Aka: contractual marriage isn’t as boring as it sounds
“He spoke of their engagement as though it were a betrothal, as betrothals used to be of yore; as though they were already in some sort married. Such betrothals were not made now-a-days.” (Trollope 24)
Trollope wrote Can You Forgive Her? starting in 1863, six years after the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which created the first civil divorce courts and changed laws around married women’s property in England. Divorce was still scandalous and expensive but it no longer required an act of parliament. It’s important to realize that Trollope wrote his novel, which contains at least three marriage plots, at a time where marriage was changing. Alice Vavasor even references the changing state of marriage when she thinks about John Grey and how he imagines their marriage as a sort of old-fashioned serious betrothal. Was an engagement a solemn beginning to a covenant between two people or just the start of a legal relationship? In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England Sharon Marcus analyzes the ways marriage evolved in the Victorian Era and what that reveals about same-sex relationships between women. She notes that “The debate about the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act hinged on whether or not marriage should be a contract, and if it were a contract, what that should mean.” (Marcus 212).
The idea of marriage being a contract can sound sort of harsh and punitive to modern ears but liberal reformers saw marriage as a contract because like contracts marriages should be dissolvable. Transforming marriage from a covenant into a contract also indicated that the two parties were equals-- granting women greater agency in their relationships. In contrast, the tradition of hierarchical marriage placed a man’s family completely and irrevocably under his control (Marcus 213). The choice of the word contract reaches back to the earlier use of it in the term social contract and as Marcus points out “since the seventeenth century, contract has defined the political relationship between individuals and the state in terms of a balance between freedom and obligation.” (213). Contractual marriage was an obligation but one which balanced more freedom for women than traditional marriage. It was seen as radical and maybe even romantic at the time.
In her book -- which we will refer to again -- Sharon Marcus summarizes Can You Forgive Her thusly: “Trollope represents a woman's choice between two male suitors as a contest between contractual marriage and hierarchical marriage that is simultaneously a struggle between female marriage and female amity.” (Marcus 228). We’ll hopefully get to the second part about female marriage next week but I wanted to write about the first clause. In this analysis, Marcus represents George Vavasor as a contractual suitor and John Grey as a hierarchical one.
I really enjoy Marcus’s work on marriage but I don’t know that I agree with her casting of John Grey as a hierarchical suitor. Or, I suppose, it might be more accurate to say that Trollope stacks the deck against contractual marriage to George Vavasor and so viewing the relationship through that dynamic erases some of the complexity that I think adds to the realism of the book. George does offer a more contractual relationship where Alice is an equal or even economically more than an equal while in the first five chapters John Grey’s concerns are whether or not his house will suit Alice and how the gardens should be laid out for her, which symbolically suggest he will expect her to keep to her separate sphere of domesticity. On the other hand, Vavasor wants Alice to advance his political career-- especially I think as she advances into a friendship with her “grand relations”. Of course, because I’ve spoiled it we know Grey will develop a political career and give Alice the life in London she wants and we know that Vavasor will misuse Alice’s money and fail in his political career. So clearly: getting what you want is not as simple in this story as selecting it when it is offered. Both Grey and Vavasor’s marriage offers will develop in complexity throughout the story. So while Grey in the opening bids seems to represent a hierarchical marriage Trollope grants Alice’s wish by transforming her suitor over the course of the book.
I’m flagging this now because I think it’s going to be easy to dismiss Grey as a sort of static pillar in the narrative, he enters ready to marry Alice and doesn’t change his mind the whole time. But he does act, develop-- or at least reveal a greater complexity than we at first realize.
To fall back on my standard: what does that have to do with realism? My point here is that love is very important in Trollope novels and Alice is going to devote herself to George but she is not going to love him, not in the consuming instant way she says she loves Grey. This doesn’t mean Trollope is secretly promoting a contractual marriage through John Grey. Rather: Trollope rewards his characters for following love and social guidelines and so Alice gets what she hopes to get from marriage to George out of a less contractual marriage to John Grey.
Is this a little impractical? Yes and no. Happy endings are an easy out for a novelist like Trollope. He doesn’t always write them and the Palliser series is full of its own unhappy endings but all the marriage plots of Can You Forgive Her? resolve amicably for their heroines. It’s impractical and unrealistic to say that by giving up all hope of a political life Alice gets one but it isn’t unrealistic to say that love and marriage change and evolve partners even within hierarchical systems. And, Alice’s goals also fit easily within a hierarchical marriage. In a more James-ian version of the story, Alice would be a radical trying to get the vote and want to lecture in public at political rallies-- but she doesn’t. She just wants to live in London and be close to a man’s political career. In the Henry James version of the story, Alice’s marriage to Grey would be a punishment because she would have to subdue her dreams to enact the role of his wife within the confines of society. But because Alice is in Can You Forgive Her? And not The Bostonians Trollope rewards her with her gender-appropriate dreams.
So it’s not that I disagree that John Grey is a hierarchical choice, but I think flattening George into a contractual choice when really what he offers is a contract with the devil overlooks significant plot points to favor structural and societal analysis. This isn’t necessarily a mistake on Marcus's part-- that’s really what her book is concerned with anyway. But, romantic realist that I am, I feel like I have to stick up for John Grey.
So a more accurate summary of the novel from my reading would be that Trollope presents Alice with the option of a hierarchical marriage or a contractual one but that he doesn’t align the most promising suitor with the fairest marriage offer. So, Alice must balance her desire for freedom against her safety, morality, and sense of what is just. George offers a contractual marriage but he doesn’t offer her a “good” (in all senses of the word) life. What use, Trollope seems to suggest, is a contractual marriage if all the men offering it are bounders?
So I read Trollope I think a little more conservative here. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to be conservative-- I think as we’ll learn when we take an inevitable journey into Pre-Raphelites we’ll see that being revolutionary isn’t all bread and roses.
It’s interesting writing about Trollope because as a feminist, of course, I want to see something like contractual marriage in my favorite books but as a realist, I have to admit that sometimes the things I like are not radical they’re conservative. Does that make me any less a radical? I’m not sure but I wouldn’t mind hearing opinions.
Till next time,