Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition

Abstract

and superficial” (Novels 15). For a historicized contribution to this debate, see Nardin’s Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy. See particularly Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World, especially his account of the bildungsroman’s eventual collapse, in George Eliot, between the competing claims of labor and subjectivity: “For better or worse, vocation is depersonalized, objective, hostile to ‘personal experience’: to suggest that it can be fulfilled within everyday personal relationships implies a perversion of its meaning. It also implies a repression of the ‘other half’ of the novel: of the splendid and sorrowful account—short was the happy life of Tertius Lydgate—of the conflict between vocation and everyday life” (218). See also Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation. TROLLOPE AND THE CAREER 273 WINTER 2003 6There is an echo here of Said’s powerful account of the development of literary “careers”—a figure for the exile from secure conventions or any exterior agencies—out of literary “vocations” in Beginnings. For Said the fall from vocation into career is expressive of the unalterably subjectivist stance of the modern writer, without a home in literary precedent; in the Trollopian sense “career” expresses an analogous fall into a disconnected individuality that now can only compete with others, without the collectivist umbrella of “vocation.” See also Arac’s Commissioned Spirits for an analysis of the development of novelistic “careers” proper in the nineteenth century (23–27). 7See Corfield’s Power and the Professions for a sociological picture of “relative failure” in mid-nineteenth-century British professional life, a picture that cites Trollope’s father as an instance of the kind of stalled career-path which best expresses the term (224). For one acute version of the relation of sentimentality, or pathos, to social mobility, see Bailin. 8Bourdieu’s theory of the “disposition” explicitly responds to Weber: “The homogeneity of the dispositions associated with a position and their seemingly miraculous adjustment to the demands inscribed in it result partly from the mechanisms which channel toward positions individuals who are already adjusted to them, either because they feel ‘made’ for jobs that are ‘made’ for them—this is ‘vocation,’ the proleptic assumption of an objective destiny that is imposed by practical reference to the modal trajectory in the class of origin—or because they are seen in this light by the occupants of the posts—this is co-option based on the immediate harmony of dispositions—and partly from the dialectic which is established, throughout a lifetime, between dispositions and positions, aspirations and achievements” (Distinction 110). Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus is useful here particularly because of its attempt to formalize a theory of biography based on the career, on successive choices made within particular fields of power, which is remarkably close to the biographical procedure of Trollope in the Palliser novels and even in such brief studies as his Lord Palmerston (1882). For both, the vocational “aspiration” is of far less moment than the kinds of choices the individual faces in the midst of a vocational pursuit—choices that are always limiting, and limited. See also “The Field of Cultural Production” for further definitions of “trajectory” and what Bourdieu calls “constructed biography.” Contemporary sociologies of careerism stress what is often called the investment effect: the increase of desire for what has been achieved, which turns career-paths into “a powerful factor of conformity with the existing social order and a source of basic conservatism” (Larson 229). 9Miller’s contention reflects a lively debate among Trollope critics as to how truly “political”—or, responsive to social changes outside of parliamentary tactics—the Palliser novels are; for a defense of Trollope’s engagement with the issues of the 1860s and 1870s, see Halperin, Trollope and Politics, and for an acute analysis of Trollopian politics as a “spectacle of violence directed against another” (22), see Dellamora, “Stupid Trollope.” One further useful account is Hillis Miller’s in The Ethics of Reading, where Trollope’s relation to the playing of games—cricket, whist, the novel—could be usefully extended to the game Trollope was finally excluded from playing, Parliament. The similarity this analysis of Trollope’s Parliament bears to contemporary accounts of the profession of literary criticism is intended; the monadic, self-enclosed nature of parliamentary government reflects Stanley Fish’s account, in Professional Correctness, of disciplines and their boundaries, while the self-adjusting and self-critiquing