[In the following excerpt, Banta briefly discusses why Du Maurier's Trilby is superior to Henry James's “The Real Thing.”]

… Two years after the appearance of [Henry] James's “The Real Thing,” Trilby burst upon the reading public in Great Britain and the United States.¹ George Du Maurier (who planted the “germ” for James's 1892 story in his friend's mind) had also offered another story-line to James; but James turned it back to Du Maurier. The result was Trilby, a publishing success of the kind James never managed to bring off.

What does Trilby have as a narrative that “The Real Thing” does not? In many ways they share similar elements for public interest: a setting (artist's studio, professional model) and a situation (which is the real thing?) But the differences are crucial. For one, James's tale is a passion of ideas about the creation of images by which we come to recognition of certain types; feelings as such are underplayed. In contrast, Du Maurier's novel does without almost everything but the feelings stirred up by the powerful icons of Trilby and Svengali. James's story is so harshly realistic in its pursuit of functional authenticity that the artist-narrator's responses form the only “furniture” the story contains. Consider Du Maurier's romance, from its opening paragraph through to the end. It is crammed with realistic props: plaster casts of arms and legs, Dante's mask, a Michelangelesque Leda and the Swan, reproductions of an Elgin centaur, Old Master drawings, animal figures by Barye, and Clytie's bust—all the trappings of a student digs by means of whose inventory readers were assured they were being given an inside look at la vie de bohème.

This doting upon things is not only not a guarantee of the narrative's realism; it is the giveaway that the verisimilitude is included for the sake of fantasy. (As in their use by the artists we viewed earlier, props as such may serve the purposes indiscriminately of realism or romanticism. The big question is whether they can be made to serve the creation of types.) But to things, Du Maurier adds emotions. James's story has no romantic plot and no reference to “love” (except as the affections the middle-aged Monarchs feel for one another are gently expressed and as the narrator comes to care for the people whose grasp around his neck he must unloosen); but such low-keyed feelings hardly turn “The Real Thing” into a parade of popular emotions. Du Maurier's novel is a love story, if we can put up with no lovemaking, no overt sexuality, and an excess of brain fevers, broken hearts, and languishings in the name of unrequited sentiments. Sexuality, of course, is implied by Svengali's obsession and the hold he exerts over the hypnotized woman in his power. The fact that he is also repulsive to look upon, “Eastern” and villainous in character made “the white slavery” motif of vile and unmentionable forces even more appealing to contemporary readers of this kind of romance. James's artists and models may be magicians of the imagination, but it is Du Maurier who knew how to throw an aura of black magic around Svengali and his “creation.”

Trilby may be without an idea in its head of what it is about (the primary element James exacted of worthy fictions); but Du Maurier's narrative provides a thrust of feelings that project into that space beyond the edges of the silly story where readers (if they want more than a good “read”) may think about what such feelings mean, as well as what they convey about the relation of human identity to artistic type within the world of the painter's studio.

The males in Du Maurier's novel are men only through the convention of their chronological age. Actually, they are boys who have yet to grow out of the diminutives and nicknames by which a paternalistic society has given them a kind of probationary identity. Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee—all three—do not add up to one adult masculine figure. Rather, the boyish worship Billee gives to Trilby is returned to him by Taffy and the Laird who treat their little friend as the perfect child and woman.

By contrast, Trilby O’Ferrall is presented as a complete self, as rounded a personage as a girl who lives by intuition and soul can be. True, she is a woman more in stature than in emotional maturity at the onset. This is, as the story makes clear in wholesale lots, what happens to one who has not yet “suffered.” She must undergo the pain of loving Billee and experiencing shame and have a brainstorm (all events that parallel Billee's own path toward what is supposed to be—not very convincingly—the maturation that transforms him into an artistic genius and an authentic romantic-hero type). But what really matters (when playing Du Maurier's story off against James's) is that Trilby is both Miss Churm and Mrs. Monarch. She is an Irish/Parisian-Bohemian version of the Cockney model in light of her scruffy antecedents, her knock-about upbringing, and her social classification as an artist's model. She is also, naturally (without having to act her way into the type), as much a lady as Mrs. Monarch is. These considerations that Du Maurier let seep into his romance grant Trilby whatever ties it has with authentic meaning and whatever place the story takes in the ranks of literary realism.

Du Maurier works hard at the need for everyone to recognize Trilby's true type. Together with other writers of late nineteenth-century artist-and-model stories, he borrows Dumas' “Camille” to provide himself with the emotional force of what happens when one is not known for what one typically is. Early in the story we are even shown Trilby weeping over the plight of a stage Camille, in unconscious prophecy of what lies ahead that will bring her shame and sorrow. When Little Billee's mother comes to plead with her to give up her son for the sake of his sister's happiness within respectable society, Taffy tries to convince Mrs. Bagot that Trilby has a soul as beautiful as her face; but the bigoted woman depends entirely upon the conventional method for recognizing identity—through a person's social function and class. Toward the novel's conclusion, when it is patently too late to do Trilby or Little Billee any good, there is a handsome scene which Du Maurier lets swell. Billee's mother publicly acknowledges that Trilby's role as a model (which had categorized her as immoral) is countered by the moral authenticity of her real self. Not only is Trilby revealed to proper society as being a lady; she is honored in her dying hours (à la Camille) as an angel and a lily—a recognized icon of sacrificial love.

During the earlier days when Trilby was practicing her profession as a model, she had inspired an entire arrondissement of artists, each as emotionally retarded as the trio of love-sick adolescents who constitute her main admirers. She is called Galatea to one sculptor's Pygmalion. She prompts the creation by Billee of what is accounted by all as one of the masterpieces of the Western World—the soul-stirring outline of her foot chalked upon a wall. Then she becomes the muse of Svengali who thrusts his dark sexual longings upon her diaphram, throat, and mouth. It is noticeable that Trilby's identity is continually being anatomized. Synecdoche takes over whenever male fantasies attach themselves to one part or other of her body. Not breasts, buttocks, or thighs, however; rather, discrete portions (foot, throat) act as erotic substitutes for those other “real things” that Du Maurier's descriptions of his beautiful model choose to omit.

At the end of the novel a major disclosure is made. Trilby who was so wonderfully one person at the start of the story (present model and lady; future angel and martyr) has undergone the purgatory of having had another self imposed upon her (or discovered within herself) through means of Svengali's hypnotic powers. That second self is “the Beautiful Statue” (to allude to one of Mrs. Monarch's attributes). It is that public figure that appears on stage, its perfect foot posed upon a pedestal-like stool, its throat coerced into releasing the banal lyrics of “Sweet Alice” upon an awed audience. The original, unselfconsciously responsive young woman who simply is and the subsequent marble form that unconsciously performs gives us a switch on Miss Churm. That woman had had the admirably intuitive gift of acting that made her the real type, in contrast to Mrs. Monarch's real form that kept her limited to the marbleness of her ego. Confronted by such intriguing doubleness of means and ends, external image and inner type, as his creation of Trilby offered to his hand, Du Maurier fails to resolve the splits or (worse) to convert them into the aboutness of his story. We are left with the original Trilby seen whole but dying, overwhelmed (as Du Maurier is) by that other shadow entity swept into the narrative by Svengali's creative force. …

Notes

1. Trilby (New York: Harper, 1894).