C.J. Hauser's The Crane Wife and Victorian Relationships

Toxic relationships are timeless

Introductions & Welcomes:

There are some new faces here and also it has been months of quiet on the Trollope front-- my apologies. Welcome or welcome back. 

 I don’t think I’ve written about this before but I’m a full-time student and full-time library worker and I may have taken too many classes last semester to allow for regular meals and regular Trollope but everything is handed in and I can’t wait to get back to my true love. 

For those of you not yet familiar: This is Can You Stand Her? A newsletter where we are close-reading and slow-reading Trollope’s 1864-1865 novel Can You Forgive Her? It’s available on Project Gutenberg for free or you can get it online/in some stores. I take my name from reviewers who complained the book should be called Can You Stand Her? because I think there’s something to be asked about Victorian heroines and heroines we don’t “like” and what makes a woman likable to the Victorians and now and what makes her unlikeable on both markets-- and I think Alice (Trollope’s heroine) is unlikeable to both markets. 

Can You Forgive Her? Is a very modern novel as well as a very Victorian novel. It asks the question: can a woman who has jilted a lover ever recover her honor? But really this is the kind of question lots of people debate over brunch each week: do we forgive our friend for getting back with a toxic ex? Do we allow people the grace to make mistakes? It kind of reads like the prequel to Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together”. 

To push the point Trollope has his heroine Alice Vavasor jilt multiple lovers multiple times before reaching her happy ending. (This isn’t really a spoiler 95% of Trollope novels have happy endings). While Alice’s struggles seem dated by the crinolines and the carriages they’re really not that different from modern struggles in dating in fact I was reminded of Alice when I read C.J. Hauser’s The Crane Wife this month.

The Crane Wife and Anthony Trollope:

The Crane Wife is an essay collection that takes the form of a memoir. In three of the essays (Act One: The Mechanicals, Act Two: The Fantasticks, Act Three: Dulcinea Quits) Hauser recounts a long off and on again relationship with a boy she started dating in high school. She writes, “Most people thought what of what you had as teenage infatuation, but it wasn’t. Even now you sometimes think of the high-octane intimacy that passed between you and wonder if someone older could have survived it. You’re not saying it was unique, just that it was real.” (28). Which reminded me immediately of this rather long passage in Trollope from which I’ll pull the following:

“But she had once loved her cousin. Yes, truly it was so. In her thoughts she did not now deny it. She had loved him and was tormented by a feeling that she had a more full delight in that love than in this other that had sprung up subsequently. She told herself that this had come of her youth;-- that love at twenty was sweeter than it could be afterwards. There had been something of a rapture in that earlier dream which could never be repeated,-- which would never live, indeed, except in a dream.” (25). 

I want to take a second to fully appreciate that Trollope has to use a semicolon and an em dash here but apart from that what we have here is teenage infatuation right? Or the twenty-year-old equivalent. The rush of first love. What’s different is that to Hauser the intensity comes from reality whereas to Alice it comes from the impossibility of the relationship; it could never live except in a dream world. But we should pay attention to the fact that Alice is telling herself this to justify away her torment: that she enjoyed her failed relationship with her cousin more than she’s enjoying her less turbulent relationship with Mr. Grey. So while Alice says the relationship wasn’t real, or the feelings it inspired weren’t, the fact that they still haunt her years later indicates they are real feelings even if the reality of the relationship wasn’t always positive. Both quotes ask indirectly, why previous relationships are more intense even if they weren’t necessarily better. 

I think this is a question Alice will return to over and over again. Most people don’t have their first love showing up at their house repeatedly when they’re grown up but Alice and C.J. Hauser do so what happens when memory has to be held accountable for life choices and you’re a grownup not a teenager anymore? This is a question we’ll explore and explore as Alice has to make some tough choices. 

Victorian Tinder Dreams 

In a later essay, Hauser struggles with the realization that she might never get to be a mother. She writes about how this affected her dating life saying “When I stopped thinking about the people I kissed as being part of some sort of pathway to shared parenthood, I found I was interested in different people. I became open to seeing polyamorous people. I saw women more frequently. And the monogamous cis-men I was interested in were different, too” (282). Hauser doesn’t break down the ways that the men were different (I would love to listen to this over a glass of wine though) but she does tell the story of a romantic encounter with a man she names Adam and describes how when they have sex she is suddenly free to be “only myself in bed” (283). 

What would Alice be like, I wondered if she was suddenly free (from Victorian society and memories of George)  to be only herself? Isn’t that kind of her dream and her anxiety all at once? I’ve quoted this passage before but remember when arguing with Lady Macleod Alice says, “I haven't much of my own way at present; but you see, when I'm married I shan't have it at all.” (28). If we take her fear beyond just having dinner set when she wants it is it possible to imagine she means she won’t have herself once she marries? There’s something sparkling for Alice about this time before marriage this time when, as CJ Hauser puts it, she can be only herself. 

Hauser articulates an instance of a woman being herself with a man while Alice can only imagine being herself unmarried-- but I think partially this has to do with the social situations of the times. If Alice could have gone on tinder would she have? I want her to go on a date to a wine bar. I want her to do canvassing for women running for office. I want so much for her that I didn’t realize I wanted it until I read C.J. Hauser’s book. 

I wondered what kind of Crane Wife Alice would write if Trollope let her cast off all her beaus and take on the world alone, like CJ Hauser in a series of houses and relationships that don’t necessarily need to lead to the straight marriage… “I saw women more frequently”, Hauser writes-- I suppose I want Alice to consider seeing women more frequently and seeing George less. Because the great love of Alice Vavasor’s life isn’t Mr. Grey or her cousin George Vavasor it’s her other cousin: Glencora Palliser and we finally meet her in this chapter.  

Glencora Palliser 

Let’s just acknowledge that I absolutely love Glencora. Glencora calls her fancy little wagon a “dog cart”, Glencora shows up covered in furs and she brought enough for a friend, Glencora is going gray already and wants to hide from her house party guests in her sitting room, Glencora is wicked and delightful. 

Glencora could be called a foil to Alice. Glencora obeyed her family’s requests and gave up her passionate romantic attachment to the unsuitable Burgo Fitzgerald to marry the thoroughly respectable Plantagenet Palliser. She’s now in line to become a duchess.  Alice visits their house at Matching during this chapter. But Glencora and Alice are both in love with men they can’t or won’t be with so setting them up as a simple compare contrast doesn’t work exactly. They’re more like a venn diagram. 

Glencora isn’t just a flatly delightful character: she worries about whether or not she’ll be able to provide her husband (and the Duke) with an heir and she wants to talk about Alice’s scandalous cousin George not just because she wants hot goss but because she wants to bolster Alice up against the family pressure she herself caved into. She’s a woman with regrets and responsibilities. 

I can’t wait to find out how I feel about her next week. 

Summary: Dandy and Flirt 

Glencora meets Alice at the station in a cute little carriage with a second carriage for the maids and luggage. Alice immediately realizes that her friend’s life: with footmen and furs and carriages, is very different from her own. 

Glencora confesses she longs to drive a four in hand (four horses at once) instead of the more ladylike set of two. Glencora, for all that she has acquiesced to social expectations, chafes against them much like Alice. Her longing to drive and her admission that she would hunt if her husband would let her also communicate this. 

We get some great political gossip as Glencora drives Alice to the Priory: the Duke used to hold two boroughs as part of his estates. These were districts where he could essentially select whoever represented them in parliament directly without worrying about the electorate. This means he had two members of parliament in his pocket at all times but in the Reform Bill he had to give up one of the boroughs; so now he only has Silverbridge, which is the district Plantagenant represents. If we ever make it a) through this book and b) to The Prime Minister I am going on such a tangent about Reform Bills.

Readers may notice that Barsetshire gets a mention here as the place the duke's father was going to build a house-- there's some cross-pollination between Trollope's two long series although from my memory there's more on the other side. 

Glencora says no one will bother Alice about Mr. Grey but that she herself expects to hear all the gossip from her. It's interesting to compare Kate and Glencora-- both want to know what is in Alice's heart and head but Glencora doesn't have a strong interest in either union she just wants to get closer to Alice and maybe closer to a story that reminds her of her own.

Glencora takes Alice to her private sitting room, she calls it a dressing room and the talk turns to marriage. Glencora worries she hasn't gotten pregnant yet; Alice tells her not to worry. Glencora worries that Alice will be swayed by her family into marrying Mr. Grey. Glencora goes to see to her guests. Alice worries she isn't aristocratic or important enough for this sort of house party. When she goes downstairs she meets the Duchess of Bungee and Jeffrey Palliser and everyone goes into dinner. 

Some notes before we part:

You may notice there’s less formal step-by-step reading and summary in this essay.  I’m going to try this new approach to make the newsletter more sustainable while I’m in school. I’m sure there will be chapters where I fall back on a close reading but it’s not going to be the only way I write the newsletter. I’ll always include a summary either at the beginning but I’ll try and incorporate more of my reading and other work as it overlaps. 

Lastly thank you to my friend Elizabeth who had me guest write a recommendation for her this week which inspired me and got me back to my desk (for Victorian reasons). You can follow her newsletter if you want book recommendations. I actually guest-wrote for her earlier this week and my pick was, you guessed it, The Crane Wife.