delves into the causes of modern uprootedness is Simone Weil’s 1940 existential L’enracinement (mistranslated as The Need for Roots)

She explains or gives a history of how money and the state came to replace much more natural attachments: local, and now the familial is a desperate resort. Nation replaced religion which was seen to be powerless to help you – only controlled you – for African-Americans church was the one place to turn to. She gives history of industrialization as a building of prisons (factories) with severe limits on people desperate for a means of survival – by money. Families break up and shame is used to silence people. Taxes are a totally arbitrary imposition by one of these totalitarian nation-state gov’ts – or groups of people sometime headed by a king. People learned to hate the state but then in an odd inversion worship the very thing in concrete forms (the country) that they hate in people forms (bureaucrats) because they are deprived by people who manipulate these gov’ts for their own aggrandizement.

Here is Sartre’s description of how this alienation forms:

we must move deep into our own minds and remain true to them. We are obligated to feel a reality of anguish and abandonment when we realize we cannot turn to others to create our own meaning; at the same time as irrespective of others, no matter how they might try to stop us, we must fulfill our talents. We find we are here existing. (This reminds me of Heidegger’s thrownness.) The individual exploration of the self is what matters. We are a presence to ourselves. At the same time we must be responsible for our acts. If circumstances are against your doing something, Sartre says it is still cowardly not to do it — he insists you have the potential or capacity to act so not to act is a choice. Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity) says we have this impulse to disclose our real selves, to be found out and then to act out amid others what this real self is.

Is not this Phineas in so many of his soliloquies and finally his speeches in Parliament so carefully performed?

Weil again: she says since industrialism, the growth of enormous cities, the eradication of a sense of place by our having to move with say a job and the job itself can disappear tomorrow – employer knows no obligation to you – so what happens people latch onto nationalism, this idea of an imagined community we all belong to and call home. This identity we attribute to others and then ourselves. Well Madame Max has moved with her marriages, and now that she is (rumored) to be paying a second husband to stay away, it seems that in Vienna she cannot live the respected high social life she craves. So she comes to London to find a new community, and works hard to be accepted and rise “towards the light,” with her exquisite dinner parties, her dress, her wit.

What is so modern about Trollope is characters who are at home nowhere, who have no sense of belonging and long to belong and are at home everywhere – Madame Max a chief surrogate for this kind of thing. You can’t belong. There is nowhere to belong to. People in the room may not be willing to go so far as me in this idea. You can try to erect your own home – halcyon place (I recall Camus with his absurdist resolutions in Sisyphus.

Máire Ní Ghráinne as Mary Flood Jones reading Phineas’ letter promising to return and marry her (an addition by Raven who felt Phineas’s return might otherwise not be believable) — there is much brilliant use of filmic episotolary in the Phineas matter of the Pallisers (6:11)

Lest my reader think me gone mad with modernity, I called attention to an essay by Henry Rogers (“The Art of Madame Max,” Philological Review, 33, Fall 2007) on being in love with Madame Max her at the close he argues that Marie Goesler is the most quintessentially autobiographical of all Trollope’s characters. She plays many roles where she discloses her self – and reveals a carefully crafted persona protects her: in her Trollope unites the self and society, the internal and external worlds, realizing herself and being hersel, but she has known and continues to know much pain and loneliess – Barbara Murray tries to convey this again and again – the singing for example – in Phineas Redux she is superb – when she learns of his marriage to Mary Flood Jones and her pregnancy remarkable moment – who could do it today?

Here is Marie at the Duke’s extravaganza party at the Horns just after Phineas has rejected her offer of her money, with or without marriage (Pallisers 6:11)

And the idea that Phineas is a surrogate for Trollope is so common (having been in effect voiced by Trollope himself) I need not argue it.

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I conclude on how we ended our penultimate session (the last one was devoted to showing clips from Raven’s Pallisers): I brought into class an essay just printed in Trollopiana, by John Graves, where he argued that Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux are two separate books, among other things that PF stands very well just on its own with no loose ends. My two classes begged to differ. We took Trollope’s view that we have one novel or one story in two books. An overarching trajectory of the evolution of a specific group of characters over time links the two. One person even read aloud the final sentence of PF, and said when she had finished that, she turned the page expecting another chapter

In a brilliant wholly invented scene Phineas breaks up with his original friend, Laurence Fitzgibbon (Neil Stacey) as Fitzgibbon insults Phineas savagely as nobody, nothing, a cheat because Fitzgibbon thinks he has roots & rights as a landowner’s son and Phineas is threatening that (Pallisers 5:10)

Most people seemed very much to enjoy the novel and the older serial drama too — the final sessions in both classes were on Simon Raven’s Pallisers.  This series has stood the test of time (and no one else getting a true chance to re-adapt with full needed budget):  there I was describing filmic epistolarity, over voice, how a film is an art in its own right, and yes admitting to the losses of hidden inner life the novel as a form has on offer.

Next Up: The Eustace Diamonds

Ellen

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Poldark: The Fifth Season: Episodes 5-8: an open-ended ending

Nampara and the sea

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask — concluding passage spoken by Demelza in Graham’s Angry Tide is divided up, re-paraphrased to be more sentimental and spoken by Ross and Demelza in tandem as concluding passage in 8 but for Ross’s promise to return

Friends and readers,

The ending of the eighth episode of this (last?) fifth season is carefully structured so that its last scenes (and words) are those the eighth Poldark book, The Stranger from the Sea implicitly rehearses at its opening as the remembered ending of the 7th book, The Angry Tide. In case we don’t see this (Debbie Horsfield has to keep in mind the viewership may not have read the first seven books upon which the five seasons of the new Poldark are based), she underlines a projected intent with a (overdone) reiteration by Ross that he promises Demelza he will return. The music surges, his figure is seen walking into the distance rhythmically like some god or force as she watches from the cliff.

Ross’s (Aiden Turner) last words to Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson): “I swear to you, my love, I will return ….”

In this second half of the season once Despard (Vincent Reagan) is hanged, the love stories that Horsfield has developed out of Graham’s material and her additions take over what subjective space and matter there is and are more or less concluded: Cecily Hanson (Lily Dodsworth-Evans) attempts to elope to Jamaica with Geoffrey Charles (Freddie Wise) and is thwarted by her father. Morwenna (Ellise Chappell) cannot resist stalking the small child John Conan, causes emotional havoc for herself and Drake (Harry Richardson) and almost lands Drake in prison once again, except that the harridan old woman, Lady Whitworth (Rebecca Front) softens, after which we are expected to believe Morwenna goes home cured, ready to have sex with Drake. (What does one thing have to do with another? She was not avoiding sex because she was in love with this child — it was her memories of harrowing sadistic sex that froze her.)

Tess (Sofia Oxenham) functions like the femme fatale of spy thrillers (more on this in the comments) except she is a thug: she heads a band of thieves stealing precious ore from Ross’s mine, she lures Sam (Tom York) turned stupid once again, away from the good pious Rosina (Amelia Clarkson), and has an affair with Ross who himself uses her for his plot to undermine the French conspiracy to invade England.

Side stories suggested briefly: Caroline’s (Gabriella Wilde) maternal instincts are aroused when Mowenna’s baby is born and, like Morwenna with Drake, almost miraculously, she is ready once again to have sex and a child with Dwight (Luke Norris). A much better scene is the one where she thinks of how she can approach someone powerful to protect Dwight from whatever he is doing (he also keeps her in the dark)

Sam and Rosina are a convincing pair until the silly Tess material intervenes and then they given but one scene together — it is effective their making up

Caroline is given gravitas in her dress and behavior in the last parts of the fifth season — mostly during the trial and aftermath

I say what subjective matter there is because in the last two episodes of the season, the script is that of the spy-mystery thriller action-adventure melodrama so typical of serials on most TV channels in the last few years. The trajectory is that Ross (at first to save his own life when he is captured by a French traitor-revolutionary) pretends to join in on a French conspiracy to invade England; he is gathering information so that he can send it to William Wickham, and thus restore the respect he had enjoyed from this man before he became involved with Despard. He hides this motive and this aim from everyone so that he appears to have distanced himself and become another man, mean, cold, sexually unfaithful.

We are then treated (inbetween bouts of sentimental stories) antic twists and turns to as each of the characters who care so much for Ross and are so worried about him and put-off by his behavior themselves go through a trajectory of super-anguish, super-heroism, anger, and so on to match his, all presenting their inner souls in melodramatic (over-done) gestures. Time is taken out for Cecily and Geoffrey Charles to attempt two elopements, an absurd attempt of George to marry Cecily to spite his step-son (deterred by the step-son suggesting Cecily could be pregnant so George would have another illegitimate child), Ross and Demelza to hide the lovers who are nonetheless snatched away, he beaten within an inch of his life, she deciding she would rather not marry anyway, but for a moment feeling for him.

The reviews made fun of much of this, either implying or saying outright all was preposterous, outrageous improbability. Why should (for example) Meceron (Tim Dutton) and Hanson (Peter Sullivan) come to Cornwall to confide in George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) and his uncle (Pip Torrens) as their own means of revenging themselves on Ross. What should they revenge themselves on him for anyway? George Warleggan as a character is turned into convenient never-ending engine of spite against Ross until the last moment. (In the later books he dislikes Ross intensely but he has other interests.)

Geoffrey Charles and Cecily parting — they are the romance couple of the season

Everything culminates in Ross’s plan to have his friends (Drake, Sam, Zacky Martin [Tristan Sturrock]) set off fireworks to warn people (who we are told) of the invasion just as it starts (which it never seems to). He has told Dwight the truth since Dwight (whose character is utterly travestied) threatens to end the friendship unless Ross explains himself and Dwight is involved somehow or other. Since all our male friends are enlisted for this spectacle we have Morwenna and Rosina and Caroline (reminding me of Kitty in the 1950s Gunsmoke while Matt is out endangering his life) at home worrying. One of them even says “Be careful” in that usual way. At the last minute finally Demelza is told (off-stage so we have to guess) that Ross has all along been behaving as a mole-spy, having an affair with Tess as part of this cover-up.

So what does she do but rush back to Nampara to throw herself into the very danger from the French working there, which danger Ross purported to be protecting her from. A wholly improbable duel emerges because she then pretends to want to have sexual intercourse with the French leader in front of Ross to humiliate him. How far can we go? But along comes an unexpected deus ex machina: George, who turns up with a conscience and a gun to stop the dueling; he cannot bear to betray his country. (Everyone who is a major character must have some good qualities.) And (like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes) wakes everyone up to what is supposed reality.

Ross with sword — no cuckold he —

The program is now ready to swing back — in effect to erase all that has happened for 8 episodes. Geoffrey Charles (his name is never shortened), while bitterly disappointed, turns from grief to studying and training to be a soldier; he can certainly ardently love someone else – as he does in The Stranger from the Sea. Morwenna and Drake now have that baby, Loveday (with the strange name explained) we learn is growing up when we finally hear of her in Stranger from the Sea; Tess exposed, there is nothing left for Rosina and Sam but to marry as they are when the new book opens.

A self-reflexive touch was to bring Robin Ellis back as the Judge Halse who will put Merceron and Hanson away for a long time so we get Aidan Turner and Ellis shaking hands just about near the end. Poldark lives on you see – then we learn Demelza, now completely reconciled to Ross’s lying (and behavior) is pregnant again (accounting for Isabelle-Rose whom we will meet in Stranger from the Sea).

Some of these scenes could have been moving, and for fleeting moments are (Harry Richardson manages it) were it not that they are given such brief mostly unprepared for scenes and embedded in spy-thriller nonsense. I found Ross and Demelza’s last scene ludicrously overdone because of the reiterated “I will return.” If you turn off the sound, the actors are effective. By the time of Stranger in the Sea Ross has been away for months, in London and in Portugal and Spain, working for reform, and now a quiet agent-spy for George Canning. He returns to Demelza, presented as preferring Cornwall, one-third of the way into the book.

Far shot of George taking leave of Trenwith and the staff with dignity

Close up of him looking round once more at this place he had so coveted

One exception is the curiously moving silent pantomime moment given slow ritual play seen at a distance when George leaves Trenwith – which has been left abandoned when Stranger in the Sea starts again. The actor did pull it off, for a moment the last hour of this fifth season was lifted from its concluding morass of absurdities.

Ross takes out time to shame Tess (who Demelza says she feels sorry for but is smugly looking on) — the ejected bad woman

In the last two episodes especially of the fifth season we have the embarrassing spectacle of a intelligent and thoughtful woman script-writer and “creator” (the writer is the linchpin person of these costume dramas on British TV) leading a team of capable people to make a travesty out of fine somewhat seriously intended historical fiction. I presume it’s the drive for high ratings and in a gut level way her own lack of sympathy for costume drama and liberal-left politics. It saddens and dismays me to see this. She does update: Ross is “disappeared” by Hanson and Merceron at the opening of the 8th episode (like any rebel in contemporary fascist dictatorships)

Despard on the scaffold just before he begins to speak

Catherine watching from below

What is valuable in this fifth season (though represented through the lens of hostile conservative historians) is the presentation of the Despard story. I assume many more people will now have heard of this man than have done for many a decade. At the close of the fifth and sixth episodes time and dignity are afford the trial, testimonies and killing of Despard. He is allowed to give part of his speech at the time. Debbie Horsfield has read her history and the names of the men murdered alongside Despard are there and accurate.

Catherine Despard (Kerri McLean) was a pro-active intelligent woman who did all she could to publish what was cruelly inflicted on her husband and others in the prisons and to obtain a pardon for him after the guilty verdict. I was glad to see though Horsfield seemed to feel she needed to knit Catherine into the love stories so she has Dwight falling in love with Kitty (again a repeat — he fell in love with Keren Daniels, also another man’s wife Caroline reminds him) there was no sign of this woman having a romance with Dwight. Indeed in the story he is made to testify that Despard was mad and not responsible for his actions, the slur the newspapers placed on Despard’s actions, which survived into the 19th century histories of the incident.

Costumes, setting, music: Looking back over the five years I’d say one of the strongest elements has been a combining use of music and landscape to mesmerize the viewer, to create a continual mood which draws upon the place (Cornish landscape, seascape, minescape) and the projection of passion in the actors. When a sequence or scene is given some time, it’s been especially effective, but even when the scenes are swiftly and endlessly switched back and forth, the music offers a continuity that binds the experience together. The costumes blended in, did not call attention to themselves except when the character was in an occasion.

This last season a decision was made to dress Eleanor Tomlinson in an emerald green pelisse and matching squarish hat; the effect was to emphasize her height, and make her look mannish; since several times she is put on horseback, riding to some rescue, I suppose this was an attempt to make her into a female hero but found it grating, alienating. I have read comments by her which suggest how much she loves the Demelza of Graham’s books. Before this role I loved the way she embodied characters; here she has been made to alternate between a calculating hardened shrew and a woman whose understanding of love is a demand her lover prove it.

A rare unforced thoughtful moment for Tomlinson as Demelza

All along I have suggested that making Aidan Turner into a central over-sexualized fetish undermined the sometimes effective ensemble nature of the story, and what I suggest what Graham’s general aim: to provide a picture of an earlier time and place with his hero as an effective if self-contained and private presence within a group.

I was interested to notice that the ending of the second season of the first Poldark season (1975, Warleggan) where we see Ross (Ellis) and Demelza (Angharad Rees) walking on the beach as he prepares to return to the army and she to wait for him in Cornwall was in effect revived. Also an utter departure from Graham’s book

If the series does return, my hope would be that Debbie Horsfield returns to her literal closeness to the books in the first and third seasons. I think the problem for me all along has been Debbie Horsfield’s lack of sympathy with some of Graham’s central conceptions so that her stories while variations on Graham’s stories Horsfield, lack or are the reverse of his outlook. This year she dropped Graham just about altogether except his method (the choice of a minor historical figure, costume drama itself). At core what I have liked all these years is the transfer of the matter of Graham’s Poldark into these videos, realized through effective acting, dramaturgy, the whole experience of film. The anticipatory hints suggest more frustration. In lieu of Portugal and Spain as the secondary setting, and the colonialist war of the era (called the Peninsular war) at the opening of The Stranger from the Sea we might find ourselves in Paris, France, near Napoleon (better known), with Ross as Canning’s spy and Dwight as Ross’s sidekick, spending time investigating psychological “medicine” in a nearby sanitarium.

Demelza, Caroline, Dwight

Hail and farewell.

The two Rosses

Ellen

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