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
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I attempted to participate in a group read on the Trollope society face-book page of Phineas Finn around the time of Trollope’s birthday (April) as his signature book. I volunteered to write summary-evaluations (synopses? redactions) on Chapter 61-64. It seemed to me my first was deleted, and the second only put on out of time, so I repeat them here as I worked hard on them and close readings of some parts of brilliant works provide another way of understanding them:
I volunteered to write about 4 chapters in this marathon reading of Phineas Finn as one of Trollope’s signature books on the occasion of his birthday (61-64). Here is my summary of the first two chapters:
Chapters 61 & 62 are a pair. The first titled “another duel” alludes to Phineas’ and Chiltern’s violent gun duel earlier in the book, and will connect these 2 to the next 2 chapters (centering on Phineas). 61 is relatively short and concentrates on Madame Max’s inward reaction to the Duke of Omnium’s proposition she become his mistress; and then seeing she will not condescend to this lowering of her status, his proposal of marriage. The Duke informs Palliser he may be making changes in the disposition of his wealth because he may marry; Palliser tells Lady Glen who immediately suspects the candidate is Madame Max, and determines to prevent this, at least do something as her husband will not (he is more concerned with his budget is one of the chapters’ jokes). Lady Glen therefore visits Madame Max and out of her Lady Glen’s point of view tries to persuade Madame Max to reject the proposal: grounds include her son may lose the title, her gain of a title will degrade the Duke, limit her Madame Max’s liberty; this rouses Madame Max’s self-esteem to anger and a refutation she will injure the Duke by her yes. Phineas briefly visits Madame Max to convey a kind of parallel ambivalent situation to Madame Max’s and she laughs at him. Nonetheless the tone of the chapter is not light and reveals a woman whose mind is sore with thoughts of someone who wants this “coronet” as a pinnacle of success, having come from much lower status (country attorney’s daughter, now a widow of a “Jew banker”). The question is one Lady Glen’s words and Madame Max’s thoughts imply, Is this going to be what’s called success; what price she will pay in emotional pain when possibly rejected by “the Queen” (standing in for people of rank) and an impulse to prove Lady Glen and this “world” wrong.
The second is long, made up of two letters by Madame Max embedded in narrative and explanatory, meditative (about the two letters) and dramatic texts (a concluding scene). We begin with two pages of a mix of complicated thoughts on the part of Madame Max & Lady Glen: Lady Glen rehearses her rationales for accepting her coerced marriage to the Duke, and thinks as she was forced to marry so the Duke ought to be forced not to; now she has conceded this “coercion” was “proper” because of the position she has gained for herself and son; she vows not to allow Madame Max to succeed fully. There is an ugly racist strain in a long paragraph where she thinks were the baby to be “fair,” “pink” in complexion, with grey eyes, she could accept it better, but that the baby would be dark in skin and eye, “sallow” skinned she cannot. Madame Max’s letter of refusal is based on her articulating she is not worthy of him, that she has worked hard to obtain her present position as a woman accepted by and inside high society, and she will lose that and “the good opinion of those among whom I have attempted to make my way” — a very characteristic phrase there. We see that for Madame Max political ambition has been enacted in the social world as we’ve been watching it enacted by Phineas in the political one.
There are problems & contradictions here — for in Madame Max’s following thoughts we see what what actuated her was a desire to remain free, to do as she wants (when she wants), which no wife in this book can do, yet that freedom is limited since she is so intent on keeping these other people’s admiration. We see Madame also feels she might have made a great “success” of the position, would have gotten “real friends” (not the distant tenuous sham her veneer life has offered as she would be “one of them”), could love this aging man. And her letter was a form of triumph: that she remained above demeaning herself as (what she would have become in effect in this world’s eyes) the supplicant. She has not sold herself for this coronet. But her letter is careful not to breathe a word of this: she says Lady Glen’s boy is “safe” from her but may not be from other women; Lady Glen’s behavior was insulting. Madame Max emerges as actuated by a self-sustaining conception of her own innate moral value
E.M.
Here is a record of how I worried and also presented the problem of Phineas’s choices at the close of the book. Postings to TrollopeandHisContemporaries and on face-book:
1)
Teaching Phineas Finn across a whole term (going slowly over the text for real) I’ve come to see one of the aspects that we relate to so strongly is he is called upon to make choices — as is Lady Laura, and also Violet Effingham, to say nothing as yet of Lord Chiltern. Eventually he becomes a Master of the Hunt — in Trollope’s universe that is a useful paying occupation.
We see across the novel both Phineas and Laura making decisions that have consequences. In her case maybe she already made a decision whose consequences she had not realized and now must live with the results and make further decisions on how to. In his case life in the novel is now a series of choices when it comes to politics and love, and what I meant to say was how this relates to all of us — since all of us have over our lives made decisions, choices and have had to live with the consequences, some of which don’t emerge as quickly as Phineas’s seem to. We identity with him because maybe we have seen that it is not so easy to live with the consequences, they have been unexpected, and sometimes you cause events to happen whose results you might want to retrieve and cannot.
But there is one choice he makes which puzzles me. When he decides to vote for Irish tenants rights. After a whole long 5 year struggle, where he has won a career, a place (and if he loses a seat, another is found for him), income, respect, the love of several pretty rich women, he gives it all up to vote for Irish tenant right. Raven was so astounded by this he made Mary Flood Jones pregnant so as to account for this. I had always accounted for it this way: that Trollope knew he wanted his hero for another novel and to develop the character much further. If he had him hold on vote with the party after all, and marry Madame Max, there would be no story left.
But now I’m thinking it just doesn’t make psychological sense that he should make such a decisions when he knows how hard it will be to build a career as a barrister in Dublin – why Dublin suddenly. John McCourt argues that this is part of Phineas’s character as an Irish man and that he really cares about these issues and to end this way, to bring Phineas back to Ireland brings out how he is Irish, an outsider, with these instincts. My problem is two fold. While he likes Mary and says how he loves her best, he produces no reasons truly for preferring her to Madame Max and as we shall see in a way it’s an incompatible marriage. He went so far beyond her understanding. Raven brings this out in the series more emphatically.
More: I’m bothered that as with the talk about the secret ballot if we are to think Phineas cares so much why does Trollope not develop the issues more. In the case of the secret ballot Trollope never bring up the other side: you need a secret ballot to be free of pressure from landlord, employer, publican, other people. Then Phineas does vote against. In the case of tenants rights we only get once Monk say how (implied) wealth people will not invest in their property and make for wealth for themselves in Ireland because they cannot have any rights of usufruct — they will be rent-racked; they can’t keep the property in their control. But that’s such a narrow upper class view. Never mentioned is how the average person can’t make improvements in his house without being rent-racked. If we are to believe Phineas cares so much why do we never hear of this.
People in my class are already talking of how counterproductive is Phineas’s keeping at trying for Violet after the duel, after she keeps saying no. No one much believes in his love for her: they believe in his need for money. Then he so quickly switches to Mary once Violet produces the definitive no?
Any comments from anyone who has read the book?
My question could be reformulated as, Did Trollope succeed in presenting Phineas as a genuine Irish man? Laurence Fitzgibbon is a caricature of an Irish man in some ways, and he himself enjoys caricaturing himself. Why are we not told the particulars of Monk’s bill? We don’t go with Monk and Phineas to Limerick so that we are not privy to the real impulses that drive Phineas to give up all he has earned … Trollope said he made a blunder by making the character Irish, but that’s like his sneer at Lily Dale; he is deflecting criticism, I believe McCourt when he says one central raison d’etre for the two Phineas novels is to have an Irish man there and his outsider outlook.
Raven shows more of Ireland itself in his scenes in Ireland than does Trollope.
2)
I got various answers to my query on this on face-book. Mostly people just justified what is on the surface of the text, or took this or that assertion of the narrator as true. I realize that’s a way out.
I wrote in reply this way:
Because an author says a character is such-and-such, even as narrator within the function, that does not make me believe it. Phineas falls in love altogether more rapidly than is believable, and some of the other characters remark on this, especially Laura and Violet. Love in the novel seems to be the equivalent of: this woman is free (either Laura or Violet), I lust after her and she has money ergo I love her; then this woman is no longer free or she really means no (Trollope males actually say over and over that no does not mean no), so I love this next best one (Mary or almost Madame Max). We see him having to argue himself into believing he loves Mary because forsooth she loves him and needs him more than the other women do or did. Phineas’s sense of honor does not preclude standing for rotten boroughs, or standing for a borough where he knows that he is working to thwart the borough’s supposed controller- big landlord (Brentford) crucial desires for his son (Chiltern). If Trollope wanted to convince of the rightness of Phineas’s vote for tenant rights, he should have made the argument for it in Phineas’s mind clear. He never does. It’s fine with me that Phineas’s Catholicism is invisible (maybe I prefer this) but the invisibility does not make his portrait of a Catholic Irishman does not help make the portrait convincing; quite the opposite. All big novels have flaws because they are dealing with real life in a probable way (or are supposed to) and at the same time obey the most wooden of conventions in order to have a shapely story with beginning, middle and ending — life is not like that at all.
Isuggest too that Trollope wanted a melancholy ending; he did not want Phineas to have a meaningful success. Why it’s hard to say. Did he want to show a poor man could not be in Parliament and vote with integrity? or just want an ambivalent ironic close? It didn’t matter what are the specific issues or what Phineas’s imagined specific identity. He just wanted that mood in his close. Or he wanted to put his hero away until such time as he would write another book on him — he had put all in place to do it again — Madame Max waiting there and all the characters saying, oh you’ll be back 🙂
Linda:
I’ve just (re)read the section where Bunce is arrested at the protest and I have either more appreciation or more awareness of the impact of this incident on Phineas’s moral conscience. People have a right to express their political opinions in a peaceful way as Bunce has done without being strong armed by the police and court system. This is the first time that I see zphineas as actually having an opinion based on his own ethics and which he is passionate about, despite his disastrous performance in Parliament trying to elucidate his position and despite the fact that it runs counter to the party and the people who mean the most to him- Laura, Violet and Brentford.
Are we meant to think of this as a first step in the awakening of Phineas as an independent political thinker? So that when he does take the enormous leap of leaving Parliament we should remember this and understand how his mind has been slowly changing? Throughout the novel so far he continuously sees himself as a fraud, as someone unfit to be in Parliament. That to be honorable would mean a return to Mary and to Mr. Low. When I first read the novel this continual ping ponging just frustrated me, but now I see it as evidence (maybe not forceful enough) for his final decision at the end of the novel. Certainly I agree that Trollope did have to have the novel end with Phineas being an honorable man if he is the hero. Otherwise he would not have been worthy of Madame Max!
October 12-13, 2019
Thank you very much for this reply, Linda. It’s very helpful.
Yes in that incident we see a bit of true reality — only I think Bunce might have been even more roughed up by the policeman than he was, and Trollope insists in presented police often as super-neutral except with regard to their own ego. So it was only when Bunce started to say he had the right to assemble and demonstrate and Trollope tells us the Policeman took this personally that he became angry at Bunce. In fact many policemen have conservative points of view; that’s part of why they become policement; they believe in being agents of the state gov’t and identify whoever is running the state gov’t with the “country” (whatever that is ) or “people at large” (‘invisible majority” is the tendentious formulation Nixon came up with.
Yes I agree that after this incident (and before too) we see him berating himself as a fraud. Yes I can see we might be headed for seeing him as finally utterly disillusioned — we are told he is disillusioned when Laurence Fitzgibbon is given a job he has no intention of doing at a high salary, and he Phineas a small job with no salary. But Cantrip does come up to Phineas’s expectations of a public servant and gets rid of Fitzgibbon and chooses Phineas in his place.
Maybe what I’m wanting is more evidence and no gaps, and more forceful evidence. As I recall in Simon Raven’s adaptation we are at least shown (though so fleetingly) the state of Irish people’s roofs; the tenant won’t fix it because his rent will go up. Maybe I’d have liked to see Phineas getting indignant at what he saw in Ireland and this being explicitly part of his thinking. Instead the discourse at the end is mostly laments — by others who say Phineas is so suitable for serious gov’t office work. All the talk is about how he can’t live without a salary and at no point does Phineas really come out explicitly to say he is disillusioned. In fact he tells Monk when Monk says Phineas and his efforts are going for nothing, no, they are bringing the attention of the legislators and people (who read) to this issue.
It is presented as a defeat for Phineas to go home — except for the moment in Parliament when he stands up and speaks at length. But then we are not told what he said. That is where I am so frustrated. I want to know that Trollope recognizes the justice of tenants rights for all tenants and he doesn’t do that. He has Gresham say it’s all so complicated he doesn’t understand it. We are told he did the honorable thing but not quite why it is so honorable. It is honorable for more reasons than he told the truth about his point of view. It is honorable because tenants rights is the honorable position.
As medicare for all is the honorable position — however we get there. All people in the land mass of the US should have affordable access to good health care. It’s also the content that Phineas stands up for.
I felt to give him a salary as someone in charge of poorhouses was a poor joke — the kind of joke that Trollope indulges in at that Bazaar in Miss Mackenzie. Negro as a cause is ridiculed and by presenting the place given Phineas this way it becomes ridiculed. Poor houses were terrible places and desperately in need of reform. Orphaned black children were in desperate position
I both wish Trollope were more of a liberal or braver in his presentation of his hero. Did he truly think it a defeat or a triumph for Phineas; if he wants us to see it as both he didn’t sufficiently present what happened as a triumph. Probably in reality such choices don’t feel like triumphs so again to stick to realism helps the conversative position.
3)
I don’t think anyone can perfectly answer if Trollope succeeded in
presenting Phineas as an Irishman. We would have to be an Irishman
living in the 1850s to answer that I think, but I am not surprised
Phineas would side with the Irish tenants, or that Trollope would have
him do so. I think Trollope understood the true poverty and difficulties
the Irish faced – I say that after having been blown away by his
depictions of the potato famine in Castle Richmond.
Tyler
My idea is in terms of what Trollope has presented for several hundred pages what Phineas does at the end of the novel does not seem probable; it seems forced. All novel long he has done all he can — at cost of integrity, of an alternative career as a barrister, at risk of his very life (in a duel somewhat forced on him) gotten into Parliament, stayed there against great odds, and been himself part of a point of view that says what gains we have today we will build on, we will compromise and take what we can for our side and gradually win what is needed for people in general. Suddenly he throws all this over — because he wants to end the novel in melancholy, with the idea that a poor man cannot act with integrity in parliament and last, and (I think) wants to write another book in somewhat of the same vein about this character. Like Ross Poldark by the end of the Season 5, at the end of the book, if not Phineas (in Ross’s case it is Aidan Turner who keeps saying in these numinous accents he will return), then many of the characters say he will be back.
I hold against the fiction as a flaw that 1) nowhere does Trollope explain why the secret ballot is so desperately needed by the average person so that if he or she can get the vote, he or she will actually be able to vote for someone working for his or her interest; and 2) equally while he does have Monk present an argument for tenants rights’ from the viewpoint of someone with wherewithal to invest in Ireland to create say some wealthy home or business he does not present anywhere what are the reality of the hovels Irish people lived in because any improvement the average person would make would quickly lead to his or her rent going up. He does say he does not want to present that debate because English readers would be bored but I think they might have endured a couple of sentences had he had the belief himself in helping the desperate that way (it goes against unqualified capitalism – maybe that’s why Gresham says he can’t understand what is wanted – again Trollope doesn’t explain) since he had had the courage to do so much else.
4)
As always, many good points I’ll try to keep in my head as I continue reading. Do you think that Trollope diluted any real discussion/representation of Irish concerns because of his English readership? ( We can discuss in class, don’t want to hijack this group for a book no one else is reading!)
Yes right now only I and you are reading Phineas Finn, but we have read this book on this list twice now, and about 2 years ago a few of us watched the Palliser series, week by week. It is also simply a book very well known, not quite the Pride & Prejudice of Trollope studies, but coming close. It was the book chosen for the “celebration” (an over-used word) of Trollope’s birthday this past year on the Trollope face-book page, so there is overlap.
Still I get the point so let me say I will save what we have said until a few weeks from now in class – except for your comments on Bunce which are a propos for this week.
But I want to say to all that last night I watched two of the Phineas Finn episodes from the Pallisers: especially 5:10 or the 10th episode seems written to make up for all that Trollope left out — as if Raven was seeing the same problem I’m outlining. I had not noticed this before because last time I didn’t closely compare. So in the series 10th episode Phineas visits an Irish tenants house and we see the roof is falling apart and that the family live much more poorly because of the house is not fixed inside. Then Phineas and Monk make explicit arguments found no where in the books on what Irish tenant rights means to the average person, and Phineas’s decision to vote for is put in very different terms. He is doing the right thing — not doing what is a failure at all. Phineas’s Irishness is emphasized by the Christmas rituals. Finally he discusses this with Madame Max (who is a major figure since the 7th episode) and she outlines what is the hope and the cost to Phineas; she does offer him money and he refuses.. So I’d say everything I complained was left out is put in by Raven.
And more: we see Phineas urging a proposal to Violet and her anger at him and Lady Laura and this is juxtaposed with a scene of Phineas getting up from the ground with Mary Flood Jones’s arms around him — we have moved on to his having sex with this girl. Raven makes him look bad but also manages to convey the idea in Phineas’s mind these are two different places. He is still wrong here.
I’ll show some of these scenes in a second round of clips 🙂 I’ve discovered the Lady Glen material is held off until later in episode 10; it is not intertwined in the series at all for real. I guess it would not have made sense to a viewer who the video or film-makers could not assume had read the book or remembered it or was reading.
5)
Now I’m thinking that at the heart of this novel is a feeling of not belongingness: when Phineas leaves Horns, we are told he wants to throw himself into the river. He feels (as he has before) he does not belong; it is not just a matter of class, rank or even quite ethnic group; it’s that this is not his home; but when he returns to Ireland, is that his home. McCourt and Owen Edwards would say it was home enough; it rid him of depression, he throve there in Ireland, he felt more comfortable there, but note how much he traveled.
Yes a sub theme, conscious enough is that of integrity. We are to admire his integrity coming forth at long last but like Madame Max who grieves when she says no to the Duke, he is a character none of whose choices suit him. After all she is his true counterpart, not Mary Flood Jones.
I feel here is Trollope and will try to find his letter to Kate Field where he talks about himself as cosmopolitan in deepest impulse.
These are themes with resonance to us today: this past summer I read Simon Weil’s Uprootedness (misleading translated as The Need for Roots); her point is modern (20th century ) people are uprooted in deep ways and in seeking roots are led astray to false gods and imagined groups not there at all.
Ellen
This feeling of not belongingness could be what underpins his constant questioning of whether he has chosen the right path professionally- constantly thinking he’s made a mistake entering Parliament, not even being truly satisfied when he achieves his objectives. Also, perhaps that is why he’s so flighty with women. Constantly looking for a person with whom he can truly feel “at home” and provide him with a stability which he lacks.
Glenn Shipway: “Well said, Ellen.”
I always look forward to your blogs! Lucky are those who can attend your classes! How I wish they would air the Pallister series again!!!
Thank you for this comment. I wish they would hand the six books over to Andrew Davies and give him 6 seasons of 6 episodes each to do them in. Ellen
Susan McGlennan Schwartz “Wonderful essay!”
A Trollope-reading friend: “I liked your blog post about resistance as a form of self-definition (is that a fair précis?).”
Me: It’ll do — you add to the add by bringing the two ideas together. Yes resistance is a form of self-definition — Sartre would have liked this.
My friend: “I have often said that the derided focus on marriage choice in Victorian novels is not a dreary focus on marriage–it’s about who are you, most especially for women. But I see a strong analogy to Phineas’ pained decisions throughout. He must define himself, even if by surprising or disappointing people.
Me: Yes — what is interesting about Oliphant is that when the couple marries (often early in the novel), the self-definition first begins. One sees how badly people choose because they don’t begin to know themselves or to try to recognize who the other is. Phineas in choosing Mary Flood Jones is not thinking of her but himself.
My friend: ” He has to grow up quite a bit before he deserves Madame Max.”
Me: Yes. He is too young for her — in years he is younger too. Let’s say appreciates her …. By the way in a Wednesday night play (now I’m told wiped out) Donal McCann and Barbara Murray played adulterous lovers …. You see the carry-over baggage typing here … or an affinity between the two actors which the casting person glimpsed twice.
My friend: “As you know, I have never warmed to him as Phineas…just not good looking enough for all the fuss all the women make over him.
Murray as Max…is too fleshy (she’s supposed to be quite thin, and Murray is lovely but not skinny)–but her performance is idiosyncratically brilliant. That accent! Here is my Phineas: A real person, of course…John Calhoun Chamberlain. (American; a chaplain in the Civil War; Maine boy
Me: Hmmn. In my musings to the two classes and they back again, we picked actors and actresses. I couldn’t think of anyone different for Phineas: I feel he must look Irish somehow and am not familiar enough with recent Irish actors. Maybe Cillian Murphy who was Paul Montague in Davies’s The Way We Live Now. You’re right: looking at people in previous history seems more fruitful and I don’t know what the heroic politicians and martyrs looked like. Murray was too old too — but at the BBC at the time good acting, experience was more important than appealing looks — though they did try to find actors who looked the way they felt the author meant. For Madame Max I thought of Tuppence Middleton who played the corrupt but sophisticated Helene in Andrew Davies’s War and Peace – he presented he sympathetically.
My friend: “Among the living…maybe Rachel Weisz?
Me: Yes I like Rachel Weisz for Madame Max; she plays knowing Daphne DuMaurier heroines, strong women too, passionate in Constant Gardiner.
My friend: “She’s also, I believe, Jewish, which doesn’t hurt. The intensity and intelligence are about right. I can just about imagine Murray’s perfect mysterious mid-European accent coming out of that mouth. But I’m just playing now…please forgive me.”
Me: Nothing to forgive, a real pleasure to talk to you.
Virginia M Solomon “Love the stills!!”
Someone has said that Phineas Finn was Winston Churchill’s favorite novel by Trollope.