~The Trollope Prize 2006~ *Winner, The Trollope Prize*   Matthew Sherrill College of William & Mary A Novel Against Novels:  The Collision of Story and History in Trollope’s Castle Richmond Advisor: Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse

            It is no accident that the majority of criticism written on Trollope’s Castle Richmond concerns the relationship between what critic Margaret Kelleher calls the “conventional story of upper-class love”(Kelleher 242), and the Potato Famine.  Trollope’s novel is both disturbing and remarkable because the narrator’s attention, along with the attention of all the characters, is fixated on the former, paying comparatively little mind to the devastation surrounding their isolated pockets of relative luxury.  This division points to a wider concern in the novel, that is, the tension between fiction and fact, stories and history.  The main plot is distinctively and deliberately ‘literary’ in its construction.  Its world is populated by typed, stock characters who participate in an age-old plot of courtship and melodrama.  The narrator himself often appeals to novelistic conventions, and the entire plot is intentionally framed as a ‘story.’  In contrast to this fiction, Trollope provides glimpses of the real, historical backdrop of the famine, which, buried beneath the fictional plot, acts in opposition to the central plot.  Through this tension, and the narrator and main characters’ virtual denial of reality, Trollope points to the power and seductiveness of his own enterprise, that is, fiction.  Castle Richmond reveals itself to be a cautionary tale about stories themselves, in which Trollope emphasizes the importance and necessity of fact and history in a world where fiction often proves alluring, escapist, and ultimately unreal.

Trollope’s narrator begins his tale, appropriately, with a discussion of stories themselves.  Specifically, he claims that stories of value should prove worthy even when detached from their settings.  “The readability of a story,” he remarks, “should depend, one would say, on its intrinsic merit rather than on the site of its adventures”(3).  From the start, the narrator attempts to disengage his story from any specific geography or history.  His intentions are purely those of a storyteller, whose fictional universe is distinct from the ‘real’ one.  He continues, “No one will think that Hampshire is better for such a purpose than Cumberland, or Essex than Leicestershire.  What abstract objection can there then be to the county Cork?”(3).  The narrator will presumably ignore the Irish famine in particular, if England would be an equally suitable location for his story. 

The famine is indeed neglected for the first few chapters of Castle Richmond, until the narrator breaks jarringly from the movements of the plot to highlight the historical background of the novel, which seemingly contradicts with his earlier assertion of the setting’s irrelevance.  In a sense, however, the historical, matter-of-fact tone that characterizes much of this chapter serves to further the disjunction between the story and the history.  The chapter “The Famine Year” begins, “They who were in the south of Ireland during the winter of 1846-47 will not readily forget the agony of that period”(120).  It reads like history rather than fiction with its specificity of dates and geography.  This tension is played out in the overall structure of the novel, as well.  The main narrative is consistently punctuated by famine incidents, such as Herbert’s encounter with the starving woman and the scenes concerning the relief committee, or detailed historical descriptions, like the explication of the profit-renter system.  The back-and-forth pattern is a structural manifestation of the opposition between the fiction and history. 

Though the famine’s history occasionally breaks through into the narrative, the narrator himself is clearly concerned with stories.  He often interrupts his own story-telling to provide commentary on his efforts, often drawing attention to its more hackneyed, conventional elements.  After Owen first confesses his love to Clara and she is confronted by the Countess, the narrator comments:

Clara’s story was very simple, and did not in fact want any telling. It was merely the old well-worn tale, so common through all the world. 'He had laughed on the lass with his bonny black eye!' and she, - she was ready to go 'to the mountain to hear a love-tale!' One may say that an occurrence so very common could not want to much telling (62).   

“Clara’s story,” of course, is what has been previously related to the reader by the narrator.  Thus, to say that it did not “want any telling” is to acknowledge a superfluity about the novel’s plot.  Clara’s experience, along with much of the main plot, is indeed “well-worn,” in that the notion of the naïve girl seduced by the romantic, dangerous suitor is territory frequently treaded in literature and tradition.  The clichéd aspect of the situation is further driven home by the allusion in the passage, suggesting the pervasiveness of this narrative convention throughout history.

            These acknowledgements on part of the narrator continue through the novel.  When Herbert departs from Clara one evening, the narrator remarks, “What is it the song says? ‘Oh, ladies, beware of a gay young knight / Who loves and who rides away’”(213).  Again, a reference is made to an older source to highlight the derivative nature of the drama.  The narrator is wrapped up in his own story, but also hints at its inadequacies.  He even admits to his unsuccessful attempts at creating suspense and depth of character.  Upon Mr. Prendergast’s arrival at Castle Richmond, the narrator confesses, “The reader will have learnt by this time, with tolerable accuracy, what was the nature of the revelation which Sir Thomas was called upon to make, and he will be tolerably certain as to the advice which Mr. Prendergast, as an honest man, would give”(398).  Though the secret of Fitzgerald’s troubles is not explicitly mentioned, the reader easily ascertains its nature without having been told.  Any suspense that might have otherwise been generated is lost, and the ‘revelation’ reveals little the reader hasn’t already gleaned himself.  The eventual reaction of Prendergast is also obvious to the reader, which the narrator acknowledges, thereby admitting to the character’s simplification.

            The inadequacies of the narrator’s fiction, as pointed out by the narrator himself, are readily apparent.  This plot is certainly “conventional” as Kelleher notes, and in an explicitly literary way, since conventional ideas of genre and character guide the action.  Owen Fitzgerald, in particular, is a very ‘literary’ character, in that he resembles and represents a type of character that has always had a place in literature.  After assenting to Herbert’s advances, Clara thinks of Owen:  “His bearing, too, was chivalrous and bold, his language full of poetry”(215).  The description is that of a courtly lover, a character out of a medieval tale, seducing with words and valiant deeds.  Owen emerges as more of an inheritor of conventional traits than a unique character in his own right.  Though one could claim that Clara is imposing these literary characteristics on Owen, his own actions seem to confirm her opinion.  When Owen is given such laughably trite lines as “Remember this, Herbert Fitzgerald, you shall live to rue the day when you treated me with such insolence”(451), it is hard to conceive of him as anything less than a stock character speaking in cliché.  Appropriately, Owen is said to have “the old, true, passionate love of which [Clara] had read in books”(549).  Indeed Owen, like Clara’s love for him, is straight out of books, and is consciously constructed as such.

            The reader is thus presented with a main narrative that is clearly defined as fictional story, and whose conventional principal actors act out a conventional drama.  Interestingly, these actors themselves become wrapped up in their own story, in the sense that they are all horribly self-involved and neglecting of external historical circumstances, namely the famine.  The main story is framed by the characters and narrator action in terms of a specific genre, that of tragedy.  Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, with the knowledge that his immediate family will eventually lose the rights to Castle Richmond, is a clear example of this self-pitying attitude.  He “confine[d] himself for the last year or two almost entirely to his own study”(84).  This self-imposed isolation, which eventually leads to his death, suggests an absurdly exaggerated sense of his own misfortunes.  Had he paid more attention to the surrounding historical landscape, perhaps Sir Thomas would not have died a death so agonizingly long in the making.  It comes as almost a relief when Sir Thomas expires, and his exhortation to Herbert to “tell me that you have forgiven me”(635) is so melodramatic as to induce groans.  Also, Sir Thomas’ death is not shown by the narrator, for “it is an axiom of old that the stage curtain should be drawn before the inexorable one enters in upon his final work”(637).  Adhering to the tradition of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the scene again emphasizes the literariness of this story, in this case, Sir Thomas’ self-forming tragedy.  Mary Jean Corbett notes that “the story of Sir Thomas echoes that of those laid low by the famine.  The domestic narrative of a private individual’s misery and death repeats in miniature the broad outlines of the public drama”(Corbett 137).  Sir Thomas’ experiences certainly echo the famine, but I believe that Trollope’s intentions were far more critical than Corbett claims.  The reader is encouraged to reject the overwrought fictionalized tragedy of Sir Thomas when seen in the historical light of the famine.  Rather than feel uniform sympathy, the reader must identify with reality, with the famine victims.

            Another Fitzgerald, Herbert, feels sorrow that is even more troubling to the reader, as it actively hinders him from performing charitable acts towards the poor.  Before he finds out about his loss of inheritance, Herbert is a reluctant, but willing almsgiver.  After he discovers the truth, however, he, like his father, becomes wholly enamored with the Fitzgerald tragedy and his own misfortunes to the point that he utterly ignores the true sufferers.  In one encounter with famine victims, the narrator states:

On ordinary occasions Herbert would listen to them, and answer them, and give him…He could not think of their sorrows; his own sorrow seemed to him to be so much the heavier…Nothing is so powerful in making a man selfish as misfortune (530).   

Herbert finally lapses out of his self-absorption when he encounters the dying mother, but his action in response is seen to be inadequate, as she dies regardless of the cart that Herbert calls for.  Even though Herbert himself would certainly recall his own family’s misfortunes as the more vivid memory, to the reader “that image [of the dying mother] has come to stand for Castle Richmond as a whole, for it is one incident that readers cannot forget”(Terry 88).  These famine scenes, so intentionally poignantly constructed by Trollope, clash directly with the scenes of suffering surrounding the Fitzgerald family.  Though the reader is denied interiority with any of the famine victims, their earnest lamentations contrast with the self-centered, woe-is-me, self-dramatizing mentality of the protagonists.  There is a simple reason – the former is the stuff of history, the latter of fiction.  One catastrophe is real, the other grossly exaggerated.

Other characters also seem to take a great interest in the ‘tragedy’ of the Fitzgerald home.  Mr. Somers has at one point “a suspicion of such a truth – of such a tragedy in the very household”(425).  In addition to making clear the literary genre of tragedy that the characters are acting out, this passage points towards the bizarre and extreme importance that all the characters attach towards the Fitzgerald story, even those who aren’t in the family.  The Townsends’ reactions are particularly curious:  “‘It is very dreadful,’ she said, in a low voice.  ‘Very dreadful, very dreadful.  I hardly know how to think of it.  And I fear that Sir Thomas will not live many months to give them even the benefit of his life interest.’  ‘And when he dies all will be gone?’ ‘Everything.’ ‘And then tears stood in her eyes also, and in his also, after a while’”(607).  The poignancy of the Fitzgerald ‘tragedy’ moves them all the way to tears, demonstrating the extent to which these minor characters are invested in the story of the plot.  Thus not only the Fitzgeralds find themselves enraptured with their own tragedy, but others are drawn into it as well, fostering a culture of fiction and stories in the novel.  This culture leads to a disinterest in the famine issues.  While the reader sees some of the characters engaged in charity work, everyone in the novel approaches the Fitzgerald affair with far more passion, emotion, and interest.

            The main plot of Castle Richmond is constructed as a tragedy by its actors, but Clara creates her literary fiction in a different genre: romance.  As previously described, Owen is the dangerously seductive suitor, who uses poetry and sensuality to his advantage.  In addition to these attractive qualities, Clara wonders, “Should not the remembrance of Owen’s poverty have made her true to him?”(338).  Of course, Owen is not living in poverty, and the notion is purely fictional.  But in Clara’s mind, in her romance, Owen has become poor.  And this imagined poverty, to Clara, has made him all the more desirable.  What is more romantic than a reckless disregarding of money for the sake of true love?  Eventually, the tides shift, however, and Herbert becomes the “poor” suitor.  Clara then latches on to this conception of Herbert, declaring her everlasting love for him.  The narrator mentions, “She also was in love with poverty…Herbert Fitzgerald would be poor enough”(788).  Imagined, romantic notions again guide her course of action.  Rather than the man, she loves the romantic concept of choosing poverty over wealth.  Like the Fitzgeralds, Clara exists in her own formulated literary world, but it is a romance rather than a tragedy.

            In Castle Richmond, Trollope is very concerned with ideas of genre.  In the general sense, he is concerned with fiction.  The main plot of Castle Richmond is treated as almost a story-within-a-story, as the reader’s attention is constantly drawn to the fictitiousness of the central drama.  This is accomplished by having the narrator comment on his own storytelling, as well as injecting conventional literary ideas of character and genre.  Trollope creates a world in which both the narrator and the characters seem to value fiction over reality, and he asks the reader to consider the worth, purpose, and relevance of fiction.  The reader must reflect on these questions in light of the historical circumstances presented by Trollope, that is, the famine.  History and story collide in a very violent way in Castle Richmond. They compete for the sympathies and attention of the reader, though everyone in the novel seems to side with the story.  But the very literariness of the story, and all its falsities and conventions, eventually bring the reader in favor of history.  Trollope, ironically, uses his novel to assert the importance of history and reality, rather than fiction and imagination.   He recognizes how enthralling and tempting the world of fiction can be, but in the case of a national disaster like the famine, demonstrates how fiction and story can be counter-productive, evasive, and self-serving.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

 

Kelleher, Margaret. "Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond: Famine Narrative and 'Horrid Novel'?." Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, 25:2 (Autumn-Winter 1995), 242-62.

 Trollope, Anthony.  Castle Richmond.  London:  Penguin Books, 1993. 

Corbett, Mary Jean.  Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 Terry, R.C. ed.  The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999.