“But the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel

Abstract

Victorians Journal 55 “©at the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel by Tamara Wagner Trollope’s uncompromising realism imbues the everyday of highlife with a wry sense of comedy. He excels in detailing the familiar, laying bare the mundane private lives of the elite and ofthe middling classes that attempt to emulate or marry into these higher ranks of a rapidly changing society. Examples include the famous bedroom conversations of the Archdeacon and his wife in the Barchester Chronicles, the domestic lives of politicians in the Palliser series, and altogether his critical insight into marriage at a time when its significance as an alliance and a contract underwent crucial changes. Throughout his representations of married life, Trollope eschews sentimentality and sensationalism alike. In his autobiography, he might have asserted an ambiguity about “sensationalist and anti-sensationalist” writers and readers, claiming that a “good novel should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree” (2.41-42); but his rejection of sentimentalism remained fervent. It arguably formed the most defining characteristic of his realism and was in pointed opposition to the style of Dickens, whom he dubbed “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in a particularly biting passage in The Warden. 1 In Trollope’s comic explorations of marriage and family life there is, however, a revealing doublesidedness in the way he places babies, an aspect of Victorian culture that, I further contend, has altogether been curiously sidelined in critical discussions. A close analysis of how Trollope engages with what he terms “Baby Worship” (ch. 16) in Barchester Towers helps us to re-evaluate the surprisingly neglected figure of the baby in Victorian literature. The comic marriage novel Is He Popenjoy? pits Trollope’s satirical evocation of “baby worship” against the larger 1 Compare Meckier (ch. 2) on what he has termed “the realism wars.” 56 Victorians Journal structural function of the expected heir as the pivot on which an outwardly conventional narrative ofinheritance can turn and thereby be turned into something else. “to impress her with the solemnity of married life”: expectations of Modem Marriage in Is fiePopenjoy? Is He Popenjoy? is Trollope’s most bizarrely comic marriage novel. It traces the coming of age of a young woman after her marriage, providing painstakingly detailed insight into married life in the Victorian upper and middle classes. The novel describes the transformation that “a little girl... not pretending to any self-action” (IHP 202) undergoes when she becomes a married woman, and how marriage makes her “learn to be a woman” (48). Yet the double­ standards inherent in her husband’s appreciation ofhow she “had lost her childish little timidities, and had bloomed forth a beautiful woman”—although, “as to the childish timidity, perhaps he would have preferred that it should not have been so quickly or so entirely banished” (315)—is presented tongue-in-cheek, as is his plan to “impress her with the solemnity of married life” (178). The lightheartedness ofone ofTrollope’s most refreshingly lively female characters is in pointed contrast to the ridiculed solemnity of her serious but “not very clever” husband (327). In detailing their contrasting expectations, shifting hopes, and ideas ofmarried life, the novel maps out diverging concepts of marriage, domestic realities, and a married woman’s rights and duties at the time. Although conventional approaches to Trollope’s fiction often take his provocatively blunt pronouncements—such as his notorious suggestion in North America that “[t]he best right a woman has is the right to a husband” (2.72)—at face value, Deborah Denenholz Morse’s seminal Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels has instigated an important revaluation of his much more nuanced and often self­ consciously ambiguous representation of gender. More recently, in an essay entitled “Trollope the Feminist,” Morse adds that, in “his dissection of masculine privilege in Victorian culture and society,” Trollope’s “critique of the lassitude and misogyny of aristocratic Englishmen [is] coupled with his loving depiction of vibrant women,” such as a stablekeeper’s granddaughter in Is He Popenjoy?', Victorians Journal 57 thus “Trollope’s critique of gender is imbricated with a critique of social class and nationhood” (np...