“What should a woman do with her life?” Alice jilts John
Sorry for the delay, I had the end of the semester, COVID, and writer’s block… anyway it’s time to get back on the horse.
Summary:
We learn a little more about Mr. Grey. His income is small (1500 a year) and both his parents are dead. His county, judged by Trollope, is a little dull and not as scenic as it could be but the house his family has built is charming.
Mr. Grey writes Alice a letter asking that they get married by the end of October. She writes back to say she cannot marry him before the end of the year and maybe longer than that. She says she understands if he wants to break off their engagement. In her explanation for a delay she does not mention George but she describes marriage as going through a grave from one life to another-- not exactly a cheerful thing to write to your future husband.
Mr. Grey is worried by this letter and visits Alice in London where she asks him to end their engagement. He says only her marriage to someone else will convince him that their engagement is at an end. She says she can't promise to marry someone else. Things are left broken between them but Mr. Grey urges Alice to reconsider.
All work and no play = John Grey
Trollope goes on at length about how boring and plain the countryside of Cambridgeshire is. “It is very flat; it is not well timbered; the rivers are merely dikes; and in a very large portion of the county the farms and fields are divided simply by ditches—not by hedgerows.” (Trollope 85)
I'm not sure he paints a very exciting portrait of Mr. Grey in this chapter. John Grey's life is rooted in the place he grew up, even if that place is kind of lonely which he suggests when he says that Grey's access to Cambridge is important to him: " His easy access to Cambridge had probably done much to mitigate what might otherwise have been the too great tedium of his life" (Trollope 86). Is the reader supposed to imagine Alice, confined by this tedium? Without the benefit of scholarly pursuit? In the arguments to be made against the marriage to Mr. Grey Alice will come back time and time again to the fact that while she loves him his way of life does not suit her. Is Trollope offering us evidence that her caution is a correct one?
The complexity of this chapter is that it reveals Alice isn't wrong to hesitate to marry Mr. Grey, she isn't under an illusion that her life will change-- her life really will change when she marries him. Trollope considers that Alice may have thought too much about this question but he doesn't imply she's made up her arguments out of thin air-- in fact in detail like this he is very careful to show she has some logical points on her side.
I would argue that Alice doesn't realize that delay is its own decision, deciding not to get married now is a way of deciding not to get married ever. Grey is fully awake to this and his ability to read the seriousness of her delay speaks to the complexity of his character. Trollope paints him as sort of simple and plain in some ways but he is awake to Alice --considering he met her without the advantageous familiarity of the family to color in her background.
In a novel where characters are all related to one another Grey is a sort of an outsider to the various family connections that tie together Alice, George, Glencora, and Arabella Greenow. If George, Alice, Kate, and Arabella all live within the dynamic of a sort of traumatic/codependent family structure Grey is the sane person in the room who sees they're not good for one another
Trollope seems bent on assuring us that Grey is as boring as George and Alice worry he is. Trollope points out that even with the Catherdral and University close by “there had still been many solitary hours in his life, and he had gradually learned to feel that he of all men wanted a companion in his home.” (Trollope 87) and isn’t Alice worried about these many hours and what she will fill them with? She writes to John,
“Dear John, do not suppose that I despair that it may be so; but, indeed, you must not hurry me. I must tune myself to the change that I have to make. What if I should wake some morning after six months living with you, and tell you that the quiet of your home was making me mad?” (Trollope 89)
And Trollope backs her up somewhat; it’s only John Grey’s years of community experience that give him a mild social life in Cambridgeshire what would it be like for a newcomer?
We are taking a brief Virginia Woolf detour:
It's also interesting that it's Grey's education at Cambridge that gives his life in the countryside color and excitement-- education is exactly the thing a woman of Alice's class wouldn't have had access to. It's probable that George could have gone to University (I'm not sure if George attended a specific school or not) but the daughters would have been educated much less than the sons in fact many households scrimped on a daughter’s education on purpose to pay for a son’s. Virginia Woolf nicknamed this tradition of educating the sons at the daughter's expense "Arthur's Education Fund" in her long essay Three Guineas. Alice and Kate both show the attention to George's career that she describes in this work and I think it’s worth quoting at length a passage where Woolf considers the different way men and women look at the world because of education:
What is that congregation of buildings there, with a semi-monastic look, with chapels and halls and green playing fields? To you it is your old school; Eton or Harrow; your old university, Oxford or Cambridge; the source of memories and of traditions innumerable. But to us, who see it through the shadow of Arthur’s Education Fund, it is a schoolroom table; an omnibus going to a class; a little woman with a red nose who is not well educated herself but has an invalid mother to support; an allowance of £50 a year with which to buy clothes, give presents and take journeys on coming to maturity. Such is the effect that Arthur’s Education Fund has had upon us. So magically does it change the landscape that the noble courts and quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge often appear to educated men’s daughters like petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton, and the boat train starting for abroad while the guard slams the door in their faces.
Woolf lays out in a sort of collage of images the long impacts of stinting women’s education and experience but she also communicates a kind of anger that I think is useful in understanding Alice. Alice of course in her time period and her situation cannot be angry with George she can only be happy for him but her lack of education and experience have prepared her for the sort of narrow boring life that Mr. Grey suggests and her spirit utterly rebels. She worries she’ll go mad in his house!
Of course, Alice has some independent control over her own money and at least a longing for a social and political life the truest victim of Arthur’s Education Fund is Kate Vavasor who cannot imagine a selfish impulse on her own behalf. Kate possesses an obsessive self-sacrificing nature to benefit George's career. She gives him even the 10-pound note her grandfather gives her as an apology for speaking harshly to her, it rests in George's war chest waiting for his next campaign (Trollope 51), she hopes not that Aunt Greenow will leave her money to her but that she'll be willing to do something for George because it would be wonderful for the family if he were in parliament (Trollope 50).
But, tantalizing connections to Three Guineas aside, I think this second chapter “Mr Grey Goes to London” is important because Alice finally does (100 pages in) that which we are to forgive her: she jilts John Grey. I want to make sure I give this second chapter its due.
So: why does Alice jilt John?
Trollope spends much of the first half of the chapter describing Alice’s state of mind and laying out various arguments for why he thinks she’s wrong. (We are speaking of Trollope’s narrator here if that isn’t clear. Though with Trollope I think we can make an unusual argument for the two being the same sometimes…)
Trollope suggests first that the reason she’s ending her engagement with Grey isn’t because of George:
“It was not that her heart had again veered itself round and given itself to that wild cousin of hers. Though she might feel herself constrained to part from John Grey, George Vavasor could be her husband. Of that she assured herself fifty times during the two days' grace which had been allowed her. Nay, she went farther than that with herself, and pronounced a verdict against any marriage as possible to her if she now decided against this marriage which had for some months past been regarded as fixed by herself and all her friends.” (Trollope 91)
Though something about the fifty times in two days makes me think he’s suggesting she’s protesting too much I think this is also just an honest portrayal of Alice’s character--she goes to extremes. Part of her assurance to herself that she just won’t marry may also be a sign of how much she believes she is in love with Grey-- maybe the excuse is half denial of the power George has over her and half acknowledgment of the love she has for Grey.
A passage that critic return to again and again, and that I do too, describes how Alice would have liked to struggle for her husband:
She was not so far advanced as to think that women should be lawyers and doctors, or to wish that she might have the privilege of the franchise for herself; but she had undoubtedly a hankering after some second-hand political manœuvering. She would have liked, I think, to have been the wife of the leader of a Radical opposition, in the time when such men were put into prison, and to have kept up for him his seditious correspondence while he lay in the Tower. She would have carried the answers to him inside her stays,—and have made long journeys down into northern parts without any money, if the cause required it. She would have liked to have around her ardent spirits, male or female, who would have talked of "the cause," and have kept alive in her some flame of political fire. As it was, she had no cause.
Trollope 93
What Trollope essentially describes is that Alice wants the life of a political hostess or even just a politician’s wife. While her romantic and somewhat extreme personality probably would be drawn to live as a radical’s wife, smuggling documents and decoding ciphers, I think what would make her happy would be the life of a politicians’ wife-- to act as his hostess and helper. The closest example of what Alice wants is actually probably the role Glencora takes in The Prime Minister except that 1) that’s four books away and 2) Alice probably, as Trollope suggests, would have preferred to be married to a leading member of the opposition so as to keep a “cause” alive.
Considering Alice’s desires as simple and totally attainable for a woman of her class-- is she so silly to pause and consider jilting Grey? She loves him but cannot imagine the future with him, in his dull house in Cambridgeshire when she knows she wants more out of life. Grey emphatically doesn’t want a political life, he lives his life in history
John Grey had, so to speak, no politics. He had decided views as to the treatment which the Roman Senate received from Augustus, and had even discussed with Alice the conduct of the Girondists at the time of Robespierre's triumph; but for Manchester and its cares he had no apparent solicitude, and had declared to Alice that he would not accept a seat in the British House of Commons if it were offered to him free of expense. What political enthusiasm could she indulge with such a companion down in Cambridgeshire?
Trollope 93
Alice’s confusion is probably a very real jumble of desire for more out of life than she has ever had and guilt over wanting it. Victorian women after all are supposed the enthusiastically embrace life in the home. I was reading The Fascination of What’s Difficult which is a newish biography of Maud Gonne and the author described the Victorian attitude towards the home as beatification. The saintly image of the Victorian home put real pressure on the women expected to inhabit and create it. Alice, full of shame over her failure to hold onto cousin George, must feel repulsed by her own desires for a life outside the home. That she is only the 40% hot mess she is we should be astounded!
So I think Alice jilts John because she is scared of marrying him and being bored but more than that she is scared of her future even if she doesn’t marry him because her options are so limited. I think George doesn’t help matters, trying to seduce her and running for Parliament in the background, but I don’t think she only jilts John because of George.
As the novel goes on we will have lots more time to reflect on Alice and her choices but next week we are going to focus a little bit on George!