Feminism, fiction and contract theory: Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right.'

Criticism, Summer, 1994 by Wendy Jones

(10.)William Thompson, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery: in Reply to Mr. [James] Mill's Celebrated "Article on Government" (London, 1825; New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 55.

(11.)Caroline Norton, Selected Writings of Caroline Norton: Facsimile Reproductions with an Introduction and Notes by James O. Hoge and Jane Marcus, (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978), 4, 13, cited by Mary Poovey, in Uneven Developments; The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 64.

(12.)John Start Mill, "The Subjection of Women," in Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 168-69. Future references will appear in the text.

(13.)Cobbe, 788.

(14.)Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 192, June 21, 1870, Column 604. Future references to Parliamentary Debates will be cited by volume, date and column number and will appear in the text.

(15.)Thompson, 70.

(16.)Cobbe, 788, 790.

(17.)Frances Caroline Cornwallis, "The Property of Married Women: Report of the Personal Laws Committee (of the Law Amendment Society) on the Laws Relating to the Property of Married Women," Westminster Review 66 (1856): 358-59.

(18.)Cobbe, 791.

(19.)Josephine Butler, Introduction to Woman's Work and Woman's Culture: A Series of Essays, ed. Josephine Butler (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), xxxii.

(20.)Discussions of Trollope's feminism include Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); P.D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); N. John Hall, A Feminist In Spite of Himself," Trollopiana: The Journal of the Trollope Society 10 (August 1990): 13-19; and Jean Nardin, He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). Trollope's two extended discussions of women's rights appear in his "Higher Education of Women," Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable and Co., 1938), 67-88 and North America (New York: Knopf, 1951), 256-65. For summaries of Trollope's overtly expressed views on feminism, see Hall, 14-15; Nardin, 16-18, and John Sutherland's introduction to the novel (in the edition cited in note 21), xxi-xxii.

(21.)Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 237. Future references will appear in the text.

(22.)See Ruth apRoberts, "Emily and Nora and Dorothy and Priscilla and Jemima and Carry," in The Victorian Experience: The Novelists, ed. Richard A. Levine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 116. Taylor, a seventeenthcentury divine, was an authoritative religious guide for the Victorians; most households possessed his sermons. As this reference indicates, the revision of ideals of masculinity implied by "gentle patriarchy" was not new to the Victorians. A similar ideal had been popular with the Puritans. But it was always in conflict with sterner models of masculinity, and at this particular time, would appear "new" once more since it followed closely on a resurgence of autocratic patriarchy at mid century. On ideals of masculinity in the Victorian era, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109-13.