Very Long Classic.
My ambition this summer is to read four stand-alones by Trollope that have been on the shelf for about two years. This is
the second, as I read An Eye for an Eye
for the category Tragic Classic a week ago. This summer the rainy weather has kept me from yardwork - mercifully - so what is there to do but read?
The American
Senator – Anthony Trollope
This 1876 novel is a sunny partly cloudy read, a fairy
tale for early summer. It features Arabella Trefoil, one of Trollope’s most
memorable creations. Like Griselda Grantly of Barsetshire
fame, Arabella is statuesque, pale, beautiful, graceful, and carefree or
impassive as she judges the situation requires. She has been relentlessly doing
the hard work of hunting a husband for about ten years, in the trying company
of her monstrous mother Lady Augustus. Like the awful Georgiana Longstaffe in The Way We Live Now, Arabella is dead tired of fortune-hunting:
I’ll tell you what it is,
mamma. I’ve been at it till I’m nearly
broken down. I must settle somewhere;-or
else die;-or else run away. I can’t
stand this any longer, and I won’t. Talk
of work,-men’s work! What man ever has
to work as I do?
Arabella has settled, kind of engaged to a dull martinet
of a diplomat, John Morton, heir to Bragton Hall located in the dull Midlands
hamlet of Dillsborough. In a brisk funny scene, one of the best in the novel,
his juniors in the Foreign Office call him The Paragon. Says Mounser Green, who
does important but unnamed things in the FA:
“…..When I heard about the
Paragon and Bell Trefoil at Washington, I knew there had been a mistake made.
He didn't know what he was doing. I'm a poor man, but I wouldn't take her with
£5,000 a year, settled on myself.” Poor Mounser Green!
“I think she's the handsomest
girl in London,” said Hoffmann, who was a young man of German parentage and
perhaps of German taste.
“That may be,” continued Green;—“but,
heaven and earth! what a life she would lead a man like the Paragon! He's found
it out, and therefore thought it well to go to South America. She has declined
already, I'm told; but he means to stick to the mission.”
Arabella sees a slight chance, however, with moneyed and
propertied Lord Rufford of Rufford Hall, in the neighborhood of Dillsborough.
Audacious Arabella throws the dice in a sequence of events that make the reader
first scorn, then admire, then feel bad for the initial scorn. She’s playing
for the highest stakes possible to become a great lady, in other words:
…one who would be allowed to
swim out of rooms before others, one who could snub others, one who could show
real diamonds when others wore paste, one who might be sure to be asked
everywhere even by the people who hated her. She rather liked being hated by
women and did not want any man to be in love with her,—except as far as might
be sufficient for the purpose of marriage.
Besides not looking for love nor ever expecting it, she faces
many other obstacles to a good match. She has no allies, as her father shirks
all responsibilities and her mother is detested wherever she goes. Everybody is
on guard because they know she is hunting for husband as the sportsmen go after
foxes. Anyway, bad girl Arabella is the prime reason for reading this enjoyable
novel.
The title character does not play large a role though
having a book named for him would indicate otherwise. Elias Gotobed (the name
gets less annoying with repetition, trust me) is a stand-in for Trollope’s
critiques of Victorian society in the UK. The Senator tactlessly criticizes
English hypocrisy from a rationalist and utilitarian point of view, stomping on
the cultural corns of members of every level of society that he meets. The good
Senator believes in universals: “I don't understand your laws, but justice is
the same everywhere.” He is positive “nowhere on the Earth's surface was
justice more purely administered than in the great Western State of Mickewa”
which he is proud to represent. Trollope and his English characters share a
grudging respect for Gotobed and to my mind he’s hardly a caricature
considering the likes of real senators like – oh, never mind, who remembers
their pompous goddamn names anyway?
I mentioned above this is a fairy tale because besides set
in the Brigadoon of Dillsborough, it has an evil step-mother, Mrs. Masters, who
roasts Mary Masters, an innocent gentle country girl, because Mary rejects an
excellence match, sturdy farmer Larry Twentyman, because she doesn’t love Larry
but secretly loves Reginald Morton, who owns several properties in the
neighborhood. This inevitable love triangle in enlivened by Mrs. Masters’ berating of Mary. Mary Masters has been exposed to civilizing
influences of which Mrs. Masters thinks:
“…You have been reading books of
poetry till you don't know what it is you do want. You've got your head full of
claptraps and tantrums till you haven't a grain of sense belonging to you. I
hate such ways. It's a spurning of the gifts of Providence not to have such a
man as Lawrence Twentyman when he comes in your way. Who are you, I wonder,
that you shouldn't be contented with such as him? He'll go and take some one
else and then you'll be fit to break your heart, fretting after him, and I
shan't pity you a bit. It'll serve you right and you'll die an old maid, and
what there will be for you to live upon God in heaven only knows. You're
breaking your father's heart, as it is.” Then she sat down in a rocking-chair
and throwing her apron over her eyes gave herself up to a deluge of hysterical
tears.
Pretty funny. Trollope didn't say it - for once - so I will: Poor Mary!
I think this is worth reading especially for readers who
prefer Trollope’s darker novels such as He Knew He
Was Right and The
Way We Live Now over the earlier chipper novels of nice young women
discouraging perfectly suitable guys for 500 pages. Other reviewers think
the Senator and his social and political philosophy don’t really fit in the
novel, suggesting he and his sanctimonious rants be cut to get the novel from about 600 pages in three
volumes to about 450 in two. I don’t think so because, having lived overseas
for 10 years myself, I like stories of expatriates putting their foot in it and
mortifying the locals.
Finally, I encourage would-be readers to get the OUP
edition which probably has an introduction that you must read only after you read
the novel because the prof who wrote the intro will not give you spoiler alerts.
I read the orange Penguin pocket
edition of Tony’s complete works which includes neither a spoiler
introduction nor the usual end-notes that explain French and Latin tags or
explicate references to the classics and contemporary issues of the day. In
short, a reader is left to her own device if she wants to see Larry’s billycock
hat.
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