Can You Forgive Her? is built from three love triangles, each featuring one fellow who is a solid citizen, wealthy and dullish, and the other indigent, dangerous, but perhaps more fun, at least for a time. In the main story, the A plot, sensible Alice Vavasor does not just waver between the two types, but gets engaged to them, or keeps becoming engaged and then breaking the engagement. The entire interest of the story comes from the fact that Alice is not flighty or careless, but rather the reverse, yet she still makes a series of serious errors in the way she deals with her two suitors.
This plot shows Trollope at his best as a psychological novelist. I might wince as Alice makes a mistake, but I have spent enough time in her thoughts to understand her decision. The reader who finds her choices false will likely find much of the novel a failure, and even a snooze. Why spend so much time hashing through Alice’s thoughts and emotions if none of it makes any sense? But I thought the story of a rational woman wrestling with her pride made sense.
I doubt too many readers today feel the social weight of her dilemma too much anymore. Here Alice is with her grandfather:
“And that's the meaning of your jilting Mr. Grey, is it?”
Poor Alice! It is hard to explain how heavy a blow fell upon her from the open utterance of that word! Of all words in the language it was the one which she now most dreaded. She had called herself a jilt, with that inaudible voice which one uses in making self-accusations; – but hitherto no lips had pronounced the odious word to her ears. Poor Alice! She was a jilt; and perhaps it may have been well that the old man should tell her so. (Ch. 32)
“Jilt” is obviously not a dirty word, since Trollope can use it in a Victorian novel, but it had no weight for me. Jilt a half dozen more men, what do I care. The conflict that is still meaningful is the internal one.
The B plot is not introduced until a quarter of the way into the novel. A quarter is 200 pages, so it took its time. Young, beautiful, emotional Lady Glencora is not only regretting her marriage to a perfect gentleman, but is even tempted to run off with her dissolute first love, Burgo Fitzgerald (apparently not meant to be a silly name), even if he gambles her money away, runs around with other women, and in the end breaks her heart.
I think this is the first time in Trollope that I have encountered a mercenary marriage from the inside. Minor characters were previously allowed to marry for money, but not anyone I was supposed to care about. Lady Glencora is easily the most lively character in the novel, and the one most likely to say something interesting. So I will abandon her here. She will reappear in later Trollope novels.
The final triangle, the C plot, is comic relief, the romance of a newly widowed woman, now rich, trailing a pair of ridiculous men behind her. I read an old Oxford University Press edition of the novel which has a 1948 introduction by Sir Edward Marsh, who I think might himself be a Trollope character. He calls the battle between Captain Bellfield and farmer Cheesacre for the hand and bank account of Mrs. Greenow
a blot on the novel – farce at its lowest, and even if it were amusing, quite out of keeping with the other two; but luckily it is easily detachable, and I strongly advise anyone reading the book for the first time to skip it ruthlessly. (bold mine, first page of Preface)
Anyone with a sense of laughter will say nuts to that. Marsh hates the silly names, too. Why would you have someone with no sense of humor write the introduction to a Trollope novel?
Oh, there's plenty to come from the Palliser marriage - that's the psychological portrait which makes the series (and Trollope's reputation, really).
ReplyDeleteI've read other people say something like that. And I guess the Palliser series is named after the husband, isn't it? Or maybe it is named after Lady Glencora. She ends up running away with this novel, even with a 200 page handicap and an ending that is not entirely satisfactory (except that I know it is not really the end of her story).
ReplyDeleteThe great work of these years is Trollope's portrait of PP, a man whose life stretches nearly twenty years in real time, enabling the writer to adjust his character slightly. Palliser actually grows old and learns about life (the hard way) under our noses.
DeleteLady Glencora is more fun though, it's true.
I am going to have to read this, absolutely.
ReplyDeleteI really did know a jilt once!
Did you forgive her? The jilt, I mean?
ReplyDeleteThe title of this novel is, thankfully, ironic.
I'm pretty sure my father has been in love with Lady Glencora for decades. My mother has been very patient about it. She really is the heart of the series, which is what makes ... oops, almost dropped a spoiler! :-)
ReplyDeleteNo spoilers here. I have come across critics express regret at her absence in The Duke's Children.
ReplyDeleteNow that was pointlessly ambiguous. I mean, there are no such thing as spoilers here.
ReplyDeleteI got my copy of 'The Duke's Children' from England a while back (the trip took about eight weeks...). When I finally got it, I looked at the back cover and read what happened to poor Cora - it's a traumatic event which gives me some understanding of the teenage girls who cry about their favourite characters...
DeleteWell, I liked looking up jilt to find out what it means. Some words are so wonderfully precise and say so much about culture. So being jilted was a major concern for men of the time, I presume? That they invented a word for it?
ReplyDeleteI guess it was a concern for everyone, given that a girl who got dumped could sue for breach of promise.
DeleteSo true - but I am more used to stories where the man is the jilt, or where he is in danger of being entrapped. Trollope pivots the sympathy.
DeleteThere are also characters who will not be jilted, like the American Mrs. Hurtle who travels to England to remind her runaway fiancé of their engagement. That sounds almost like the plot of a certain Henry James' short story...
DeleteNow there is some good comedy. Any excuse to drag an American to Europe is good comedy.
DeleteAnd yet there's plenty of stuff to hate for us Americans on Trollope's TWWLN. I think the few lines quoted next were the original source of the British negative valuation of us 'Murricans as "smart" but without manners. The fact that that lioness, Mrs. Hurtle, who once shot a man, is 'chickified' by her contact with perfide Albion and the Albionians does not help, either.
Delete"And then, though, in all her very restricted intercourse with such English people as she met, she never ceased to ridicule things English, yet she dreaded a return to her own country. In her heart of hearts she liked the somewhat stupid tranquillity of the life she saw, comparing it with the rough tempests of her past days. Mrs Pipkin, she thought, was less intellectual than any American woman she had ever known; and she was quite sure that no human being so heavy, so slow, and so incapable of two concurrent ideas as John Crumb had ever been produced in the United States;--but, nevertheless, she liked Mrs Pipkin, and almost loved John Crumb.
She loved Paul Montague with all her heart, and she despised herself for loving him. How weak he was;--how inefficient; how unable to seize glorious opportunities; how swathed and swaddled by scruples and prejudices;--how unlike her own countrymen in quickness of apprehension and readiness of action! But yet she loved him for his very faults, telling herself that there was something sweeter in his English manners than in all the smart intelligence of her own land. The man had been false to her,--false as hell; had sworn to her and had broken his oath; had ruined her whole life; had made everything blank before her by his treachery! But then she also had not been quite true with him. She had not at first meant to deceive;--nor had he. They had played a game against each other; and he, with all the inferiority of his intellect to weigh him down, had won,--because he was a man."
The tone of my last post came out wrong. In that chapter, 97 which starts on page 900 of the novel (forget about page 90!) Trollope gives the reader a wonderful sense of closure and a happy ending by expanding of the two paragraphs I quoted. I don't want to spoil how completely and brilliantly Trollope redeems himself from this mean setup. And that is just one chapter from 100 of TWWLN.
DeleteOne chapter from 100, that is exhausting. I always take Trollope on long plane trips. I will have to plan something extra long for The Way We Live Now. A winter in Antarctica or something like that.
DeleteAs for the jilting, it was more important for the women really as large numbers of women ended up as old maids in the Victorian era...
DeleteOh yes, since the women have no means of support outside of their family, the marriage contract is even more of a financial contract than for the men.
DeleteLily Dale can retreat into her family (and she could have sued), but not every woman had that option.
Men of an earlier time, since the word goes back to the 17th century at least, and come to think of it, why specify men? Are women non-judgmental about other women's sexual behavior?
ReplyDeleteI have to read Trollope. That excerpt from the introduction is hilarious. Really? Skip a big portion of the book? I just read a similar introduction to Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's Sarah Videbeck in which the writer upbraids Almqvist for exceeding the bounds of normalcy.
ReplyDeleteTrollope is certainly worth sampling. For such a hasty, repetitive, narrow writer, he is sure good. Good with people, and good with money, the psychology of money - with money, the best of the century, better than Balzac or Zola, actually.
ReplyDeleteSir Marsh in effect suggests skipping at least a sixth of the novel, 120-150 pages. The Almqvist introduction is even worse - what did the author think he was agreeing to?
Interesting about the three love triangles. As I have mentioned I am reading Barchester Towers and I was thinking how it contained a love square.
ReplyDeleteNot so much a square as a three-sided pyramid, although I do not think Mr. Slope ever had much of a chance with Eleanor. Nor did Bertie, come to think of it. A square, but a rickety one.
ReplyDelete