- The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Reading for the Twenty-First Century
This interesting collection of essays is the second publication I’ve recently reviewed from Ashgate that explicitly treats its subject—here, of course, Anthony Trollope—as a kind of Rorschach test for the varied and interdisciplinary investments of scholars of Victorian culture. The editors’ introduction explains that “each generation finds in Trollope the Trollope they wish to find” (8), a point that is particularly well suited to our current interest in methodological multiplicity and to Trollope’s abiding status as ambiguously political and ambivalently ideological. The emphasis on interpretive [End Page 506] openness and multifaceted reading also works well for collections of essays that emerge from rich and engaging scholarly conferences, as this book did from the 2006 Exeter Trollope Conference. In keeping with the promised eclecticism of the volume, the editors’ introduction also foreshadows the inevitable conflicts that reside within Trollope criticism and within (apparently) Trollope himself: both the novelist and his critics grapple simultaneously with the peculiar comforts and affective pleasures of Trollopian realism and the subversive power that his female characters in particular are accorded and enact.
While gender is the general theme that unites the individual chapters, the essays themselves are separated into four parts according to the subthemes “Sex, Power And Subversion,” “Imperial Gender,” “Genderized Economics,” and “The Gender of Narrative Construction.” As usual, however, this visible and explicit organizational structure is less interesting than the more subtle organizational principles that must have dictated the selection and arrangement of the essays we read here. While the subtitle is mostly right in its implication that these are “New Reading for the Twenty-First Century,” the editors are also invested in giving the audience a selection of Trollope criticism that foregrounds those shifting generational perspectives and places some of the most formidable and foundational voices in Trollope scholarship in conversation with “the next generation of Trollopians” (7). For this reason the volume itself seems to enact a passage of the Trollopian torch, moving from early chapters by Robert Polhemus, Margaret Markwick, and Deborah Denenholz Morse to closing essays predominantly written by emerging Trollope scholars like Steven Amarnick, Helen Lucy Blythe, Nathan K. Hensley, Christopher S. Noble, and Anca Vlasopolos. The inevitability of and even necessity for some torch-passing is especially evident in the first chapter where Polhemus returns to the “Lot complex” first articulated in his 2005 monograph Lot’s Daughters (2005) to describe “the drive or compulsion, in an age of growing female emancipation, to preserve, adapt, and/or expropriate the traditional paternal power to sustain, regenerate, define, and transmit life and civilization—the patriarchal seeds of culture” (11). After their mother is turned into a pillar of salt, Polhemus explains, Lot’s daughters “assume agency” and take responsibility for repopulating the earth by seducing their drunken father and becoming voluntarily pregnant with his children. This depressing biblical story becomes an “explanatory grid” for reading both Trollope’s life and his literature (12), especially in the cases of the two short tales Polhemus chooses here, “A Ride Across Palestine” (1861) and “Mary Gresley” (1869–70).
It’s a bold move to begin a study about gender politics in Trollope with an argument for female complicity and even pleasure in their own exploitation at the hands of older, powerful men. Indeed, more interesting than the literary interpretations this methodology inevitably produces is the curious explanatory grid this first chapter offers in turn to the collection of marvelous essays that follow. While the established feminist critics who also contribute to The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope—Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Jenny Bourne Taylor, Markwick, Morse, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Mary Jean Corbett, Elsie B. Michie—don’t explicitly challenge the precedent set by the first chapter, they do engage each other in an open conversation about the limits of liberalism that indirectly (and happily) critiques the persistence of...