Criticism dealing with Trollope's views about women is a hardy perennial despite the fact that his more celebrated statements are unambiguous.¹ “The necessity of the supremacy of man is as certain to me as the eternity of the soul,”² he says. Or of Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? he says, “her mind had become filled with some undefined idea of the importance to her of her own life. What should a woman do with her life? There had arisen round her a flock of learned ladies asking that question, to whom it seems that the proper answer has never yet occurred. Fall in love, marry the man, have two children, and live happy ever afterwards. I maintain that answer has as much wisdom in it as any other that can be given;—or perhaps more.”³ Women lack “the gift of persistent energy” to do the work of the world, and the sexual division of labour—he in the world, she in the household—is a lesson that comes “direct from nature,—or, in other words, from the wisdom of an all-wise and all-good Creator.”⁴ And there's an end on't, as one might say. Nevertheless, several critics for various reasons and in various degrees of sympathy have felt the need to assert that these are indeed his views. C. C. Koets in his study of Trollope's female characters, and in terms that could scarcely be used today, coolly adds: “His personal views on marriage and the duty of women in the world are simple and healthy.”⁵ Without such naive approbation, John Halperin, in his “Trollope and Feminism,” also flatly reasserts Trollope's position, declaring “a lot of solemn specious nonsense has been written about Trollope's supposed sympathy for the economically and vocationally helpless Victorian woman,” and concluding roundly, “He was not a sympathizer.”⁶ Yet the topic remains interesting because Trollope himself keeps turning it over in his works, and because, as David Aitken observes, “it is the brightest and most interesting of Trollope's heroines … who rebel against the doctrines about women he preaches so emphatically,” even though they are often punished for it. The best of them are “such lively and assertive individuals” that they seem less object lessons than “vividly, willfully, and peculiarly themselves.”⁷ Sympathy, of course, is a messy business, especially if confused with approval. Gay would not hang Captain MacHeath, though he would hardly approve of him. Flaubert sympathized with Emma Bovary (“Emma Bovary, c'est moi!”) while exposing her endless appetite for the thrilling. And Trollope has the imaginative power to enter into women's problems and attitudes while reserving approval of feminist principles. That complicates his and our responses. In a perfect system sympathy and approval would match, but tension between them makes for absorbing art. Of the woman eager to do what he considered man's work, Trollope said, “I am inclined to admire her while I oppose her.”⁸The Way We Live Now, sometimes considered Trollope's greatest novel, provides an especially interesting instance of such ambivalence towards women with minds of their own.⁹ A major theme of the novel is that of authentic selfhood, and while the theme embraces both sexes, the women provide its most intricate elaboration.

Thinking, judging, and speaking for oneself is a key issue in The Way We Live Now because its world is inundated by puffery, sham, toadying, and herd values. Trollope counterpoints the two notions of individual judgment and herd influence, reiterating them throughout the novel, thereby providing not only a major element of thematic organization but a means of assessing character. Roger Carbury, the book's moral centre, asserts the values of personal authenticity and individual judgment: “he never says anything that he doesn't think” (i, 361), and “that growing feeling which induces people to assert to themselves that they are not bound to go outside the general verdict, and that they may shake hands with whomsoever the world shakes hands with, had never reached him” (i, 69).¹⁰ Two chapter titles accentuate the “natural aptitude to do what all the world approves” (ii, 44) that permeates the book: “Everybody Goes to Them,” referring to the Melmottes' soirées, and “‘Unanimity is the Very Soul of These Things,’” referring to Melmotte's concern that his humbug railway board should put up a unified front. To such specious unanimity, Roger opposes a sense of community responsibility, expressed in his conduct of the affairs of his estate and in his concern for John Crumb's amatory difficulties with Ruby Ruggles. Ironically, Roger's sense of feudal responsibility and his values of truth and constancy isolate him, as the moat around his manor suggests. I start with him because he exemplifies and recommends the idea of individual integrity that echoes throughout the novel. He insists on it first to Hetta, who, with her mother, has attended one of Melmotte's splendid social gatherings.

“Everybody goes there, Mr. Carbury.”

“Yes,—that is the excuse which everybody makes … I wish you to have some opinion of your own as to what is proper for you.”

(i, 70-71)

This motif then recurs in many settings. Proselytizing Father Barham disparages the Bishop of Elmham for having “no strong opinion of his own” (i, 177). And even though Hamilton K. Fisker, the unscrupulous American financier, has little to recommend him but ebullience, Trollope, in a characteristically tempering qualification, adds, “His mind was not capacious, but such as it was it was his own, and he knew how to use it” (i, 81). As a master of nuance, gradation and qualification, Trollope presents not just an opposition between general opinion and individual integrity but a variety of shades. Expressing one's own opinions ranges from honest self-assertion to arrant wilfulness.

Marie Melmotte, perhaps, provides the clearest example in the book of evolving identity, authenticity, and resistance to the way of the world—an evolution that occurs in the great poseur's very household. She enters the book shyly, thoroughly dominated, in muted, negative tones. “She was not beautiful, she was not clever, and she was not a saint. But then neither was she plain, nor stupid, nor, especially, a sinner” (i, 32). As his portrayal of her shows, Trollope's anti-feminism does not preclude a minute interest in the circumstances and feelings that create feminism. Pursued as a commodity by Lord Nidderdale, Grasslough, and others (“Each had treated the girl as an encumbrance he was to undertake,—at a very great price”), Marie hardens a shade, begins “to have an opinion,” and is “tempted from time to time to contemplate her own happiness and her own condition” (i, 33). She has “an incipient aspiration for the enjoyment of something in the world which should be her own. There was, too, arising within her bosom a struggle to be something in the world, an idea that she, too, could say something, and have thoughts of her own, if only she had some friend near her whom she need not fear” (i, 163-64). Ironically, at this critical stage of her unfolding sense of self, it is Felix Carbury, with “the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog” (i, 17), who sets her dreaming of castles in the air, and encourages her imagination, courage, and strength to blossom. “As days went on she ceased to be a child, and her courage grew within her. She became conscious of an identity of her own” (i, 233). Her father has settled money on her with the intention of keeping it safe for himself, but in her love for Felix she is ready to abscond with it. Along with the sense of self has come “a will of her own” (i, 275). After Felix, on the day of their elopement, has been so utterly feckless as to gamble away the money she has given him, get drunk and stand her up, she speculates that she might after all marry Lord Nidderdale, “though it will be very bad. I shall just be as if I hadn't any self of my own at all” (ii, 111). But that temporary trace of weakness vanishes when Hetta Carbury makes it clear that Felix has not only bungled the elopement but abandoned his suit: over Marie's face comes “a stern hard look, as though she had resolved at the moment to throw away from her all soft womanly things,” and she resolves, “I'll marry Lord Nidderdale. … But I'll lead him such a life afterwards!” (ii, 168-70).

At this point in studying the growth of authentic identity and will power in a woman, Trollope has, perhaps, arrived at too much of a good thing. Marie is no longer “womanly.” She is “hard” instead of “soft.” And she is distanced from sympathy in other ways as well. Her environment has been damaging. She is not only the brutal Melmotte's daughter but his illegitimate and foreign daughter. And yet despite her determination to hold on to the money her father has settled on her, an idea that inspires Sir Felix to new interest in her as “a very enterprising young lady” (i, 274), the reader finds much to admire in her. She shows grit in defying Melmotte even though he beats her. She manifests fidelity to Felix and extraordinary readiness to forgive him even when she understands how impressively worthless he is. She has the socially unconventional energy to pursue him—a girl pursuing a man, and a man who has deserted her at that. And finally, she has the clear judgment to assess him accurately: “I don't see why a girl should not run after a man if they have been engaged together. But I'm ashamed of thinking so much of so mean a person” (ii, 309). One sees in her a personality forged in adversity and achieved: “go where she might, she would now be her own mistress” (ii, 310). That she has got well beyond Trollope's approval in principle is evident in her acquiring “opinions of women's rights” and in her marrying Fisker—“she had not seen enough of English gentlemen to make Fisker distasteful to her” (ii, 453).

Here, then, we have a fine study of a woman, not wholly scrupulous, not presentable in Trollope's eyes as a sufficient argument for feminism, but whose imprisoning social role as a commodity he clearly understands, and whose development under the pressures of that circumstance he articulates with detailed care and human sympathy. Though not a feminist, he sees how Marie is moulded both by exploitation and by learning to resist exploitation and assert her own desires and her own will. Melmotte makes her a legal convenience to hoard away his embezzled wealth, fully counting on her total submission. He uses her as barter in his scheme to supplement wealth with social standing by marrying her to an aristocrat, a matter in which her views are of little concern. Her pretended lover, Sir Felix, finds the courting “weary work” (i, 43), reserving his ardour for her money and for seducing a girl from the country. We are made to sympathize with Marie in her situation and to understand the human likelihood of her response to it. If Trollope were a feminist, he could hardly do that part of his work better. Marie, however, is a fairly straightforward study. With Mrs. Hurtle we come to a much more complex, brilliant—and still ambivalent—achievement.

“Shall a woman be flayed alive because it is unfeminine in her to fight for her own skin?” asks Winifred Hurtle (ii, 8). She thinks for herself vigorously, expresses herself with rhetorical flourish, and acts with determination. Her very name bespeaks energy. Though she says “a woman's weapon is her tongue” (i, 443), she cuts a dash with other weapons as well—she has shot a man in Oregon, is rumoured to have fought a duel with her husband, and professes masculine skill with a horse-whip. Her combative panache is expansive: “‘I'd interfere to save any woman that God ever made,’ said Mrs. Hurtle with energy” (ii, 189). And she acts on her principle, joining forces in an unlikely alliance with Roger Carbury to save Ruby Ruggles from Felix. Like Roger, she deplores the want of individual strength in England. To her American sensibility all Europeans are effete with one or two exceptions: “Savonarola and Galileo were individuals” (i, 394). She particularly deplores the weakness of English women (which Trollope himself admires): “Should she be weaker even than an English girl?” (ii, 3).¹¹ Her being American—“a nasty American woman,” says Hetta—is very much to the point (ii, 375). Trollope makes her an exotic, a wild-cat that has roamed out of its proper frontier environment, “very clever and very beautiful,—but … very dangerous” (i, 243).

While the reader may respond with sympathy to Mrs. Hurtle's energy, grit and determination, Trollope, as in his treatment of Marie Melmotte, discounts them as masculine. It is “unfeminine in her to fight for her own skin” with the verve she displays. And the impression of masculinity is reinforced. Having a clear sense of the disabilities imposed on women by convention, she wishes she were a man so that she might undertake an enterprise on the grand scale, like Melmotte's railway: “I should like to manage the greatest bank in the world, or to be Captain of the biggest fleet, or to make the largest railway” (i, 391). It exasperates her “that men should be so vile, and think themselves masters of the world” (i, 448). She threatens to horse-whip Montague for his infidelity. And when Hetta Carbury comes to seek the truth about Mrs. Hurtle's involvement with Montague, though Mrs. Hurtle realizes she could make mischief with her answers, “it was a woman's fashion, and, as such, did not recommend itself to Mrs. Hurtle's feelings” (ii, 381). But she is not a flat character in any sense of the word. Much as Trollope dwells on her masculine qualities, he also describes caressingly her feminine sexual attractiveness. Voluptuous without the aid of artifice, she is expressive, sensuous, lovely, the simplicity of her dress only accentuating her seductively vivacious flesh and blood.¹²

In short, Mrs. Hurtle is a study in ambivalence, both cultural and sexual, her cultural conditioning determining her sexual tensions. As an American, how can she help being masculine? “She had endured violence, and had been violent. She had been schemed against, and had schemed. She had fitted herself to the life which had befallen her” (i, 449). Her very “force of character,” however, impells her, poor lady, to sense her cultural disability:

With all the little ridicule she was wont to exercise in speaking of the old country there was ever mixed, as is so often the case in the minds of American men and women, an almost envious admiration of English excellence. To have been allowed to forget the past and to live the life of an English lady would have been heaven to her.

(i, 450)

The “genuine kindness of her woman's nature,” her English propensity, is at odds with her frontier aggressiveness. “She was in truth sick at heart of violence and rough living and unfeminine words,” and if offered an English haven, “she thought she could put away violence and be gentle as a young girl” (i, 449-50). The two letters she writes responding to Paul Montague's rejection of her epitomize her ambivalence, showing her “torn in two directions,” one letter all “feminine softness,” the other all horse-whips and ferocity. Having written both, she is in a moral and emotional dilemma, unsure which to send.

In spite of Trollope's traditional masculine bias, Mrs. Hurtle, with her frustration, her acuity, her verve, her beauty, and ultimately her individual integrity, escapes the safe bounds Trollope erects around her to contain our sympathy. Her relationship to the theme of authentic selfhood is as ambivalent as she is—she asserts individual autonomy, is satirized for the degree of it, but eventually allies herself with Roger Carbury, its champion. In her desire for a larger range of activity, she feels the weight of the cramped social stereotyping Mill attacked in The Subjection of Women. She may well ask, “What is the good of being—feminine, as you call it?” (ii, 8). The voice she gives to frustrated ambition is, of course, partly intended to nettle Paul Montague in his dithering; nevertheless, she is close to being the sort of woman Trollope said he both opposed and admired, and while he would not endorse her viewpoint, he dramatizes her so well that the reader can, perhaps, take a more sympathetic view than he did. Most works have some degree of autonomy, independent of the author's attitudes. Reading the book a century later, having absorbed Mill, and, one hopes, being readier to respond to Marie Melmotte's and Mrs. Hurtle's arguments, the reader may take with a grain of salt Trollope's trick of making certain simply human qualities and ambitions “masculine.” Still, one should not underrate Trollope's interest in the intricacies of sexual psychology.

What makes the question of sexual stereotyping, already complicated in Mrs. Hurtle, all the more interesting is the sexual role reversal Trollope sets up between her and Paul Montague. If Mrs. Hurtle is often “masculine,” Paul is essentially “feminine.” We must suppose that she is as much attracted to his feminine traits as he is to her masculine traits. But the relationship is complex and tense. As she submerges in herself the feminine softness she longs for, so she ridicules the feminine sensitivity of the man she loves: “Oh, with what bated, half-mouthed words you speak,—fit for a girl from a nursery!” (i, 247). And annoyed by his deference to Roger Carbury's opinion, she scolds: “I had heard that in your country girls sometimes hold themselves at the disposal of their friends,—but I did not dream that such could be the case with a man who had gone out in the world to make his fortune” (i, 442). The reversal between them makes for some comic ironies, as when frightened by the aggressiveness of her discussion of “questions of women's difficulties,” his mind running uncomfortably on “the wild-cat's claws, and the possible fate of the gentleman in Oregon,” he artfully turns the conversation to the safe feminine topic of the colours she should wear. She acknowledges his eye for such things, but at once comes the barb: “But I fancy that taste comes with, or at any rate forebodes, an effete civilization” (i, 393-94). Paul's femininity, which Mrs. Hurtle exploits so adroitly, is not simply a creation of her decided talent for abuse, nor a matter of the cultural differences between them. Trollope stresses it: “There are men,” he says, “who, of their natures, do not like women, even though they … be surrounded by things feminine in all the affairs of their lives. Others again have their strongest affinities and sympathies with women. … Paul Montague was of the latter sort” (i, 260). The type is familiar in Trollope. The emotional dilemma of Paul's determination to end the affair balanced by an agonizing inability to break off, his sense of Mrs. Hurtle's physical and intellectual allure along with the oppressive, claustrophobic hold she has on him, is also familiar. Consider Phineas Finn and his involvements. Indeed, Trollope seems aware that the reader, like Montague himself, may grow restive about such indecision, and therefore supplies an apology for Montague's dithering in which feminine softness is the key element:

There are many,—and probably the greater portion of my readers will be among the number,—who will declare to themselves that Paul Montague was a poor creature, in that he felt so great a repugnance to face this woman with the truth … they will be very hard on him on the score of his cowardice,—as, I think, unjustly. In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. … He feared the woman; … but he shrank from subjecting her to the blank misery of utter desertion.

(i, 441-42)

When she finds out about Mrs. Hurtle, Hetta rejects Montague, and he is indignant, not thinking how he would act in her place. In view of the sexual reversals in the book, there is perhaps a double weight of irony in Trollope's observation: “But then,—as all the world knows,—there is a wide difference between young men and young women!” (ii, 248).

In relation to the theme of individual judgment and outspokenness, Montague, though he is the hero of the book's love interest, hardly comes off better than Mrs. Hurtle. Roger—morose and jealous, it is true—thinks ill of Montague's double attachment. Melmotte easily overbears him at board meetings. Dolly Longestaffe, light-minded though he is, shows himself by comparison a model of decision and tenacity. Montague does have some delicate and inhibiting scruples. But the sympathy he inspires is limited. If Mrs. Hurtle is a wild-cat, she is a wild-cat lapping at a milksop.

The most flagrantly unauthentic selves among the women of the novel are Lady Carbury and Georgiana Longestaffe. Georgiana neatly inverts the theme of judging and speaking for oneself, masking her own wilful actions as actions imposed on her by others. She too is a study in ambivalence, pulled in opposite directions by her bent for self-assertion and her concern for public opinion. On the one hand, she knows what she wants, a husband, and she wants very much to capture one before her sister gets married. Moreover, she is ready to suffer considerable mortification in order to be in London where she may find one. To that extent she appears to have a mind of her own. But she pretends that her will is really a sense of duty: “It isn't for pleasure that I want to go up” (i, 198). And though she insists on taking advantage of the hospitality offered by the Melmottes, whom she socially despises, she argues that the indignity is forced on her by her father, who, for the sake of economy, is determined to rent out their house in London. “Who sent her to Melmotte's house? Was it not her own father?” (ii, 139). Her petulant notion blossoms into direct accusation: “It was you, papa, who told me to go to the Melmottes” (ii, 143). And the accusation becomes a determined refrain:

“It was you sent me to Mr. Melmotte.”

“I didn't send you to Mr. Melmotte.”

“It was at your suggestion I went there, papa. And of course I could only see the people he had there. I like nice people as well as anybody.”

“There's no use talking any more about it.”

(ii, 261)

Old Longestaffe stands accused here not only of forcing the Melmottes on Georgiana but, by so doing, of being responsible for her decision to marry Mr. Brehgert, though Longestaffe hates Jews: “It isn't” says Georgiana, “that Mr. Brehgert is the sort of man I should choose” (ii, 261). Though Georgiana is wilful and obstinate in this covert way, however, she is also a prey to appearances. Brehgert has a very fine income, which she likes, and a luxurious house, which she sees as a necessity, and she cares nothing about his religion “except as far as it might be regarded by the world in which she wished to live” (ii, 92). But, for her, that is a big exception. In spite of her obstinacy, she fears her parents, and the only “real opinion of his own” that Longestaffe has had in politics is that against admitting Jews to Parliament, while her mother speaks “with horror even of the approach of a Jew” (ii, 93). Lady Monogram, whose society Georgiana craves, is similarly bigoted, and her “few words about ‘various sets’ and the ‘mixing of things’ had stabbed her [Georgiana] to the very heart,—as had been intended” (ii, 138). Even calling off the match becomes dreadful because of the same anxiety about public opinion: “I think,” says the narrator, “she would have decided on the latter had it not been that so many people had already heard of the match” (ii, 138). “She thought that she could have plucked up courage to face the world as the Jew's wife, but not as the young woman who had wanted to marry the Jew and had failed” (ii, 274). Still, provoked by her sister's impending marriage, Georgiana grimly keeps up her threat to marry Brehgert until the very morning of Sophia's wedding, when “they were all astounded by the news that Georgiana had run away with Mr. Batherbolt,” the poor and supposedly celibate curate (ii, 428). This refuge, however, is also socially determined: “a clergyman is always considered to be decent” (ii, 427).

From the ideal of having one's own opinions and not saying what one doesn't think, Georgiana is far removed, despite her wilfulness and her father's conviction that “upon the whole his daughter liked a row in the house” (i, 199). “The general verdict,” as Roger calls it, the herd view, controls her aspirations and inspires her fears—what if she marries a Jew, what if she is seen to fail in marrying a Jew? Concentrated within the bounds of Georgiana's consciousness, Trollope's overall thematic opposition of self and society emerges in frustration and contradiction, her personal drive crippled by social anxiety. To some extent, like Marie Melmotte's and Mrs. Hurtle's, her moral life is one of alternatives arising from her feminine position and the compulsions she feels about it. Unlike them, she is blinded and stymied by self doubt. While they deliberate and decide, Georgiana petulantly vacillates, lying to herself and to others. A rational course is hardly open to her; therefore, the surprise of her elopement with a curate noted for celibacy is comically, morally, and aesthetically appropriate.

Roger Carbury gives his advice about “having some opinion of your own as to what is proper” in response to Lady Carbury's visit with Hetta to the Melmottes'. Lady Carbury is “false from head to foot” (i, 17), “a female literary charlatan” (i, 6). She opens the novel significantly with three toadying letters to editors who, she hopes, might be persuaded to provide favourable reviews of her amateurish book on “Criminal Queens.” The first letter plays titillatingly on Mr. Broune's amatory susceptibilities: “as you are a friend, be loving”: but closes with a high-minded postscript, “how few women there are who can raise themselves above the quagmire of what we call love, and make themselves anything but playthings for men” (i, 2). The sentiment is droll since she plays poor Broune like a fish, earning his deepest gratitude later by not agreeing to marry him when he has too incautiously taken the bait. (Mrs. Hurtle is equally amusing when, having thoroughly plagued and threatened Paul Montague, she comments, “It is a poor time we women have,—is it not,—in becoming playthings to men?” [ii, 387].) The second letter is to Mr. Booker, brief, noting pointedly that she is reviewing a book of his and offering an exchange of things to be “specially said.” The third letter goes to Mr. Alf, who has a reputation for damning everyone and everything in The Evening Pulpit. In this one, she deplores “would-be poets who contrive by toadying and underground influences to get their volumes placed on every drawing-room table” (i, 9). All this, as the narrator says, is “absolutely and abominably foul” (i, 11). Like Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Carbury knows her sexual power and exploits it. Both of them, though still very attractive, are women of a certain age who have been tempered by adversity. Unlike Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Carbury is a thorough-going hypocrite. Nevertheless, with his penchant for qualification and nuance, Trollope draws attention to her genuine devotion to her children, especially her bottomless and absurd devotion to her rotter of a son, Sir Felix, whom she strives to maintain (as Trollope's mother had) by her literary industry. She works hard, too, at the task of keeping Felix in pursuit of Marie Melmotte's money. Like Georgiana, but moreso, she provides a negative elaboration of the theme of authenticity, and in comparison with her Mrs. Hurtle and Marie Melmotte are models of sense and virtue. And once again Trollope shows a thorough and sympathetic grasp of how social circumstances, though they don't exonerate her, contribute to a woman's outlook, and how she uses the influence of sexual attraction to counter the social disabilities of being a woman.

Roger, with whom Trollope pointedly contrasts Lady Carbury, sums her up as “essentially worldly, believing that good could come out of evil, that falsehood might in certain conditions be better than truth, that shams and pretences might do the work of true service, that a strong house might be built upon the sand” (i, 132). Inasmuch as this judgment could apply equally well to the whole fabric of social falsehood and perversity in the novel's world, Lady Carbury typifies what is wrong with it. The terms of Roger's judgment become a motif, as when Lady Carbury defends Melmotte to Mr. Booker (using Mrs. Hurtle's Spencerian argument as well):

“One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule.”

“You would do evil to produce good?” asked Mr. Booker.

“I do not call it doing evil. You have to destroy a thousand living creatures every time you drink a glass of water. …”

(i, 279)

Like others in the world she represents, though attuned to manipulation and puffery, Lady Carbury nevertheless sees herself as primarily a realist, accommodated to “the hard truths of the world”: “If there was anything that she could not forgive in life it was romance” (ii, 324). She therefore opposes Hetta's marriage to the relatively poor Montague and insists instead on Roger, who has an estate: “that which pained her most was the unrealistic, romantic view of life which pervaded all Hetta's thoughts. How was any girl to live in this world who could not be taught the folly of such idle dreams?” (ii, 385). (There is a touch of Mr. Gradgrind in Lady Carbury.) Her scheme that Sir Felix should inveigle Marie Melmotte into marriage for her money is in tune with her hatred of romance. Romance embraces honesty as well, so Lady Carbury feels uncomfortable condescension towards “the superhuman virtue of poor dear Roger” (i, 145).

In her views of romance, Lady Carbury is manifesting a tone of mind, and tone of mind, a core of response underlying a character's opinions and actions, inherent but also influenced by circumstance, is a quality Trollope, with his carefully tuned sense of personality, is very good at rendering and using for subtle ironies. Lady Carbury's realism is in fact a cloak for sordid motives. Typically, Trollope pursues the tension of romance and realism through an equally perverse reversal. Georgiana Longestaffe's preference for romance is as absurd as Lady Carbury's hostility, equally at odds with honesty, as in her response to Brehgert's dignified, forbearing and sensible letter about marriage: “She could understand that it was a plain-spoken and truth-telling letter … but she did allow herself to be pained by the total absence of romance” (ii, 273). Marie Melmotte, on the other hand, gradually acquires an unromantic toughness in response to her disillusioning experiences. Though she starts out, inspired by the fantasy of Felix's love, building “castles in the air, which were bright with art and love, rather than with gems and gold” (i, 164), her career in the marriage market and her confrontations with her father harden her by the end: “I don't think I'll marry anybody. What's the use? It's only money. Nobody cares for anything else. Fisker's all very well; but he only wants the money” (ii, 402). Her comment here is not so much one of bitterness as of cool observation. Nevertheless, she does marry Fisker. But, of course, by then, “She had contrived to learn that, in the United States, a married woman has greater power over her own money than in England, and this information acted strongly in Fisker's favour” (ii, 453). Marie's feminist viewpoint about property in marriage may be a danger signal, warning of unwomanly “hardness” of mind, but it is softened by a touch of humour, and in the light of Marie's carefully articulated development in the novel, it shows a good deal of plain common sense. Unlike either Lady Carbury's or Georgiana's views about romance and the world, Marie's have a ring of personal authenticity in which the inner and outer life match.

Roger addresses his remonstrance about having opinions of one's own to Hetta Carbury, but with ironic results. She does think for herself to his disadvantage, determining not to marry him. Treated by Lady Carbury as “of infinitely less importance than her brother” (i, 20), and badgered by her to marry Roger, she quietly digs in her heels and resolves to have Paul Montague, admitting, “I suppose we ought to love the best people best; but I don't …” (ii, 150). She has a clear sense of her mother's and brother's failings, and she herself acts with straightforward honesty. Roger loves her, and as he is the moral centre of the book, she is the moral example by which the other women in the book are measured. Unfortunately this does not make her a very impressive figure in comparison. Though she resists brow-beating on all sides and plainly has a mind of her own, she does not go through the internal struggles that beset the other women. Both Mrs. Hurtle and Marie Melmotte overshadow her as personalities. Though Trollope clearly admires her, his deepest interest is with them, and, with all their dangerous principles and inclinations, they appeal more.

To sum up, then, although Trollope has the reputation of being an anti-feminist, skeptical about women's rights and at odds with Mill, in The Way We Live Now his absorption in women's problems, his treatment of their psychology, and his perception of the formative social influences on their lives, show more sympathy and understanding than the anti-feminist stance might suggest. His bent for qualification and eye for circumstance enable him to portray the complex human motivations of women at odds with his traditional conception of society even while disagreeing with their more theoretical feminist principles. Although he manipulates our sympathy for Mrs. Hurtle and Marie Melmotte by stressing foreignness, mannishness, and hardness, he nevertheless imbues the one with dynamic energy, rhetorical power, and sexual appeal and, in the other, follows the formation of character with minute and sympathetic precision. The impression he creates of them is the more interesting for their connection with the standard of the authentic and outspoken self which he raises in the novel and pursues among the women. Those, like Georgiana and Lady Carbury, who belong more within the traditional feminine framework, are presented satirically, one wilful to a degree, the other a coy toady—no authenticity there. Indeed Lady Carbury receives a language of flat abuse from the narrator only equalled by that applied to her son. Those, like Mrs. Hurtle and Marie Melmotte, whose minds embrace more than Trollope's ideal of social acceptance and domesticity (though as sexual beings they, of course, have marriage concerns) come off very well by comparison and in themselves. Both Marie and Mrs. Hurtle have character, and their feminist outlooks are part of what gives them their authentic individualities. For all their human failings and all Trollope's national and sexual chauvinism, they win our respect.

Notes

1. Some of the more direct commentaries are: C. C. Koets, Female Characters in the Works of Trollope (Gouda: Van Tilburg, 1933); E. L. Skinner, “Mr. Trollope's Young Ladies,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 4 (1949), 197-207; Mary S. Lawson, “Class Structure and Female Character in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now,” Dissertation Abstracts International 36: 5320-21A; C. Blinderman, “The Servility of Dependence: The Dark Lady in Trollope,” in Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Susan Koppelman Carnillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 55-67; Pamela Hansford Johnson, “Trollope's Young Women,” in On the Novel, ed. B. S. Benedikz (London: Dent, 1972), pp. 17-33; David Aitken, “Anthony Trollope on ‘the Genus Girl,’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1974), 417-34; John Halperin, “Trollope and Feminism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 77 (1978), 179-88; Juliet McMaster, “The Men and Women,” in Trollope's Pallister Novels: Theme and Pattern (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 155-79.

2. Trollope, The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. Bradford Booth (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), No. 740.

3. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, World's Classics edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), i, 134.

4. Trollope, “Higher Education of Women,” in Four Lectures by Anthony Trollope, ed. M. L. Parrish (London: Folcroft Press, 1938), pp. 73-74.

5. Koets, p. 22.

6. Halperin, “Trollope and Feminism,” pp. 181 and 188.

7. Aitken, “Anthony Trollope on the Genus Girl,” pp. 431 and 434.

8. Trollope, “Higher Education of Women,” p. 73.

9. Juliet McMaster argues that Trollope's statements on the women's cause “grew to be more sympathetic as his career progressed, so that by the completion of the Palliser series he was no longer a reactionary, although he never became a convert” (p. 166). The Way We Live Now, 1875, comes fairly late in this progression.

10. Page references are to the World's Classics edition of The Way We Live Now (London: Oxford University Press, 1941).

11. Blinderman quotes Trollope's admiration in The Landleaguers for “feminine weakness, which of all her gifts is the most valuable to an English woman, till she makes the mistake of bartering it away for women's rights” (p. 66). The comment is in chastisement of Rachel O'Mahoney, another American.

12. As David Aitken says, “That women in Trollope's world are so strong of sexual purpose and so elementally fierce in defense of their sexual integrity speaks eloquently of the nature and power of feminine passion. It is true that their anti-feminist author consigns women to the doll's house. But he hardly regards them as dolls” (p. 424).