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~The Trollope Prize 2005~


*Co-winner, The Trollope Prize*

Stephanie Mueller, Luther College
"Where the Satire Stops: Female Characters in Trollope's The Warden"
Advisor: David Faldet
Mueller's First Prize Essay 2005 (.doc)

*Co-winner, The Trollope Prize*

Greg LaBelle-Heller, University of Pittsburgh
"To Err is Human, To Edit Divine: Trollope's Narrator
in An Editor's Tales as Victorian Arbiter"
Advisor: Michael West
LaBelle-Heller's First Prize Essay 2005 (.doc)


~The Trollope Prize 2004~


*First Prize*

Alyson Clabaugh, New York University
"Smashing Up a Text: Revealing Hidden Fraud
in Trollope's The Way We Live Now"
Advisor: Mary Poovey
First Prize Essay 2004 (.doc)


*Second Prize*

Alec Patton, University of
Maryland-College Park

"Can You Stand Her?"
Advisor: William Cohen

*Third Prize*

Rebecca Porte, Macalester College
"Cathedrals and Country Houses: Architecture as
Metaphor in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers"

*Honorable Mention*

China Millman, Harvard University
"Misreadings, Miswritings and Misunderstandings:
An exploration of the representative and persuasive
power of texts and readers in Anthony Trollope's
The Warden and Dr. Wortle's School"


~The Trollope Prize 2003~


*First Prize*

Gina Cora, of University of Notre Dame, for
"The Bad and the Good: How The Eustace Diamonds Changes Representations of Femininity in Vanity Fair"
First Prize Essay 2003 (.doc)
(.rtf format)

*Second Prize*

Gail Pokorney, of Harvard University, for
"The Physical Language of Letters: Letters as Objects and the Epistolary Form in Trollope's Can Your Forgive Her?"

*Third Prize*

Katherine Leahey, of Amherst College, for
"The Comic Narrator: Tristram Shandy's Legacy in Barchester Towers"


~The Trollope Prize 2002~


*First Prize*

Carey Seal, of Yale University, for
"Learning to Live": Virtue and Moral Sense in Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right
First Prize Essay 2002 (.doc)

*Honorable Mention*

Jackie Pint, of Metropolitan State University, for
Courting Clerics in Barchester Towers: Rival Clergymen Suitors and the Victorian Marriage-Plot Novel

*Honorable Mention*

Michael Edson, of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, for
Darwin and Trollope: A Study of Victorian Literary Culture



~The Trollope Prize 2001~

 

*First Prize*

Carey Seal, of Yale University, for
"'Is That Not the Law?': Ethics and Justice in Anthony Trollope's An Eye for an Eye"
First Prize Essay 2001 (html)

*Second Prize*

Eileen Murray, of Georgetown University, for
"Disruption of Reader Expectation in The Way We Live Now"

*Third Prize*

Marie Siesseger, of Georgetown University, for
"Temporality and Property in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: An Exploration of the Constituent Facets of the Gentleman's Morality"



~The Trollope Prize 2000~

Dan Wiseman
Yale University

The Broken Basilisk: Madeline Neroni in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers

[Madeline Neroni], separated from the Italian scoundrel who has wasted her fortune and crippled her limbs, still intent on conquests to be made by her wit and beauty, and utterly lost to all sense of shame in the pursuit, seems to us absolutely unnatural. She is an intrusion upon the stage, utterly out of harmony with the scenes and persons round her, and we cannot but think with the nature of her sex. It is a pity that such a person should have been allowed to force herself on the reader's acquaintance, or on the eminently respectable society of the cathedral city. --Anonymous review ("Mr. Trollope's Novels," October 1858)

One has a vague suspicion, reading this anonymous review, that it might have appeared in Trollope's fictitious Jupiter, or that it was written by Mrs. Proudie herself. At any rate, it is telling that the Signora could have the same unsettling effect on a Victorian reader as she does on Barchester's "eminently respectable society." What is most troubling to this reviewer, and to Barchester, is that she seems "unnatural." She is "out of harmony" with that society and "with the nature of her sex." Why would Trollope, who in his discretion devotes an entire page of apology for exposing the reader to a description of Eleanor's slap of Mr. Slope, allow this "basilisk" to "force herself on the reader's acquaintance"? It seems that Trollope may have been of the Signora's party without knowing it.

By including Madeline in Barchester Towers (1857), Trollope forces the reader to consider the way we think about women. This reviewer has had to make basic assumptions regarding "the nature" of women. In this case, his conception remains stable: Madeline is unnatural. At first glance, the narrative sustains this reading. We are given the example of Eleanor Bold, who, if a little headstrong, fulfills the reader's and Barchester's shared notion of what it means to be a "natural" woman. She is pious, motherly, chaste, devoted to her lost husband, and above all a suitable mate for the novel's conventional hero, Mr. Arabin. Madeline, in this reading, only serves to accentuate Eleanor's goodness by providing a model of everything Eleanor is not: overtly sexual, amoral, and unchaste. In short, as Mrs. Proudie puts it, Madeline "is not a fitting companion for a strict evangelical, unmarried young clergyman" (145). However, Madeline's relationship to the narrator is more complex. By providing an alternative model to the conventional heroine, Madeline presents a challenge to these same conventions. She becomes a surrogate satirist for the narrator, whose own critiques of Barchester propriety are often left understated. More than that, Madeline presents a complicated interiority, which the reviewer only hints at in his suggestion that she has lost all sense of shame, and which is further complicated by the narrator's treatment of her as an allegorical character.

Madeline's defining characteristic is itself loaded with ambiguity. She is "heartless" (62), a negative term that allows for various readings. Critics have understood her as a didactic representation of feminine vice, an interpretation encouraged in Trollope's personal writings. In a letter to his publisher, who had argued for a diminished role for the debauched Signora, Trollope writes, "Of course the woman is intended to [appear] as indifferent to all moralities and decent behaviour--but such a character may I think be drawn without offence if her vice be made not attractive" (Letters 25). Trollope continues in a similar vein in his Autobiography: "The regions of absolute vice are foul and odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and the nose, is disgusting. In these [the novelist] will hardly tread. But there are outskirts on these regions on which sweet-smelling flowers seem to grow, and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands the danger lies" (222). Such passages suggest an allegorical reading of the Signora, in which she serves as an example of the odiousness of vice, however "sweet-smelling" she appears to the men of Barchester. However, even in his condemnation of the Signora, Trollope's language becomes imprecise. She is "intended to appear as indifferent," and her vice is meant to be "not attractive." It may be that the Signora does inhabit the moral "border-lands" where issues of vice and virtue are blurred, but she draws the other characters into this nether-region, as well. In serving as a foil for Eleanor Bold, Madeline argues for a reconsideration of that particular fragrant flower, and an examination of the soil from which it grew.

The Surrogate Satirist

By most accounts, Trollope places the Signora in Barchester to act as a foil for the novel's more conventional heroine, Eleanor Bold. To say, however, that the Signora plays the "bad" woman to Eleanor's "good" is to ignore the important ways that these characters comment on each other in their circumstances, attitudes, and actions. One of Madeline's primary functions in the novel is to insist upon critiques that the narrator has left understated, at once providing distance from the narrative voice by her obvious unfitness as an authoritative character and highlighting subtle implied parody. Both Eleanor and Madeline are daughters of Barchester clergymen, mothers, more or less single, and, in their peculiar ways, attractive to men. But whereas Eleanor retains an attachment to her father ("Papa has been to me both father and brother.· He is the fondest and most affectionate of men and the best of counselors. While he lives I can never want advice" [268]), Madeline's family environment has not been so nurturing:

Their conduct to each other was the same as to the world; they bore and forbore; and there was sometimes much necessity for forbearing; but their love among themselves rarely reached above this. It is astonishing how much each of the family was able to do, and how much each did, to prevent the well-being of the other four. (62)

Beside the picture of Stanhope family relations, Eleanor's situation seems idyllic, but Eleanor's family does not achieve domestic perfection itself. Despite her zealous declaration of her father's merit, it is not clear that Eleanor could count on much advice from her father, who, through an impressive subjugation of his own will, has prepared himself to become father-in-law to Mr. Slope with no complaint. Indeed, it is Eleanor who does most of the advising in her relationship with her father, but is unable to convince him to try for the wardenship of the hospital, or to move in with her and away from his bachelor's apartment. Eleanor's relation to her sister, Mrs. Grantly, is hardly free from schemings and intrigues, due to the rumor of her romance with Mr. Slope, though the narrator is careful to explain away this source of familial discord as the result in their difference in age. Nevertheless, it is possible to see the dynamics of "bearing and forebearing" that typify the dysfunctional Stanhope house in the Harding family. Instead of merely highlighting the virtuousness of the Hardings, the Stanhopes blur the distinction between the two "types" of families.

Both Madeline and Eleanor are also, to varying degrees, single. Eleanor, widow to the late Mr. Bold, is the model of English widowhood, while the Signora's husband, of whom we know comparatively little, has abandoned her and is, we presume, gallivanting somewhere in Rome. Thus, in effect, Madeline and Eleanor occupy ostensibly the same position, women without a husband, but to vastly different effect. Eleanor, we learn, has a substantial income from the estate of her late husband and is able to live independently, whereas Madeline, due to her unfortunate marriage and subsequent desertion, has been forced to return to the bosom of the financially precarious Stanhopes "with hardly any clothes to cover her, and without one of those many ornaments which had graced her bridal trousseau" (66). The result of the Signora's marriage debacle is that she occupies an indefinite position, legally married but without a husband--as Mrs. Proudie puts it, "half wife and half not" (92). Mrs. Proudie's phrase, supplied indirectly through the narrator, reveals much about the nature of the Signora's social position. She cannot be categorized as easily as Eleanor, who is simply "the widow Bold," nor is she a "wife." Mrs. Proudie, searching, we presume for the opposite of "wife," could only arrive at "not," nor does she dare to characterize her as anything less respectable.

The Signora can only be defined negatively; we know what she is "not" in that she is not Eleanor Bold--or a Greenacre or a Lookaloft. Madeline's indeterminacy is exemplified in her visiting card:

La Signora Madeline

Vesey Neroni

--Nata Stanhope

Trollope scholar James Kincaid alludes to her card as a "fine parody of social forms" (108), but the elaborate, fragmented name represents a confusion of identity, though one, as Trollope's narrator observes, not without affectation:

How she had come to concoct such a name for herself it would be difficult to explain. Her father had been christened Vesey, as another man is christened Thomas; and she had no more right to assume it than would have the daughter of a Mr Josiah Jones to call herself Mrs Josiah Smith, on marrying a man of the latter name.· Paulo Neroni had not the faintest title to call himself a scion of even Italian nobility.· A coronet [a bright gilt coronet was placed over the name], however, was a pretty ornament, and if it could solace a poor cripple to have such on her card, who would begrudge it to her? (68)

Madeline has constructed a patchwork identity for herself, borrowing from father, husband, and her imagination, but she is not entitled to it, and despite her ostentatious presentation and fine parody, she can only rightly be called, "a poor cripple," a condition we will explore later.

The Signora agitates the social order through her own placelessness in it, much as she disturbs various Barchester parties, planting herself in the middle and commanding attention, so that "it was impossible that either man or woman should do other than look at her" (81). Though her entrance into the Proudie reception is less than decorous, just as her greeting card is itself rather tasteless, the "perfect commotion" caused by her escorts in carrying her to her sofa results in the absolute disruption of the social order that she offends. The Bishop cannot even distinguish the servants as such, and supposes her brother Bertie to be one. Ultimately, the confusion results in the disrobing of Mrs. Proudie, a literal exposition of Madeline's own talent for "unmasking" Barchester's pious.

Madeline's status as an outsider allows her to examine Eleanor's position within Barchester society with objectivity, if somewhat tainted by jealousy. Having been raised for the most part in Italy, Madeline can observe English custom with an objective eye, giving her a valuable perspective on claustrophobic Barchester. The result of the Signora's reflections on Eleanor, in particular concerning her status as a widow, calls that previously stable category "widowhood" into question. In the second chapter of the novel, before the introduction of Madeline, the narrator describes Eleanor, the grieving widow: "Poor Eleanor Bold! How well does that widow's cap become her, and the solemn gravity with which she devotes herself to her new duties. Poor Eleanor!" (12), and continues:

She wept as for the loss of the most perfect treasure with which mortal women had ever been endowed; for weeks after he was gone the idea of future happiness in this world was hateful to her; consolation, as it is called, was insupportable, and tears and sleep were her only relief. (12-13)

The narrator's portrayal of Eleanor as the ideal widow is tempered in a way that anticipates the Signora's critique. The condescending tone, brought forth in the repetition of "Poor Eleanor!" suggests that the idealized description of the late John Bold as "the most perfect treasure" is meant to be taken as Eleanor's view, especially since the narrator criticizes him only a few lines earlier as not having been "worthy of the wife he had won." Eleanor is compared, as well, to a "parasite plant" (13), a simile which appears again in the account of her marriage to Arabin and which calls to mind the possibly satirical description of Dobbin and Amelia's wedding in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. But it is the especial noting of the widow's cap, which the narrator becomes fixated upon throughout the novel, that recalls the narrator's treatment of widowhood when the reader encounters Madeline's own thoughts on the subject.

When her brother Bertie, for his own reasons, argues for the continued practice of wearing widow-caps, Madeline responds virulently:

"Yes--and you'd fancy also that she could do nothing better than shut herself up and cry for you, or else burn herself. But she would think differently. She'd probably wear one of those horrid she-helmets, because she'd want the courage not to do so; but she'd wear it with a heart longing for the time when she might be allowed to throw it off. I hate such shallow false pretences." (125)

Madeline's "hatred" of false pretences might be considered a more robust version of the narrator's own satirical project, but the intensity of Madeline's aversion to the practice distances her voice from the narrator's while at the same time calling attention to his own soft satire of the widow Bold mentioned above. In this way, Trollope can both hold Eleanor up as a model of "widowhood" and question the underlying assumptions behind such a model.

This analysis can also be applied to the category of motherhood. One of the readings of Madeline's discontentment rests on the supposition that, having been deprived, we presume, of the faculty to make babies, one of the most important virtues of a Victorian woman, she expresses her frustration outwardly, an idea that we will return to later. But this reading seems to ignore the fact that she is indeed already a mother. Perhaps one reason her motherhood is so easy to forget, as we do often in the novel, is that she behaves in a way inconsistent with the ideal of motherhood. She uses her child as a tool, much the same way that Becky uses little Rawdon in Vanity Fair (Kincaid 108). She is fond of hailing her child as "the last of the Neros," in order to romanticize her forlorn condition, and parades her out in full regalia when gentlemen are calling. All of this points to her as a "bad" mother, in contrast to Eleanor, who dotes on her beloved little "Johnny Bold."

Turning to Thackeray again, we might compare Eleanor's excessive devotion to little Johnny to Amelia's pathological obsession with her own child. In both cases, the loss of a husband is augmented by an increased attachment to the child: "Just eight months after the father's death a second John Bold was born, and if the worship of one can be innocent in another, let us hope that the adoration offered over the cradle of the fatherless infant may not be imputed of a sin" (13). Of course, the narrator himself argues that this kind of adoration should not be a sin, but his excessive defense of it serves to highlight the issue. Indeed, an entire chapter is named "Baby Worship." Again, the narrator's tender, yet defensive handling of the subject is brought into question by Madeline's outrageousness. Speaking of her own child, she exclaims to Bishop Proudie, "The blood of Tiberius...the blood of Tiberius flows in her veins. She is the last of the Neros!" (87). This is the supposed heritage of her lowly husband, but represents Eleanor's own naming process taken to the absurd.

The child's name, "Johnny Bold," reflects an affirmation of the patriarchal heritage, a continuation of the father's identity that occurs in the overtly male-dominated society. This question of naming and ownership is satirized in the Signora's calling card. Madeline has constructed an identity derived entirely from male names, taken from her father and husband, in a way that suggests the arbitrariness of this kind of distinction. When the narrator explains that Madeline does not have the "right" to assume the name of her father, the reader may question the ethics of a system that can assign such rights, and whether these ethics are any more legitimate than Madeline's. Eleanor's assumption of the name "Johnny Bold" for her son unquestioningly affirms a tradition of patriarchal lineage, perhaps a minor point, but noteworthy when compared to Madeline's obsession with names. Madeline's own child, not coincidentally, is female, and though we can doubt the happiness of her childhood and her prospects, she exhibits Madeline's penchant for satire when she gets "diddled" by Mr. Thorne, who has become enamored of the Signora: "Let me go, you naughty old man, you" (445). Although the narrator sympathizes with the confused Mr. Thorne, who was only trying to befriend the little girl, and Arabin turns away in embarrassment, the precocious Julia fulfills the satire herself, confirming what the reader has already guessed: that the aging Mr. Thorne is indeed behaving naughtily in his nocturnal visit to the Signora.

The Basilisk

We have seen how Madeline functions instrumentally in the novel, as a complicated foil for Eleanor and the values which she signifies, but why must she be expelled from Barchester, "expelled" being the term most critics use to describe her return to Italy at the end of the novel, in order for the novel's resolution to take place? Kate Lawson, relying on the work of Julia Kristeva and the theories of cultural anthropologists James Frazer and Mary Douglas, identifies Madeline as a source of "pollution" in Barchester, which must be removed before the various sources of contention can be resolved:

Barchester Towers is a novel which depicts the rejuvenation, or "reformation," of a community through a redefining of this ridge [between the "pure" and "impure"], through a separation of the sacred and profane. The ecclesiastical questions that pervade this book essentially concern the institutionalization of this ridge or margin, and the expulsion of Mr. Slope at the novel's conclusion is a sign of the success of this communal purification rite. In a parallel movement, the novel also defines a ridge in the domestic realm, inscribes a border on the female body which marks it as abject, both desired and reviled. The resolution of the novel is achieved through a facile separation of the female body into the clean and unclean. Signora Neroni's marked body comes to act as the "other" --for Girard, the "double," or "scapegoat"--which, when expelled, allows Eleanor Bold's body to be figured (albeit ambiguously) as pliable, submissive, and pure. (66-67)

Madeline's banishment, then, can be seen in part as an affirmation of the values associated with Eleanor Bold. However, Lawson's essay has less to do with distinctions of moral value than with ways that the boundaries of pure/impure are marked in a more tangible way. Lawson focuses on Madeline's body as a register of the implied and metaphorical violence in Barchester Towers and draws a parallel between "violence in the domestic sphere and the public world of ecclesiastical politics which dominates the novel" (54).

Madeline's expulsion from Barchester does not resolve the violence in the "public world" so much as remove its visible sign. Both Slope and Madeline, Lawson argues, have been marked by violence, which is acceptable so long as it remains figurative and hidden. Madeline carries the results of her abusive marriage in her lameness, while Slope is stigmatized by Eleanor's infamous slap and experiences a profound reaction to this "defilement":

There are such men; men who can endure no taint on their personal self-respect, even from a woman; men whose bodies are to themselves such sacred temples, that a joke against them is a desecration, and a rough touch downright sacrilege. Mr. Slope was such a man.· (385)

Madeline's "taint," though, is a far more telling than Mr. Slope's offended pride. She is crippled, "her person for many years had been disfigured by an accident" (65):

She had fallen, she said, in ascending a ruin, and had fatally injured the sinews of her knee; so fatally that when she stood she lost eight inches of her accustomed height; so fatally that when she essayed to move, she could only drag herself painfully along, with protruded hip and extended foot, in a manner less graceful than that of a hunchback. (66)

Notwithstanding Madeline's explanation, the more likely cause of her disfigurement is her husband, though this can at best be a surmise, as the narrator is either unwilling or unable (through lack of knowledge or Victorian propriety) to substantiate this claim: "Stories were not slow to follow her, averring she had been cruelly ill-used by Neroni, and that to his violence she owed her accident" (66). Clearly, the reader must assume that these rumors must be true, but the narrator does not substantiate them. They fall outside the bounds of the narrative and can only be included under the guise of rumor or speculation. A representation of domestic violence approaches what Lawson terms "pollution" and cannot enter the narrative directly.

The ambiguity of her injury stands, however, and each of the accounts of her "accident" is telling in its own way. Madeline's account that "she had fallen" may be, according to Lawson, "a partial truth (and in fact a kind of metaphorical truth)" (57). Or it may be just a bad pun. Much of the criticism concerning Madeline focuses on her as a conventional representation of the bad, or "fallen" woman. Madeline's role is, in such criticism, reduced to the function of a didactic representation of feminine vice, a reading supported in Trollope's autobiographical work and letters. In his Autobiography, he writes, "But the novelist, if he have a conscience must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics" (222). If Barchester Towers is such a sermon, then the reader must take at face value Madeline's declaration to Eleanor Bold, whom she is trying to convince to marry Arabin, "What I would not give to be loved...by such a man--that is, if I were an object fit for any man to love!" (439). We must believe that Madeline is genuinely unhappy because she is "bad" and unfit, and that she yearns to enter the conventional role filled by Eleanor Bold. Only then can we reach literary critic Cindy LaCom's conclusion about the effect of her characterization that "the final verdict on her situation, on her Îperson' and the realities it produces, are that she will never have what the typical, whole/some Victorian woman--and Neroni at heart--wants: union with a good man and a body/object that can nurture such a union and produce the children so important to her role in the domestic sphere" (196).

However, to believe Madeline in this instance is to disregard all of her previous sentiments concerning marriage, as well as her treatment of her own child. To do so seems especially arbitrary, given her tendency to say whatever suits her purpose at the time. In this case, her persuasion of Eleanor to take Arabin is aided if Eleanor can believe that Madeline is performing a selfless, heroic gesture. Moreover, the danger of assigning such a "moral" to Madeline is that it diminishes her intense physicality and realism by placing her solely in the allegorical realm. Unlike Thackeray's imaginative description of Becky Sharpe as a siren, Trollope's Madeline remains firmly grounded in what Trollope would call "truth": "Truth let there be, --truth of description, truth of character, an truth as to men and women." (Autobiography 229). "I am realistic," he states.

Thus, in the stead of Thackeray's rendering of Becky as siren, Trollope gives this "almost clinically accurate" (Lawson 56) account of her disfigurement, which we will examine again:

She...had fatally injured the sinews of her knee; so fatally that when she stood she lost eight inches of her accustomed height; so fatally that when she essayed to move, she could only drag herself painfully along, with protruded hip and extended foot, in a manner less graceful than that of a hunchback. (66)

Madeline has lost exactly eight inches, no more or less, a precise measurement that makes her injury more "real," as it is impossible to read much moral or allegorical significance into "eight inches." In these eight inches, then, lies the difficulty of conceiving a cumulative interpretation of the Signora. On the one hand, she represents a continuation of the physically/morally deformed symbolic woman, in the tradition of Spenser's Duessa, Coleridge's Geraldine, and Dickens' Miss Havisham (LaCom 195). On the other hand, the complexity and elusiveness of her character, as well as the precise description her injury, undermine this allegorical reading.

We have seen that Madeline functions subversively in the novel as a "satirical projection of the narrator" and double-edged foil to Eleanor Bold, but Madeline's disability, read allegorically, increases the ideological distance between Madeline and the narrator. "Her crippling," according to Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark, "is evidence of Trollope's ambivalent attitudes toward an open challenge by a woman to the respectable system of sexual relations and toward even such a subdued expression of female sexual desire" (55). Many critics, like Lawson, have read Madeline's disability as implicitly related to her sexuality. The relation between her disfigurement and sexuality rests in part in the elaborate concealment of her injury: "Gaze as we might at the evidence of these injuries, their exact nature eludes us, or is suggestive of something more than a mere injured foot or hip" (Lawson 58). The injury keeps Madeline prostrate, confined to the sofa, or promenaded on the shoulders of "three or four men" (79). Barchester is never allowed to view the injury or realize its extent:

Beneath her on the sofa, and over the cushion head of it, was spread a crimson silk mantle or shawl, which went under her whole body and concealed her feet. Dressed as she was, and looking as she did, so beautiful and so motionless, with the pure brilliancy of her white dress brought out and strengthened by the colour in it, with that lovely head, and those large, bright, bold, staring eyes, it was impossible that either man or woman should do other than look at her. (81)

Contrast her motionless beauty to the "manner less graceful than that of a hunchback," and we see the ambiguity of her injury. Concealed with ornament, her disfigurement becomes attractive and compelling, a source of interest and speculation. Unmasked, it is clinical, repulsive.

Speculation concerning her injury, almost always from Barchester women, reveals a curiosity often marked by jealousy. Before the bishop's reception, the Proudies discuss the mysterious Signora:

"She has got no legs, papa," said the youngest daughter [Augusta] tittering.

"No legs!" said the bishop, opening his eyes.

"Nonsense, Netta, what stuff you talk," said Olivia. "She has got legs, but she can't use them. She has always to be kept lying down, and three or four men carry her about everywhere."

"Laws, how odd!" said Augusta. "Always carried about by four men! I'm sure I shouldn't like it. Am I right behind, mamma? I feel as if I was open." (79)

Augusta's curiosity about Madeline suggests her burgeoning sexual consciousness; her thoughts turn seamlessly from Madeline's male escorts to her own appearance, and the possibility that she might be exposed to an intrusive gaze. Before she has even made her entrance, Madeline has supplied a new model of femininity, at least to Augusta.

However, critics like Lawson do not cite Madeline as an instigator of socially corrosive sexuality so much as isolate her as the visible signification of preexisting and unstated social conditions within Barchester. Despite Madeline's careful concealment of her injury, or because of it, the female characters dwell on her disability in ways that reveal their dislike of Madeline, as well as the universality of her position:

"But why does she lie on the sofa?" asked Lady DeCourcy.

"She has only one leg," replied Mrs. Proudie.

"Only one leg!" said Lady DeCourcy, who felt to a certain degree dissatisfied that the Signora was thus incapacitated. "Was she born so?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Proudie--her ladyship felt somewhat recomforted by the assurance--"she had two. But that Signor Neroni beat her, I believe, till she was obliged to have one amputated. At any rate she entirely lost the use of it."

"Unfortunate creature!" said the countess, who herself knew something of matrimonial trials. (355)

Lady DeCourcy's knowledge of "matrimonial trials" is largely a footnote to the ladies' comedic speculations, but the implication that even Lady DeCourcy, the most "high-class" character we meet in Barchester, can herself relate to domestic violence emphasizes the understated but pervasive violence in the novel. Most of the violence in Barchester Towers takes place only in the political realm. Eleanor's slap is the exception, to which Trollope devotes an entire page of moralizing and rationalization, in a novel that explores the dynamics of political struggle. Indeed, Eleanor's slap is the only overt act of violence in the entire novel. The slap stigmatizes both its perpetrator and its victim, marking Slope as an object of violence, and thus, shame, while "polluting" the narrative, to use Lawson's term, and Eleanor's purity. Trollope closely illustrates this struggle insofar as it takes place in the public sphere, but the dynamics of power within the home are for the most part unrepresented in the novel. For all the passionate rhetoric generated by Slope's influence with the bishop, the issue is resolved entirely within the bounds of the Proudie's bedroom, where the narrator declines to enter. Madeline serves as a visible casualty of the real "war" (Chpt. 6) that Trollope sketches thematically in the novel.

Another difficulty in reaching a comprehensive reading of Madeline stems from her most basic trait: the Stanhopes' "heartlessness." This quality is essentially a statement of motive, or more to the point, lack of motive. The reader can only speculate on Madeline's motivation; the narrator can only liken it to a kind of sport:

It is needless to say that the Signora was not very sincere in her offer [to make a match for Arabin and Eleanor]. She was never sincere on such subjects. She never expected others to be so, nor did she expect others to think her so. Such matters were her playthings, her billiard-table, her hounds and hunters, her waltzes and polkas, her picnics and summer-day excursions. She had little else to amuse her, and therefore played at love making in all its forms. (367-68)

"Such matters," in this case Eleanor and Arabin's romance, which is central to the novel, are equated with all the trifling pleasures denied her. Some of the "playthings" the narrator describes are enjoyments that are denied to Madeline because of her lameness, such as dancing and "excursions." Others, however, are denied to her on the basis of gender: the hounds and hunters, the billiard table. In this light, Madeline's various flirtations and intrigues, which are her defining acts in the novel, comprise a form of rebellion against this arbitrary denial. Jane Nardin's reading of Madeline as the Victorian "angel in the house" reductio ad absurdam becomes more relevant in the context of this rebellion. According to Nardin, the narrator suggests a lack only in Madeline's "amusements," not in her inability to construct a meaningful role in society. She is beautiful, and above all, motionless. She is confined to the couch, and, consequently, to the home. Her desires are limited to the trifles of upper-class Victorian past-times. As Nardin observes,

Apart from occasionally exposing pretence or offering advice, Madeline can do nothing constructive with her intelligence, for there is no sphere apart from marriage to which she can apply it in a sustained way. Nurtured in the dark experience brought by rebellion and disaster, Madeline's intelligence is a mixed blessing at best--for all her vitality she is very unhappy. (42)

Madeline's rebellion is as much a result of her own feelings of worthlessness in a society that cherishes qualities that she lacks as it is an attempt to debunk these values: "It was all very well to have Mr. Slope at her feet, to show her power by making an utter fool of a clergy man, to gratify her own infidelity by thus proving the little strength religion had in controlling the passions even of a religious man" (244). The narrator's phrase "gratify her own infidelity" contains remarkable insight into her character. Unlike the narrator's ostensible project, to preach a sermon, which we might describe as gratifying our own fidelity, in which virtue is rewarded and the honest are triumphant, Madeline's project aims at debunking that notion. She tries to justify herself by trapping others and finding the vice in virtue, showing that even the most "sweet-smelling" flowers can also be "odious." In this project, we approach most closely an understanding of the Signora. Here, we begin to see her suffering, unadulterated by its usefulness in alluring men. The narrator notes more than once Madeline's reluctance to complain, "though she had a cause for affliction that would have broken down the heart of most women as beautiful as she and as devoid of all religious support, yet she bore her suffering in silence, or alluded to it only to elicit the sympathy of the men with whom she flirted" (154). Of course, the narrator's faint praise does not evoke much sympathy from the reader, but the narrator faults her only for using her suffering instrumentally, and does not deny its existence. His other sarcastic note, her lack of "religious support" prefigures another such comment: "Mrs. Proudie looked on the Signora as one of the lost--one of those beyond the reach of Christian charity--and was therefore able to enjoy the luxury of hating her, without the drawback of wishing her eventually well out of her sins" (357). In this passage, the criticism, a lack of Christian charity, falls on Mrs. Proudie, but the same criticism may be equally applied to the narrator's treatment of Madeline.

Despite the narrator's handling of Madline's wickedness as "natural," or allegorical, through his repeated description of her as a "basilisk" or a "spider," we have seen that her suffering is real. Although Madeline never evokes anything like pathos, the psychology of her suffering argues against dismissing her simply as a "basilisk." The reader is not meant to find her channeling of this discontentment into love-making healthy or natural, and understands the implication that such a role would in itself be unsatisfactory. It is easy to define Madeline as "rebellious," but discovering the object of her rebellion is complicated by Trollope's implicit critique of convention. We could agree with LaCom that Madeline rebels against her inability to become the "typical whole/some Victorian woman," but Madeline finds what is typical and wholesome repugnant. Critics like LaCom place too much emphasis on Madeline's equivocal declaration "What I would not give to be loved...by such a man--that is, if I were an object fit for any man to love!" (439). By arguing that this desire defines Madeline and colors all of her previous sentiments, limiting the credibility of her stance that "marriage means tyranny on one side, and deceit on the other" (126), LaCom disregards the only stable understanding of Madeline's character: her "heartlessness." The Signora can argue both sides of an issue, as she does when she convinces Mr. Slope and Arabin of the folly and necessity of worldly success respectively, without fully aligning herself with either viewpoint. In Madeline's heartlessness lies the impossibility of reaching a defining understanding of her character, however tempting it may be.

Ultimately, the Signora's pronouncement that "there is no happiness in love, except at the end of the English novel" (245) is borne out, at least in part, by the novel's own conclusion with the marriage of Eleanor and Arabin, the expulsion of Mr. Slope, and Arabin's deanship. Even the needful Quiverfuls and their fourteen children are provided for. Ironically, much of the work done to bring about such an ending has been performed by one of the novel's ostensible villains, Madeline. She has played matchmaker to Eleanor and Arabin, unmasked Mr. Slope's hypocrisy, and convinced Arabin of the need for earthly success. Yet Madeline's absence is also requisite for Barchester Towers' resolution: "We have no doubt that [Arabin and Eleanor] will keep their promises, the more especially as the Signora Neroni had left Barchester before the ceremony was performed" (495). The "doubt" that the narrator describes involves primarily the element of sexual temptation that Madeline provides, but, more importantly, the instability that her character has introduced to Barchester's values. Superficially included to affirm these values by acting as a foil for Eleanor, Madeline undermines those same values. The doubt that Arabin and Eleanor will continue their idealized relationship beyond the closing pages of the novel also derives from Madeline, who serves as a reminder of the implications of domestic violence, as well as an argument against the conventional female domestic role implicit in Victorian marriage.

Works Cited

Barickman, Richard, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Kincaid, James. The Novels of Anthony Trollope. London: Oxford University Press, 1997.

LaCom, Cindy. "ÎIt Is More than Lame': Female Disability, Sexuality, and the Maternal inthe Nineteenth-Century Novel." The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 189-201.

Lawson, Kate. "Abject and Defiled: Signora Neroni's Body and the Question of Domestic Violence in Barchester Towers." Victorian Review 21.1 (Summer 1995): 53-68.

"Mr. Trollope's Novels." National Review 7 (October 1858): 416-35. Rpt. in Trollope: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Donald Smalley. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969. 80-89.

Nardin, Jane. He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Ed. Michael Sadler and Fredrick Page. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.

---. Barchester Towers. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

---. The Letters of Anthony Trollope. Ed. Branford Allen Booth. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. 




~The Trollope Prize 1999~

Stephen Boatright
Sarah Lawrence College

Anti-Semitism in Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels

Because Anthony Trollope belonged to the Liberal party, one would assume that he would be less concerned with the glorification of a specific social class to the neglect of any other. Yet, of the major novelists of the Victorian period, none was more infatuated with the code of the gentleman than Trollope. His political beliefs, which might seem to conflict with those of a Liberal, are best defined by his own description of himself as "an advanced, but still a conservative Liberal" (Autobiography 291). This left-centrist attitude serves as the basis for the moral standard of his novels and is embodied by the various "gentlemen" in his work. Trollope idealized the gentleman more than Fielding and as much as, if not more, than Thackeray. The characters in his novels judge each other by their interpretations of this standard, which may or may not coincide with Trollope's definition. This discrepancy between Trollope and his characters is very interesting, but in some instances can be misleading.

Nineteenth-century Europe, sparked by the Enlightenment's notion of equality, underwent numerous revolutions, both political and social. In England this was represented by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Both were huge victories for the Liberal, then Whig, cause, regardless of which party was in control of the government at the time. Trollope's stance on such issues can be seen in his treatment of similar measures, some fictitious, others real, in the novels that comprise his Palliser series. In England during this time, the quest for equal treatment under the law for all residents was gaining popularity. Bills were passed which legalized Catholicism and which made citizens of the Jews living in England. As anti-semitism was a more thorough prejudice than that of Anglicans against other Protestants and Catholics, it is of interest to examine how one of the more, if not the most, realistic novelists of the time portrayed English Jews.

As Trollope mainly concerns himself with upper-class society, social movement is necessarily a major issue in his novels, and added to his predisposition to prejudicial class awareness, Trollope behaves very questionably with regard to his non-English characters, particularly his Jewish characters. European Jews have consistently been oppressed throughout their history on the continent. The most widespread slurs used against Jews, then and now, are founded in resentment of the fact that Jews, in Europe, have historically found employment in banking, pawnbroking, and usury. (It is interesting to note that European Christians forced this occupation on the Jews, as many Christians thought it sinful to profit by lending money, or otherwise working specifically with money.) With the onset of the Enlightenment, European anti-semitism began to become less fashionable but was still prevalent. The placement of Jews in fiscal-related employment appears in many novels of the Victorian period, but an examination of the way in which these characters are portrayed can help to clarify Society's general attitude toward the Jews. At the height of the Victorian period, Benjamin Disraeli, of Jewish descent, was able to become Prime Minister of the most powerful country in the world, and did so as a Conservative. Yet, in the Palliser novels, Trollope appears to diverge from the popular, liberal trend of dismissing anti-semitism, which allowed Disraeli to come to power. The books seem to reek of anti-semitism.

In the Palliser novels there are three main Jewish characters, or rather three main characters with Jewish descriptions: Madam Max Goesler, Joseph Emilius, and Ferdinand Lopez. Of the three, only Emilius is confirmed as actually being Jewish. Madam Max and Lopez are derogatorily called Jewish by other characters, but their origins are never revealed. Why does Trollope allow for such degrading and stereotypical characterization of these characters? Why are Emilius and Lopez two of the most wretched characters in the Trollopian catalogue? Is Trollope just another Victorian anti-semite, or is he trying to get his audience to see how unjust and illiberal the accepted anti-semitism of Victorian society was? In reading such an entertaining and self-aware author as Anthony Trollope, I constantly search for proof against the charge of anti-semitism. However, I cannot say that I am convinced that my quest has been wholly satisfactory.

Madam Max Goesler is introduced in the second novel, Phineas Finn, and plays a major part in the rest of the Palliser series. Her physical description follows along the lines of what would be considered a stereotypical characterization of a Jewess. She has

thick black hair.... Her eyes were large, of a dark blue color, and very bright,--and she used them in a manner which is as yet hardly common with Englishwomen. She seemed to intend that you should know that she employed them to conquer you.... Her nose was not classically beautiful ... not perfectly straight in its line ... perhaps her great beauty was in the brilliant clearness of her dark complexion.... She was somewhat tall ... and was so thin as to be almost meager in her proportions. (Phineas Finn 30-31)

When compared to the physical descriptions of Emilius and Lopez, detailed below, many of the same characteristics are repeated. Madam Max is only rarely referred to as a "Jewess," but from her physical description, it seems as if Trollope purposefully made her ethnicity ambiguous. She is the widow of a Jewish Swiss banker, but other than that her background is mysterious, which adds to the feeling of uncertainty about her. Like Madam Max, both Emilius and Lopez have mysterious backgrounds where little is known and what is known is but mere rumor. By leaving their histories vague and obscure, Trollope's attitude toward their Jewishness is left ambiguous: Is he displaying disgust with hypocritical Jewish conscientiousness, or is he satirizing anti-semitic fear?

Of the three, Madam Max is the only one who develops into a respectable and lovable character. She uses her money with taste, she conducts herself with taste, and she responds to the obligations of Society with taste. However, she is differentiated from English Society in Phineas Redux by travelling across the continent in search of evidence that will free Phineas in his trial. People talk about this behavior as if it is a result of her mysterious past. Yet Madam Max is a lady and she, in contrast to Emilius and Lopez, is rich. Emilius and Lopez are both poor and try to lift themselves in the eyes of society by conducting themselves strictly by the accepted social code, whereas because of her wealth, Madam Max has already been accepted and can bend her adherence to that code. The issues of class and wealth complicate a discussion of anti-semitism in the Palliser novels by compounding these two issues in his Jewish, or seemingly Jewish, characters. All three of these characters marry money. Madam Max marries and is widowed before she is introduced, but Trollope does not offer any speculation as to her motives in her first marriage. Emilius is chiefly after money in his pursuit of Lizzie Eustace and worries little about concealing this fact. Lopez marries out of love, as the narrator stresses, but he is conscious, or rather quickly becomes conscious, that Emily Wharton is wealthy and that her money will become available to him when they are married. That each of these characters marries "up" is suggestive of a typical anti-semitic feeling against alleged Jewish pushiness and, as a result, leaves the reader questioning Trollope's motives.

Of the three main Jewish characters in the Palliser novels, Joseph Emilius is the most "Jewish" and the only one who is ever positively identified as such. Trollope gives him terribly stereotypical characteristics, describing him as a "dark, hookey-nosed, well made man, with an exuberance of greasy hair, who would have been considered handsome" if not for a squint in one of his eyes (Eustace Diamonds 311), and further as a "nasty, greasy, squinting Jew preacher; an impostor, a creature to loathe because he was greasy and a liar" (Eustace Diamonds 314). In addition to these descriptions, he is found to be a bigot who merely lusts after money. Emilius is the least developed of the main Jewish characters and as a result fits into his extremely stereotypical role. The irony of The Eustace Diamonds is that the diamonds are, for all practical purposes, useless. It is interesting to note that the name Emilius also can be seen as a similar play on pronunciation and can be read as "emulus," which sounds like a mutation of the word "emulate." As many characters wear paste jewels, which serve as decoration almost as well as real diamonds, so Trollope uses Emilius as their social parallel, representative of how a "paste" gentleman, although similar from a distance, is no replacement for a true one. Gentlemanly characteristics may seem to be worthless, or rather intangible, but Trollope strives to show how, although it is not always perceptible at first glance, the true gentleman's worth will always outshine any emulation. That Trollope equates a fake gentleman with a Jew is a noticeable fact, and not a favorable one. Emilius, as an Anglican clergyman, has the position of a gentleman, but it seems that specifically because of his ethnicity Trollope has barred him from this hallowed status. The gentleman, as Trollope understands him, is a modification of the chivalrous, medieval knight and should be as pure, strong, and "true" as a diamond.

Possibly the most interesting of these characters is Ferdinand Lopez. As Trollope devotes much of The Prime Minister to his life, he becomes a tragic antagonist. This role needs not much consideration here, but that his life runs a tragic course parallels the anti-semitic worries spawned in the reader by Trollope's treatment of Emilius. Like Joseph Hexam in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Lopez is aware and ashamed of his familial background. He is not a "purebred" Englishman, and his Portuguese ancestry brings no notion of pride to him, but rather alienates him from the opportunity to realize his goal of becoming a true English gentleman. When Lopez first presses his suit for the hand of Emily Wharton, Mr. Wharton, a Tory, objects not only because of his parentage but also because "he thought that he detected Jewish signs" (Prime Minister 28). As Mr. Wharton is a sympathetic character, the question of Trollope's anti-semitism is again raised.

Trollope was not the only Victorian novelist to take up the issue of anti-semitism. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda is a pro-Jewish novel in which Deronda discovers his Jewish ethnicity, marries a Jewish woman, and moves to Palestine. Dickens gives a more varied picture of Jews in nineteenth-century England. In Oliver Twist he creates a wretchedly stereotypical Jew in Fagin. However, in response to readers' criticism of his portrayal of Fagin, Dickens constructed the humble, caring Jew, Mr. Riah, for Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Riah is in the business of lending money, but he is merely the cover for the English owner of the business, Fascination Fledgeby. In creating Fledgeby Dickens simply took all of the stereotypical Jewish characteristics and placed them on an Englishman. This does not make for an extremely interesting character, but it does make a strong statement against anti-semitism. Mr. Riah is an interesting comparison to the Jews in Trollope's novels. Whereas Dickens confronts anti-semitism head-on by switching the social roles of Riah and Fledgeby, Trollope's Jewish characters retain typical social positions, and in doing so leave his motives open for interpretation.

The three characters, Madam Max, Emilius, and Lopez, are not the only Jewish characters in the Palliser novels; there are a few more, but the others are generally only mentioned in passing. Trollope's treatment of these other Jews is very stereotyped; they all either work in banking, in jewelry, or in the City; in other words, they all work primarily with money. In The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope creates his most stereotypical Jew of the Palliser series in Mr. Benjamin, of the lending firm Harter and Benjamin. Benjamin is the mastermind behind both the attempted and successful robberies. He really possesses the "Jewish" debasement and avarice and is similar to the projection constructed of Mr. Riah by Fledgeby in Our Mutual Friend. That Trollope creates such a characte--in a book that already has a villainous Jew--is suspect. Throughout the book there is often talk of going to "the Jews" and getting a loan at thirty percent (see, for example, Lord George's comment [Eustace Diamonds 209]).

With the two vile Jews in The Eustace Diamonds, a defense against the charge of anti-semitism in benefit of Trollope seems hard-pressed for validity. One could say that many of these derogatory comments are made by less than admirable characters, which do not necessarily echo either the narrator's opinion or Trollope's. Yet why does Trollope place Jews in the exact same roles which anti-semites usually ridicule them for possessing? Trollope prided himself on being an astute realist, and in realism social virtues must come with their corresponding social evils. Anti-semitism was prevalent in Victorian society; therefore Trollope had to represent it, regardless of whether he was anti-semitic or not.

How prevalent was anti-semitism in Victorian society? If it were "so" prevalent, as prevalent as racism is in the American South, would not Trollope (most likely) be affected? Southern racism is not an either-or sentiment; those prejudices hold people in varying degrees. However, many (most?) white Southerners are, at least, somewhat affected--affected, in the sense that, although they might not consciously discriminate, their worldviews are nourished in a still-segregated society and, as a result, are stained with racism. Although the example of Southern racism carries a weightier stigma, Victorian anti-semitism does parallel current Southern sentiments. Even John Stuart Mill was subject to cultural prejudice, and he was as liberal a Victorian as one could wish. Trollope was not a radical and was more apt to have less liberal opinions than modern liberals would wish, but he should not be condemned as an anti-semite simply for this. Even the majority of modern conservative Southerners should not be labeled "racist." Racism in the South is declining, if not as quickly as one would; anti-semitism in Victorian Britain was going through a similar decline.

In The Prime Minister Lopez degenerates and turns evilly fierce, as the novel progresses. He is given a typical Jewish description, as he is clever, tall, dark, thin and has black hair and bold, unflinching, combative eyes. After he marries he becomes more and more dependent on his father-in-law's complaisance, while still "keeping up appearances," which he could not otherwise sustain. He belongs to a gentleman's club, makes Emily dress in the best fashion, and keeps a brougham, none of which he can afford. By emulating gentlemanly behavior, he parallels Trollope's characterization of Emilius. However, it is quite important to note that only the Tories of the novel ever refer to him as possibly being Jewish. Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory Prime Minister during Trollope's lifetime, was of Portuguese Jewish heritage whose family had converted to Anglicanism two generations before his birth. Lopez is partially a Disraeli-inspired character. Seen in this light, the Wharton-Fletcher resistance to him is less a Trollopian attack on Jews than Trollope's attack on Tory hypocrisy. As Trollope the Liberal was quite antagonistic towards Disraeli, "old school" Tories' disapproval of Lopez satirizes the anti-semitism that was mixed with conservative nationalism. Like many of the leading Liberals and Radicals, such as Mill, Trollope was definitely biased toward British culture but was not damnably prejudiced against other cultures, as shown by his relative freedom from anti-Irish prejudice.

Still one must wonder why Trollope makes Emilius Jewish and why Lopez never assures Mr. Wharton of his ancestry or proves that he is "at worst" only half Jewish. Could Emilius not have been just as wretched a character if he were a French Catholic? Would Lopez not have been as despicable a husband if it were confirmed that he was not at all Jewish? By making his "villains" Jewish perhaps Trollope seems to fall into a Wagnerian or Nietzschian anti-semitism? This is a radical statement and goes too far. However, as there is still active debate on Nietzsche's anti-semitism, a comparison with Nietzsche might aid in understanding Trollope's attitude toward Jews.

In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche unleashes an appalling attack on Jews. He understands them as the personification of "slave morality," which he says has destroyed "master morality," represented by ancient mythology, especially Teutonic mythology. Masters take what they want, honor only those stronger/better than they, and disregard any constructed restriction on their behavior. In contrast slave morality, fuelled by "ressentiment," operates on the basis "winning" by submission. Nietzsche, in the first essay of the book, scorns slave morality as contaminating master morality, as if he understands it in the bigoted sense of blood-poisoning by mixing races. At first glance the modern reader is taken aback by this and other similar comments, but on finishing the other two essays of the book, one sees how Nietzsche's attitude toward this "mixing" is not as simple as he first presents it. Nietzsche shows how the simple dichotomy of a pure master morality versus a pure slave morality is but a semi-serious introduction for his main argument. Nietzsche explicitly complicates the original master-slave relationship when he claims that "only here [the victory of slave morality over master morality] did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become eviland these are the two basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts!" (33; Nietzsche's emphasis). In the Genealogy, Nietzsche's primary goal is to attack the ascetic ideal established through slave morality (Western religion) and to replace it with an improved version of the vanquished noble or heroic ideal. I do not mean to attempt wholly to defend Nietzsche against the charge of anti-semitism. Although his examples are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be, one must not forget the multiple levels on which he is writing, and note that an anti-semitic sentiment is allowed purposefully, if only on the most superficial level of his argument. Trollope does something similar in the Palliser novels. His characters hold anti-semitic feelings, and his text is doused with stereotypically racist comments. Like Nietzsche, Trollope's anti-semitic remarks are purposefully harsh and appalling, but he draws the reader's attention to these descriptions in order to show how disgusting Victorian anti-semitism is.

Trollope, at the most, is as anti-semitic as any progressive conservative southern liberal is racist, which is not a total dismissal of the possibility that he is, but rather an affirmation that he is not utterly despicable. He is hardly avid in the anti-semitism he writes, but is he anti-semitic at all? From his treatment of Emilius, the reader could justifiably assert that he is. Trollope's description of him is quite harsh. Is there any reason why Emilius has to be Jewish? Would he not be as effective a character if he were a Christian? Possibly, but probably not. Trollope satirically plays on Victorian anti-semitism and Anglican religious prejudice in The Eustace Diamonds and elsewhere throughout his novels. Neither Plantagenet Palliser, nor Lady Glencora, nor Phineas Finn ever make racist comments, and Madam Max's marriage to Phineas establishes her as a worthy character regardless of her mysterious history. These are the most beloved characters in the series; in The Prime Minister Trollope even enunciates his own political creed through Palliser. If there were any anti-semitism in Trollope the person, the reader would hear it from one of their mouths.

It does not seem that Trollope can justifiably be considered anti-semitic, at least not from an examination of the Palliser novels. However, throughout his work Jews are repeatedly described as dirty or little, and from these seemingly random inserts it does not seem that he could be considered completely free from all Victorian anti-semitism. If he allows such prejudices to surface in smaller instances and stand as prejudices, the above apology should be intensely scrutinized, for problems do exist. However, I do not feel as if he should be blackballed or crucified because of this, any more than Shakespeare should be for The Merchant of Venice. The defense that Trollope, like all people, is a product of his society and cannot reasonably be expected to defy all social prejudices extant during his lifetime is applicable here, but is not the only defense possible on his behalf. This essay can but be considered only a preliminary sketch of the question of anti-semitism within Trollope's work, since it only considers the Palliser novels, but I hope that the points I have presented on Trollope's behalf will stand up against a more thorough examination.

Bibliography

James, Henry. "Anthony Trollope." The Art of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Kincaid, James R. The Novels of Anthony Trollope. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobioigraphy. Oxford University Press, 1950.

---. Can You Forgive Her? New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

---. The Duke's Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

---. The Eustace Diamonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

---. Phineas Finn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

---. Phineas Redux. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952.

---. The Prime Minister. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.