The Heart at Conflict With Itself
or Alice Vavasor would take forever to choose her Uber Eats order
This weekend I started re-reading my favorite Trollope novel Can You Forgive Her? Online a lot of people say the reviewer in Punch called it Can You Stand Her? as a joke about how much they disliked the character Alice Vavasor. Assuming this is credible Trollope did sort of set himself up for that one.
Can You Forgive Her? braids together the courtship stories of three women: Mrs. Greenow, Alice Vavasor, and Lady Glencora Palliser. Glencora is married to Mr. Palliser -- an outwardly cold politically driven man who loves figures and facts-- and must decide if she will remain with him or run away. Alice Vavasor must choose to either keep or abandon her engagement to a man she loves (John Grey) for her cousin George Vavasor, who offers her the dream of a worthwhile life as a political man’s wife1. And Mrs. Greenow, maybe the novel’s most fortunate heroine, must choose between a rich man and a poor man to pick a second husband.
For now, just consider Can You Forgive Her? a novel about Alice who wants to dump her fiance John and go back to her toxic ex George.
I’ve set out some close readings and analyses based on the first few chapters2 and my research so far. I’m hoping that the themes of women's agency and the romantic elements of the plot mean the analysis is fun to read even if you aren’t plodding through Can You Forgive Her? with me.
Trollope begins Can You Forgive Her? with Alice Vavasor saying:
“Whether or no, she, whom you are to forgive, if you can, did or did not belong to the Upper Ten Thousand of this our English world, I am not prepared to say with any strength of affirmation.”
The forgiveness makes sense, it's the “point” of the book but what about the Upper Ten Thousand? The Upper Ten Thousand is a slang term that originated to define the American upper-upper class but became applicable to other climates through use. So England’s “Upper Ten Thousand” might only have 2,000 people in it but we’ll still call it ten thousand. Does that make any sense? I don’t think it’s supposed to.
Trollope’s half-hearted endorsement of Alice’s social cache-- she may or may not belong to this elite group-- is a little confusing at first. What is important about Alice’s ambivalent social status and why is it as important as establishing her centrality to the plot? Partially this may be a preemptive defense for Alice. He’s already implied she’s done something wrong and he wants to give her a little status. But he’s also able to express the instability of her position: which he adds to probably most notably in the description of her housekeeping with her father. Alice is at a precipice in this sentence: she may or may not be forgiven, she may or may not belong to the Upper Ten Thousand.
This isn’t a throwaway reference. Instead, Alice’s changing place in the world-- from the world of the gentry into the aristocracy-- will propel the plot of the novel (through her interactions with Lady Glencora and her husband) and the plot of her romance with her cousin George, who aims to propel himself into the political sphere of Palliser and the Duke of St. Bungay-- into the Upper Ten Thousand. The plot here comes down to class. Alice is undoubtedly first-class which is to say she would never buy a railroad ticket for a second or third-class seat. In a similar way even if a farm laborer won enough money to afford a first or second-class ticket, he would never dream of buying it (for an explanation of England’s class/caste system see Daily Life in Victorian England by Sally Mitchell). However within “first-class” there are levels and the quality of Alice’s life will be determined as much by where she settles within her first-class railcar as which gentleman she settles with. Will marriage to John Grey turn her into a country lady with responsibilities to the county and the local church? Will she enjoy that? She would rather marry her cousin George so he can use her money to run for office and give their life some excitement— and maybe a higher position within their class. If Alice doesn’t dwell on the fact that the excitement she yearns for would give her social cache-- Trollope certainly is aware of it. Moreover, by linking Alice’s engagement to her social status he yokes the two arcs of her plot together for the reader from the very beginning. The reader anticipates the importance of the marriage plot and now connects the two into a crisis. If she doesn’t marry John Grey her plot as a romantic heroine is doomed, but if she doesn’t get into the Upper Ten Thousand her plot as a modern heroine is doomed3.
Why is Alice a modern and a romantic heroine? Because Alice longs “to be self willed” (Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope). A longing that drives her to attempt to be more than just4 a romantic heroine. Her love story is as much a story of avoiding a love story as anything. What Alice might yearn for is a coming of age bit this novel can’t be Alice’s bildungsroman-- a male-dominated genre. Women in novels marry they don’t become. Moreover, in the marriage plot, the woman is often humiliated/educated as opposed to evolved or identified. (for some discussion of this see Unbecoming Women specifically the chapter on Elizabeth Bennet)
So Alice’s long waffling over her marriage plays a sort of game resisting her future as a wife and her present as a romantic heroine and searching for some Alice-in-Wonderland-like escape to become a character in her own story. Alice also plays this game but because she is a woman she plays it with her heart. She doesn’t run for office and become part of the Upper Ten Thousand but she does successfully cultivate a friendship with the future Minister of the Exchequer and Duke of Omnium-- Plantagenet Palliser. Her husband follows her into this friendship and then follows Plantagenet into high office. So the story of Alice’s marriage is as much the story of her social-climbing as it is the story of her being forgiven.
Trollope’s throw-away comment then actually reveals Alice’s greater arc-- and this one has mobility in it that her emotional arc doesn’t. She both begins and ends the novel in love with John Grey but she ends is most assuredly a member of an elite social group--in the beginning, her status is murkier.
So… why is Alice contemplating jilting John Grey? This is a complicated question, especially after we learn she loves him.
“She was not quite pleased with herself in having accepted John Grey,—or rather perhaps was not satisfied with herself in having loved him. In her many thoughts on the subject, she always admitted to herself that she had accepted him simply because she loved him;—that she had given her quick assent to his quick proposal simply because he had won her heart. But she was sometimes almost angry with herself that she had permitted her heart to be thus easily taken from her, and had rebuked herself for her girlish facility.”
Alice loves John Grey but rebukes herself for loving, feels her heart has been too easily won. She doesn’t reject love exactly but rejects her own sudden submission to it. Alice may wish she had simply resisted a little longer, may both desire the courtship of her fiance and yet know that they have irrevocably proceeded beyond that. I like this reading because it breathes passion back into the connection between Grey and Alice. Grey and Alice’s engagement is presented not just as a fait accompli but as a totally omitted portion of the plot. For a five-hundred-page book that loves parallel construction, we don’t see the courtship between either Grey and Alice or Palliser and Glencora which might be part of the point. Trollope’s omission seems to indicate that perhaps in both circumstances there wasn’t much courtship at all. Both the reader and Alice can fume a little at their loss.
When I think about what makes this my favorite Trollope novel I think about Alice and Glencora and how they are both at war with themselves. They do not seem to get enjoyment from their feelings but they continue to have them. Isn’t that sort of the most realistic thing you’ve read? Faulkner said the true subject of the novelist is the heart at conflict with itself. Doesn’t Alice clearly reveal that is exactly her struggle? And so early in the novel! (p 16 in my edition)
In getting started on my criticism reading for this book I’m struck by how flatly critics tend to read Alice’s story-- she goes back and forth between two suitors but ends with the one she started with. Henry James reviewed the novel for The Nation and asked the question “what is there to forgive?” summarizing that the great conflict of the series was just the postponement of a wedding. I hope that through this close reading of the novel’s opening I’ve opened up Alice’s arc a little and shown the arc she is starting out on is much more than just a wedding postponement! She may be, as many critics have called her, a prude (looking at you Polhemus) but she’s a prude with feelings which I think might describe a lot of us out here.
When I started this newsletter less than a week ago I jokingly called it Can You Stand Her: a Victorian Newsletter with Feelings but actually I think I was being a little prophetic. Trollope’s characters, in their search for verisimilitude, emote a lot. I think sometimes literary criticism can look for too much logic behind emotions. You can get all Faulkner about it (as I do sometimes) but the heart at conflict with itself is the daily choice between delivery and the food already in your fridge, between a nap or going out for that drink with a friend and yes-- between the ideal of yourself and your actual behavior-- but let’s start our analysis of literature with problems the size of takeout orders and work up from there, okay?
I will admit that this is sort of a vague summary. We’ll spend a lot of time on Alice’s situation trying to tease out the meaning so I’m okay starting a little thin.
Reader, we make it exactly 2 chapters and I’m not sure we’re ready to move on yet.
Arguably Alice is not a successful modern heroine because her plot does die after marriage. She yearns for this independent life of power and she gets… two children and a powerful husband. In later Palliser novels, Lady Glencora will show much more how a woman can have an independent political life than Trollope ever has Alice show. Which might go to show “we” don’t ever really forgive Alice.
Read my use of “just” her in a narrow grammatical way; however, in the universe of Trollope there is definitely a difference between a heroine who happily restricts herself to her romantic plot and one with social and political ambition. Even minor (especially minor?) characters can have this. Griselda Grantly is a great example whereas a character like Mrs. Proudie is really more of a caricature…