Alice Vavasor Becomes Troubled and Aya wants a vibe check on cousin George

Full Disclosure: 

We’re getting very close to the introduction of one of my favorite characters so to speed things up (and because the following chapters mostly concern a hunt… which I have limited textual interest in) this segment covers four chapters instead of the usual two. Consider it a double feature. 

Summary: Alice Vavasor Becomes Troubled./ Paramount Crescent./The Roebury Club.

Alice has written to Kate saying that she has ended her relationship with Mr. Grey but cannot consider a relationship with George. Kate sends the first ½ of this letter to George. Trollope’s narrator tells us that Kate truly believes in the marriage between George and Alice and that their union has become important to her sense of identity. 

Kate writes back that she is overjoyed the engagement is at an end. She says her Aunt wants her to marry Mr. Cheeseacre but of course, Mr. Cheeseacre wants to marry her Mrs. Greenow but her aunt Greenow wants to marry Captain Belfield. Alice is conflicted over the letter and resolves to go visit Lady Macleod, as Mr. Grey has suggested. Before she leaves she tells her father she has broken her engagement. Her father convinces himself she’ll make up with Grey but he worries about her and George. 

George visits Alice and gets her to admit she has broken her engagement. Then he tries to flirt with her and brings up their conversation at Basle. When George leaves Alice is very troubled and decides when her father comes home she will beg him to ask Mr. Grey to return to her-- but her father does not come home until very late and so she does not ask. 

Alice then goes on her trip to Cheltenham. Lady Macleod is convinced Alice will still marry Grey but they settle in for her visit and she lets the subject drop. The two women discuss the engagement off and on during the visit. Then Mr. Grey sends a letter to Lady Macleod asking if he may call on her and Alice. He calls and Alice agrees to see him in the future and he agrees not to pester her with letters and he leaves. He seems to have accepted their current break but says he still considers himself her suitor. 

We learn a little about George’s social life: he doesn’t have many friends and isn’t well-liked but he’s known to be good in the field so he’s welcome at hunts in Oxfordshire. George plays cards with some acquaintances and he wins a lot of money off them and leaves and they gossip about him. The vibes are not great. Primarily what this scene establishes is that there are a lot of competing stories about George and no one clearly accurate narrative about his money, his respectability, and his career. 

The next morning there is a fox hunt and Vavasor manages to sell one of his horses to Maxwell, a gentleman he played cards with. There’s a lot of hunting detail and one of the riders is named Burgo Fitzgerald and he’s someone to keep an eye on. 

Analysis: 

Just to be brutally honest we will not be spending much time on the fox hunt. Some day I will meet someone/read something that will get me interested in the hunting scenes in Trollope but I just haven’t read anything compelling about them yet. 

Primarily it’s interesting to see Alice in this position where she is between engagements and juxtaposed so neatly with a hunt where George does quite well but where we learn he might not be that great (if we didn’t know that already). Trollope manages to draw a parallel, rather subtly in my opinion, between George’s pursuit of Alice and his pursuit of the fox. So what does George’s position in the hunt say about him as a suitor? 

Trollope opens ‘The Roebury Club’ with a rather long explanation of George’s social position in Oxfordshire: 

“He had been long known in this county, and whether or no men spoke well of him as a man of business in London, men spoke well of him down there, as one who knew how to ride to hounds. Not that Vavasor was popular among fellow-sportsmen. It was quite otherwise. He was not a man that made himself really popular in any social meetings of men. He did not himself care for the loose little talkings, half flat and half sharp, of men when they meet together in idleness. He was not open enough in his nature for such popularity. Some men were afraid of him, and some suspected him. There were others who made up to him, seeking his intimacy, but these he usually snubbed, and always kept at a distance. Though he had indulged in all the ordinary pleasures of young men, he had never been a jovial man. In his conversations with men he always seemed to think that he should use his time towards serving some purpose of business. With women he was quite the reverse. With women he could be happy. With women he could really associate. A woman he could really love;—but I doubt whether for all that he could treat a woman well.” (Trollope 133)

There’s a lot here! Vavasor is spoken of well but only as a man who rides to hounds. Not only does he fail to turn this into popularity amid the other hunters the narrator explains he fails to turn it into popularity wherever he goes. Again his secrecy is stressed by the text “he was not open enough for such popularity” (Trollope). Last installment George’s secrecy was so great that not even his sister knew the address of his rooms in London now we see he is secretive among the hounds as well. If we’re keeping track of vibes here: there’s definitely a fishy vibe coming off George and for the second set of chapters in a row! 

If there’s something bad about a man who doesn’t get along with women is there something bad about a man who *only* gets along with women? As someone who has way more women friends than men friends… I have to wonder (though I don’t think the power dynamics of me avoiding male friendship is quite the same). Does George like women too much maybe? 

Some reasons behind George’s bad social luck are revealed too: he thinks of men mostly in connection to his business interests. Only with women, apparently, can he be happy “really associate” (Trollope 133). This puts an interesting perspective on his relationships with Alice and Kate and also his other love affairs, which we’ve only gotten hints of. George doesn’t get along with any of the men in his family (not his uncle or his grandfather) and it’s primarily over the business they’ve fallen out. 

I’m wondering if there are some elements of class awareness going on here. George and Alice are not so well placed financially that they can avoid caring about money completely. Kate has to scrimp and save for their trip to Switzerland and Alice can only afford to keep house in London because her father shares the expense. But: business dealings and anything that smelled of the “shop” probably still seemed somewhat improper to older more conservative members of the gentry like George’s grandfather who would have grown up with no expectation of “work” in an office. Instead, their job was the land and their tenants (really wealthy men have agents to handle this part of the work for them). I don’t think we ever learn enough to really understand where the Vavasors are financially but if they’re straddling a social gap here it might explain some of the attitude George gets for going into business. 

I’m considering when I analyze this the attitude that Mr. Vavasor (Alice’s father) takes when he has to “work” in his office: and his work only amounts to signing some papers occasionally.

But essentially I wonder if George is better at playing by the social rules with women because he doesn’t see them as potential partners in the business world. Because he sees his acquaintances as partners and not peers, he runs into trouble with their sense of behavior. This makes Alice’s interest in him unfortunate: what she wants to be, remember, is a partner to someone political. She dreams of smuggling documents into the Tower!  But perhaps he will never be able to treat her that way even if they do marry. 

If other gentlemen can’t trust George at the hunt-- though he’s capable enough to ride the whole hunt through which most of them aren’t-- they shouldn’t trust him either in parliament or to marry their daughters. But will they? They seem happy enough to let him hang out when they need a fourth for cards. There’s a lot to be said for the power of just consistently showing up and not caring people don’t like you. This will get him far in politics.  

That said, there is something sort of defeating about George selling his brown horse, not because of the amount of money it goes for, but because his “bad character”(Trollope 153) or poor history is what dooms him to be valued at less than he is worth. It’s tempting to see George as the bad horse, undervalued because of past history but George is actually the man who deals with bad horses: this is part of his business and his character as much as his secret rooms, his elections, and his pursuit of Alice. Again I cannot help but read this as a warning against getting involved with George. At the very least: George is not being portrayed as a straightforward romantic hero. 

Grey also purses Alice, to Cheltenham, Grey makes a very good impression on Lady Macleod, but this is hardly a surprise: 

“Indeed her first glance at him had awed her. He was so handsome,—and then, in his beauty, he had so quiet and almost saddened an air! Strange to say that after she had seen him, Lady Macleod entertained for him an infinitely higher admiration than before, and yet she was less surprised than she had been at Alice's refusal of him.” (Trollope 130) 

This is an interesting passage because Lady Macleod doesn’t often soften or become aware of things: but once she’s met Grey she understands why Alice called off the engagement. Should we take this as a point against him? Or does Lady Macleod just know Alice well enough to understand why she would make a baaaaad decision? 

I think really Alice is very well known by most of her family: they all know she’s susceptible to George it’s just that they have different opinions about it. 

I think primarily these four chapters are used to tease out feelings in the readers about George, Grey, and Alice but we are given no closure. If we were the point of the next 400 pages would be quite gone. 

If you’re wondering how Alice feels about Grey and George at this point she is torn between them:  

“Poor Alice! I hope that she may be forgiven. It was her special fault, that when at Rome she longed for Tibur, and when at Tibur she regretted Rome. Not that her cousin George is to be taken as representing the joys of the great capital, though Mr. Grey may be presumed to form no inconsiderable part of the promised delights of the country. Now that she had sacrificed her Tibur, because it had seemed to her that the sunny quiet of its pastures lacked the excitement necessary for the happiness of life, she was again prepared to quarrel with the heartlessness of Rome, and already was again sighing for the tranquillity of the country.” (Trollope 124) 

In this passage Alice regrets breaking with Mr. Grey and even considers, further down the page, going back to him. 

What happens when she actually sees him? Trollope builds this scene almost entirely out of dialogue and it’s very sweet dialogue. I poke fun at Trollope but his touch of realism really comes through in scenes like this.  

Alice seems stuck on what she has done, and how wrong saying to Grey, “Whatever you may do, I myself have sinned so against you that I can have no right to blame you." (Trollope 131) Grey disputes this and while he does not seem to pressure her he does say he considers himself still her “suitor”  saying at one point: “I am still your suitor.” (Trollope 132). Suitor seems like an interesting word because it implies he has not already been accepted. He seems to be suggesting he will court her over again and win her for a second time. The text compares him to George twice. Once, Alice compares Grey’s serenity with George’s passion: “She looked up into his face, but it was still serene in all its manly beauty. Her cousin George, if he were moved to strong feeling, showed it at once in his eyes,—in his mouth, in the whole visage of his countenance.” (Trollope 131) and then at the end when Grey presses her hand the text notes “not as George Vavasor had pressed it,” (Trollope 132). The first comparison seems to be from Alice’s perspective while I think the second is up for grabs and could be entirely the narrators/audience’s. 

It’s not giving away much to say the text is comparing George and Grey, or that it will continue to. It’s interesting to consider when is the text comparing the two men and when is Alice? As readers, I wonder if we compare them more than Alice: who knows them as full complicated individuals and not just a Venn diagram (which yeah, is kind of how I think of them in my head). 

Next installment we’ll cover at least: Alice Vavasor’s Great Relations, Tribute from Oileymead, Which Shall it Be? Which will bring us to twenty chapters! Which is exciting! For those of us waiting for Lady Glencora Palliser, the light is at the end of the tunnel. 

All page numbers are from the Oxford World Classics Edition 2012