Love in the Time of Liberalism: Phineas Finn, Divided Affections, and Liberal Citizenship

Abstract

90 Victorians Journal Love in the Time of Liberalism: Phineas Finn, Divided Affections, and Liberal Citizenship by Abigail Mann Anthony Trollope, in his analysis oiPhineas Finn (1869), describes the novel as divided. According to his Autobiography, “I was conscious that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly, or perhaps in any part, by politics. If I write politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the benefit of my readers” (275). A brief survey of the critical literature on Phineas Finn suggests that while critics have not necessarily agreed with Trollope that the political was the primary focus of the novel—numerous studies have used the “love and intrigue” ofthe novel to illuminate the complicated gender stances it negotiates— on the whole, they have functionally read the novel in terms of either its political or its social plot.1 The sheer bulk of the novel (or novels, if one considers Phineas Redux) demands a narrowed focus, but I do want to point out that we have, in a sense, followed Trollope in viewing the novel as an either / or proposition. Against this trend, several critics suggest that the two plots ofthe novel must be read as interdependent. Indeed, Jane Elizabeth Dougherty points out, the subtitle ofthe novel—“the Irish Member”—makes political participation a direct result of sexual equipment. Juliet McMaster reads Phineas Finn as a very deliberately plotted novel in which “the individual politician’s relation to his party” becomes an “analogue for more familiar concerns ofthe novelist,” such as wife to husband or individual to society (39). In doing so, McMaster argues, Trollope suggests that “love and power and politics are a package deal” (50). Deborah Denenholz Morse suggests that we link Trollope’s political stances to his growing awareness ofissues ofgender, amongst others: “As he traveled the world, lived in Ireland, and then in London, and experienced a rich and sometimes frenetic life, he changed his ideas on gender and race, becoming increasingly more liberal in his thinking” {Reforming 168). This is more than an accidental or even metaphorical pairing: rather, love and politics become inseparable in the text because they both demand a complicated negotiation between states in which inhabiting both positions, rather than choosing one over the other, leads to success. The emphasis on simultaneity shapes both the content and treatment ofissues in the novel. Phineas famously falls in love with too many women at once, but I argue in the first section that these moments raise even more complicated sets of affiliations in terms ofchronology and affiliation. The political plots, too, explored in the second section, rest upon Phineas navigating disparate party, national, and individual beliefs. In each case, these differences present seemingly incompatible 1 See Halperin, Lonergan, Baker and Mouton for political readings ofthe novel. See also Denton, Morse, Turner, and Markwick on gender and marriage. Victorians Journal 91 states. Yet in each case, Phineas finds a way to negotiate these competing stances, not by choosing one over the other but rather through a sublation in which the two apparently irreconcilable states hold simultaneously. Each depends upon the other, and neither eclipses the other. Such a reading allows us to probe the concept of nineteenth century citizenship in fresh ways. Michel Foucault’s formulation of citizenship within a liberal society posits it as a balancing act between individuality and community: “How can the phenomena of ‘population,’ with its specific effects and problems, be taken into account in a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and individual free enterprise?” (317). In other words, he argues that liberal citizenship itself was built around seemingly incompatible states. Yet approaches to liberal citizenship have frequently read the two positions—community and individual— as competitive.2 In the final section of this paper I read moments of Phineas’s political endeavors as a stance that allows full political citizenship, bridging these opposing stances while simultaneously illuminating how other communities— gender and nationality—are both necessary to and excluded by such stances. I LOVE YOU, AND YOU, AND YOU It is remarkable that Phineas Finn’s amatory urges do not get him into more...