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"Something heroic is stillexpected": Realism and comicheroism in the claveringsGeorge Scott Christian aa University of Texas , AustinPublished online: 18 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: George Scott Christian (2003) "Something heroic is still expected":Realism and comic heroism in the claverings, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory,14:3, 205-222, DOI: 10.1080/713738027

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‘‘SOMETHING HEROIC IS STILL EXPECTED’’: REALISMAND COMIC HEROISM IN THE CLAVERINGS

George Scott ChristianGeorge Scott Christian received his doctoral and law degrees from theUniversity of Texas at Austin. He is currently practicing law andpursuing his research interest in comic theory and the Victorian novel.

As David Skilton points out, Trollope’s novels are frequently recog-nized for two qualities: their minutely detailed representation of thelives of the landed and professional classes and their exploration ofmiddle-class moral (and marital) choices.1 In these respects, theseldom-read novel The Claverings (1867) is certainly representative ofTrollopean ‘‘realism.’’ Victorian literary critics greeted the tale ofyoung Harry Clavering, the ambitious son of a genteel clergyman,with great enthusiasm for its moral tone. According to a reviewer inthe Spectator, ‘‘The Claverings has [ . . .] a higher moral and moreperfect unity [ . . .] than any other of Mr. Trollope’s previous tales.There is scarcely a touch in it which does not contribute to the maineffect, both artistic and moral, of the story, and not a characterintroduced [ . . .] which does not produce its own unique and specificeffect on the reader’s imagination’’ (Skilton, Introduction xv). This ishigh praise, considering that by the time The Claverings appeared inserialization, Trollope had already published some of his most popularnovels, including The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), andthe enormously successful Framley Parsonage (1860). These novelsestablished Trollope’s reputation as a master chronicler of mid-Victorian life, particularly in bourgeois cathedral cities, rich in quo-tidian detail and thick with social context. Indeed, it is hard to imaginea novelist more securely placed within the tradition of Victorian lit-erary realism than Trollope.

Yet The Claverings betrays a much different conception of realismthan either its narrative mode of representation or its supposed ‘‘moralunity’’ would at first suggest. Appearing in the same year as both TheLast Chronicle of Barset and the anonymously published NinaBalatka, the novel finds Trollope at a point of departure from his prior

Literature Interpretation Theory, 14: 205–222, 2003

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 1043-6928 print

DOI: 10.1080/10436920390226373

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subject matter and artistic assumptions. For example, in his analysisof Trollope’s later novels, Robert Tracy argues that, following thepopular success of the Barset series, Trollope developed ‘‘a morecomplex and realistic kind of novel’’ (8). While Tracy attributes thisshift partly to Trollope’s ‘‘compulsion to experiment, and the inevitableincrease in technical skill brought about by long practice’’ (6), andpartly to external political, social, and economic vicissitudes, theprecise nature and quality of the transition remain elusive. It is notjust that Trollope, through sheer output, finally masters enormouslycomplicated multiple plot techniques in his massive Palliser series, orthat his later novels reflect a distinctly darker and more ambivalentperception of social and moral virtue in the rapidly professionalizingEngland of the 1870s. The more fundamental issue involves Trollope’schanging conception of what it means to write a ‘‘more realistic kind ofnovel.’’ The Claverings can be read as aggressively, even ‘‘experimen-tally,’’ challenging the conventions of English literary realism asTrollope himself deployed them in his earlier novels.

While ostensibly tracing the progression of Harry’s agonizingmoral dilemma, as he struggles between his passion for thewidowed Lady Ongar and his horror at the personal disgraceassociated with breaking his engagement to the sweet, docileFlorence Burton, The Claverings explores much deeper issues ofmoral corruption and its relationship to literary realism, issues overwhich Harry’s moral choice is but a thin, palimpsestic layer.2 LikeMansfield Park and Wuthering Heights, for example, the novelillumines a dark and disturbing side of the English family in thenineteenth century.3 It can be read metaphorically as registering ageneral dysfunction of the society it purports to represent ‘‘realis-tically.’’ In other words, the novel’s families, threatened by tyrannicalabuse and neglect from within, mirror a macrocosmic social disin-tegration caused by Victorian society’s oppressive, self-interestedrulers. Reconstruction of those families depends on an alternative,moral-aesthetic model of family, and, more generally, of socialrelationships. This moral-aesthetic pattern involves an anti-roman-tic, comic imagination of the nature of those relationships. In fact,Trollope’s ‘‘realist’’ aesthetic, as developed in The Claverings, ismuch closer to that of eighteenth-century humorists, such asAddison, Steele, and Fielding, than it is to nineteenth-centurypractitioners of literary realism. As we will see, this Addisonianmodel of disinterested self-consciousness, informed by appropriateaesthetic exempla and a mutually corrective, critical bond betweenwriters and readers, speakers and auditors, provides the primaryalternative to literary realism’s emphasis on social relations based on

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economic status, religious dogma, racial or tribal characteristics,gender, or other identity markers.

As Stuart Tave and Ronald Paulson have shown, this Addisonianmodel of disinterestedness refers to the Whig comic aesthetic for-mulated initially by Addison and others as a civilizing response to theperceived savagery of Hobbes’s notion that comedy arises from avicious feeling of superiority over the weak and deformed.4 Paulsonargues further that Addison, Steele, and others politicized comicaesthetics by recharacterizing Hobbesian satire and raillery (suchas that practiced by Swift) as savage Tory ideology, reinterpretingShakespeare and Cervantes in terms of kinder, gentler Whig comictheory. ‘‘Politeness is the recovery of incivility (as in Tory incivility); allof those uncivil aspects of society such as enthusiasm and satire arecivilized, for which read Whigized,’’ observes Paulson. ‘‘Addison makespolite, aestheticized, and depoliticized parallel terms, part of anextraordinarily astute and effective strategy for promulgating Whigideology’’ (30). As we shall see, Whig ideology is an important back-ground for understanding Trollope’s practice of literary realism in TheClaverings because of its emphasis on emotional distance. In such anideology, sympathy is not an outpouring of fellow feeling toward theinjured or disadvantaged, but, as Adam Smith theorized, a process ofself-division, of imagining the self in another’s shoes.5 Self-divisionhas a civilizing effect because it checks the Hobbesian tendency toexult in another’s misfortune, thus promoting polite ‘‘sympathy’’ andmaking collective relations possible. Much as Addison used this theoryto transform satire into amiable, disinterested humor, Trollope deploysit here to reform the realist novel as he previously conceived it. Ratherthan portray the externalities of ‘‘real’’ life and its supposed moralconundrums in all their detail, Trollope instead seeks to depict theonly real thing: the differentiation of the self that must occur in orderfor Darwinian beings to survive together in some form of ‘‘civilization.’’

In The Claverings, Trollope, with a characteristic, self-reflexiveirony that the Spectator reviewer effaces, sets up a ‘‘higher moralunity’’ in order to knock it down, much in the same way that Fieldingharpoons conventional morality in Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones:

Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelistas those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which isallowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words,something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint fromnature, how little that is heroic should he describe! How many youngmen, subjected to the temptations which had befallen HarryClavering,—how many young men whom you, delicate reader, number

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among your friends,—would have come out from them unscathed. Aman, you say, delicate reader, a true man can love but one woman,—butone at a time.

But it is not to be thought that I excuse him altogether. A man,though he may love many, should be devoted to only one. The man’sfeeling to the woman whom he should marry should be this;—that notfrom love only, but from chivalry, from manhood, and from duty, he willbe prepared always, and at all hazards, to defend her from every mis-adventure, to struggle ever that she may be happy, to see that no windblows upon her with needless severity, that no ravening wolf of miseryshall come near her, that her path be swept clean for her,—as clean asmay be,—and that her roof-tree be made firm upon a rock. [ . . .] No doubthe should not have returned to Bolton Street. He should not have coz-ened himself by trusting himself to her assurances of friendship; heshould have kept warm his love for the woman to whom his hand wasowed, not suffering himself to make comparisons to her injury. He shouldhave been chivalric, manly, full of high duty. He should have been allthis, and full also of love, and then he would have been a hero. But menas I see them are not often heroic. (296�97)6

The narrator here posits Harry’s moral weakness and backsliding as‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘realistic,’’ well within the tradition of English novels‘‘without a hero’’ from Defoe to Hardy. But Harry’s common morality isnot the true subject of the narrator’s digressive treatise on the dif-ference between romance and realism. Trollope rather emphasizes thegap between the aesthetic expectations of the reader and the natureand extent of the novelist’s ‘‘responsibility’’ to fulfill those expectations.It is clear from this passage that the novelist feels pressure to fulfillthem, to write something ‘‘heroic.’’ Interestingly, the narrator iscareful to distinguish between the writer’s subjective interpretation ofthe words ‘‘hero’’ and ‘‘heroine’’ and the reader’s expectation, as if thatexpectation exists as an objective reality. In other words, the narratorimplies that an objective idea of ‘‘heroic’’ exists as an a priori idea,outside and independent of the writer. This idea is not an imitation ofnature, which, according to the narrator, is decidedly unheroic. On thecontrary, it is a naturalized, ideological construct, something so deeplyembedded in the consciousness of those ‘‘delicate readers’’ that it hasattained the status of universal truth. Eliot’s theory of realism inAdam Bede is similarly aestheticized, but here Trollope approachesthe same problem in an even more self-conscious fashion. If, indeed,‘‘something heroic is still expected’’ but cannot be ‘‘painted fromnature,’’ how can the novelist reconcile the implicit double moralstandard that must plague any attempt at narrative representation of‘‘reality"?

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To put it yet another way, the narrator himself recognizes that‘‘moral unity’’ is an oxymoron, a paradox that can never be aestheti-cally resolved.7 ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘morality,’’ ‘‘chivalry,’’ ‘‘devotion,’’ have distinctaesthetic and ‘‘natural’’ meanings that are always at war with oneanother, baffling all attempts at representation or unification. UnlikeEliot in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, who projects a particular self-confidence in her ability to represent ‘‘things as they really are’’(although she, too, recognizes that the distortions of the mind’sinternal mirror undermine the objectivity of such representation),Trollope here confesses that the writer has no control over his ownnarrative at the fundamental level of the word itself. This confessionnot only raises the question of whether the term ‘‘realism,’’ withrespect to fictional narratives, makes any sense (as Northrop Fryeargues it does not [131�40]), but whether narrative can exist as ameaningful discourse in the first place.8

For example, later in the novel, when Harry returns to Florence andmust make his break with Lady Ongar, he decides to write her a letterexplaining his motives:

It was not very easily written. Here, at any rate, he had to make thoseconfessions of which I had spoken before;—confessions which it may beless difficult with a pen and ink than with spoken words, but which whenso made are more degrading. The word that is written is a thing capableof permanent life, and lives frequently to the confusion of its parent. Aman should make his confessions by word of mouth if it be possible.Whether such a course would have been possible to Harry Clavering maybe doubtful. It might have been that in a personal meeting the necessaryconfession would not have got itself adequately spoken. (439�40)

While it is a commonplace that what the writer writes and the readerreads are very different things, the narrator’s persistent and equivo-cating use of the passive voice to describe both the composition of aletter of confession and its spoken counterpart creates a curiouslacunae in the text, a disappearing narrative as it were. In the firstinstance, Harry’s letter ‘‘was not very easily written.’’ Of course, thismay mean that Harry has some emotional difficulty in writing it, butthe strange lack of agency with respect to the act of putting words onpaper suggests the same epistemological gap between writer andreader discussed previously. Novels without heroes are ‘‘not veryeasily written’’ because neither the novelist nor the reader has anycontrol over the meaning or interpretation of ‘‘novel,’’ ‘‘hero,’’ or anyother written sign. While aesthetic conventions may help establishexpectations, a common frame of reference, for the parties to the

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novelistic enterprise, there can never be unified standards for writingand reading. If such standards existed, narratives would ‘‘easily’’write themselves; there would be no need for any concept of ‘‘author’’or for any differentiation between writer and reader. Unificationwould mean solipsism, self-absorption, and a degradation of human-ity. The act of writing a narrative, be it a novel or a letter confessingone’s infidelity, is an act of dividing one’s consciousness, of recognizingthe paradoxically subjective and objective nature of that conscious-ness. Writing is the comic act itself, and narrative is the materialevidence (or perhaps more accurately the residue) of the comic act, thedifferentiation of the self from itself. Writing is projected out into theworld, where it confronts other consciousnesses, themselves in vary-ing stages of self-division. Harry’s letter is difficult to write becausehe, in the very act of writing, discovers his own dividedness, thecomic self-consciousness that comes into being when the self confrontsthe other in recognition that ‘‘heroic’’ means something altogetherdifferent to her.

By the same token, having asserted that a spoken confession isalways better than a written one, the narrator immediately retractsthat assertion. Not only is it ‘‘doubtful’’ whether a spoken confession iseven possible for Harry, there is a good chance that ‘‘in a personalmeeting the necessary confession would not have got itself adequatelyspoken.’’ This second instance of the passive voice—the idea of theconfession speaking itself just as it might write itself—erases anyrhetorical distinction or narrative value judgment between spokenand written discourse. This circularity is important because itexplodes one of the central assumptions of literary realism: that nar-rative can, within some reasonable degree of accuracy, represent life,or, as the narrator of Adam Bede puts it, ‘‘give a faithful account ofmen and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’’ (150).Whether spoken or written, the word is simply a manifestation of aconsciousness that is always in one or another stage of self-differ-entiation. In other words, the only faithful account possible is a purelyinternal one of the mind’s own experience of itself.

The monomaniacal Sir Hugh Clavering might be said to representone extreme in this process, Harry and Lady Ongar the other. SirHugh is the family tyrant, whose emotional distance and cruelty tohis wife connote an infantile consciousness that believes in unifiedmeaning. ‘‘What had his wife done for him, that he should puthimself out of his way to do much for her?’’ he asks himself when,just after the death of their son and heir (conveniently clearing theway for Harry to inherit his cousin’s estate), he abandons her in hergrief for a yachting trip:

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She had brought no money. She had added nothing either by her wit,beauty, or rank to his position in the world. She had given him no heir.What had he received from her that he should endure her commonplaceconversation, and washed-out dowdy prettinesses? Perhaps somemomentary feeling of compassion, some twang of conscience, cameacross his heart, as he thought of it all; but if so he checked it instantly,in accordance with the teachings of his life. (374)

Sir Hugh’s conception of a wife as an economic and social acquisitionhas its counterpart in the novel in Lord Ongar’s marriage to Julia(Lady Ongar), and the resulting abuse is for all practical purposes thesame. But for Trollope, it is not just an oppressive patriarchal systemdesigned to protect property rights that is at fault for the treatment ofthe novel’s abused wives. At a deeper level it is the difference betweenSir Hugh’s and Lord Ongar’s understanding of the words ‘‘wife,’’‘‘husband,’’ and ‘‘love,’’ and that held by Lady Clavering and her sister.While Lady Clavering expects, at least according to convention, anemotional return on her marriage, which goes unpaid at the death ofher son, Lady Ongar accepts commodity status in her marriage inreturn for money and social rank. Only when she returns to England awidow and free woman does her understanding of ‘‘husband’’ and‘‘love’’ widen to encompass the emotional bond she believes possiblewith Harry. Her internal differentiation of the meaning of these signsparallels Harry’s struggle with his own rapidly expanding and divid-ing consciousness as he confronts his moral dilemma. In The Claver-ings, the realist novel itself oscillates between the narrator’s desire for‘‘representation,’’ or perhaps more accurately aesthetic unification,and this rapidly proliferating differentiation of meaning. The failure ofrepresentation is thus played out in the novel’s deceptively simplesingle plot. Harry’s choice of wives and careers may have looked tocontemporary readers, nostalgic for another chronicle of Barset, likejust another Trollopean test of middle-class virtue, but it opens up intoa full-scale reappraisal of the novel as a vehicle for faithfully repre-senting the true nature of that choice or, indeed, any choice.

I have said that Trollope illumines a moral double standard in thenovel. We have seen further that this double standard is deeply rootedin semiotic instability. In other words, what seems ‘‘moral’’ to theSpectator reviewer is not necessarily considered so by the novelist,who wryly looks askance at the reader’s assumption of unity betweenword and meaning. Of course, the professional novelist understands,as we do, that bridging this epistemological distance is an age-oldproblem for aesthetic representation, not to mention a barrier tointersubjective family and social relations. If narrative, whether

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spoken or written, cannot represent and contain meaning, then howcan mutually constructive human relationships, family, social, orotherwise, ever be possible? Can two minds meet, or must one alwaysbe absorbed into the other? Can two voices speak to one another withmutual regard and understanding, or must one always dominate anddetermine the other? Many Victorian novelists are concerned with thisquestion, but in The Claverings Trollope, the quintessential Victorianportraitist of mid-century, middle-class ‘‘reality,’’ may be the mostdisturbed about the prospects for a moral-aesthetic resolution of them.Even Gissing and Hardy at their most pessimistic seem to retain avestige of faith in the power of aesthetic forms to bind together a‘‘series of seemings’’ into a provisional moral code, one that promisessome amelioration of horrific social conditions, however limited such acode might be. Transcendence of the material remains a hope, even forthose late Victorian novelists.

I am not sure, however, that Trollope leaves much room for hope inthis disturbing story. Harry is lavishly rewarded for his moral weak-ness, getting Florence Burton and his cousin’s estate into the bargain.The salt-of-the-earth Burton clan, although a little dowdy and bour-geois (Theodore, as the narrative constantly reminds us, dusts hisboots with a pocket handkerchief 9), appears secure in its rising, ifmyopic and narrow-minded, commercial and cultural dominance.Lady Ongar, who sells herself for money and title, pays the price forher moral misstep and is consigned to live out her days with her color-less, bereaved sister. Siblings Count Pateroff and Sophie Gordeloup,corrupt and suspicious foreigners of indeterminate origin, each withdesigns on Lady Ongar’s wealth, are banished to the Continent at theend of the novel. All appears well in this conventional comic ending,complete with an inheritance, a wedding, and the birth of an heir. Yetthe reader leaves the novel unsatisfied that anyone has learned any-thing, or that the moral order at the end of the novel is any ‘‘better’’ ormore ‘‘unified’’ than it was at the beginning.10 Indeed the last words inthe novel come from Theodore, who tells his wife, ‘‘Providence hasdone very well for Florence. And Providence has done very well for himalso—but Providence was making a great mistake when she expectedhim to earn his bread’’ (514).

In this case Providence is the novelist, who with a stroke of the penfortuitously drowns Sir Hugh and the superfluous Archie Clavering,who stands to inherit the Clavering estate in the absence of a directheir, but decides to go on the ill-fated yachting adventure instead. Thedeus ex machina device thus enables the novelist to provide a con-ventional comic ending that meets the reader’s expectations for a‘‘higher moral and more perfect unity.’’11 But the glaring contradiction

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between this conventional ending and the preceding narrative revealsjust how objectified the reader’s desire for moral-aesthetic justice hasbecome. The Claverings suggests that perhaps the only way to dis-pense justice is through the moral-aesthetic device of fiction; no otherorder, whether divinely or secularly imposed, will any longer suffice ina materialist, post-Darwinian world. For example, when TheodoreBurton is meditating his anger over Harry’s apparent betrayal ofFlorence, the didactic narrator comments:

There is nothing more difficult for a man than the redressing of injuriesdone to a woman who is very near to him and very dear to him. Thewhole theory of Christian meekness and forgiveness becomes broken topieces and falls to the ground, almost as an absurd theory, even at theidea of such wrong. What man ever forgave an insult to his wife or aninjury to his sister, because he had taught himself that to forgive tres-passes is a religious duty? Without an argument, without a moment’sthought, the man declares himself that such trespasses as those are notincluded in the general order. But what is he to do? Thirty years since hiscourse was easy, and unless the sinner were a clergyman, he could insome sort satisfy his craving for revenge by taking a pistol in his hand,and having a shot at the offender. That method was doubtless barbarousand unreasonable, but it was satisfactory and sufficed. (290)

Theodore further ‘‘regarded almost with dismay the conclusion towhich he was forced to come,—that there could be no punishment. Hemight proclaim the offender to the world as false, and the world wouldlaugh at the proclaimer, and shake hands with the offender’’ (291).Such a real world, in spite of its professed ‘‘morality,’’ would pre-sumably applaud Harry’s acquisition of both a fortune and a beautifultitled widow, sacrificing ‘‘pure, good, loving, true’’ Florence and themorally earnest Burtons along with her. The ‘‘absurdity,’’ the ridicu-lousness of Christian dogma in the face of the ‘‘real’’ is a laughableincongruity here; the prospect of a middle-class engineer protestingagainst an advantageous marriage between members of the squir-earchy is another. This real world cannot be made congruous—andthus not absurd and not laughable—without the novelist’s imagina-tive manipulations, the deployment of a ‘‘comic’’ literary paradigmthat at once recognizes these ridiculous, laughter-provoking incon-gruities and sets them right.

The problem with the novelist’s imagination, however, is that oncelet loose in the world in its material narrative form, it ‘‘lives to theconfusion of the parent’’—it helps create and sustain a structure ofconsciousness that, in the reader’s desire for ‘‘justice,’’ represents fic-tion as the real. Justice is thereby imitated, but not actually enacted in

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a real world that laughs at the proclaimer and shakes hands with theoffender. Consequently, here the novelist must bear a degree ofresponsibility for creating the expectation that he or she must thendecide whether or not to fulfill. It is one thing to acknowledge that theChristian doctrine of forgiveness fails in the face of a man’s treacheryto one’s sister; it is quite another to avoid the social implications of thisacknowledgment by fictionally defusing the explosive conditions thenarrative has gone to great lengths to create. ‘‘To sit together withsuch a man on a barrel of powder, or fight him over a handkerchief,seemed to [Burton] to be reasonable, nay salutary, under such agrievance’’ (291). But is it ethical for the novelist to fill the barrel withpowder and place the two men upon it, only then to decide whether tolight the fuse?

This question of novelistic ethics, it seems to me, is the truedilemma of ‘‘realism,’’ a dilemma Trollope directly confronts in TheClaverings. Working backward from the premise that the meaning ofnarrative cannot easily be contained within an intersubjective field,Trollope must struggle with the consequences of creating a narrativethat will only serve to compound the text’s misprision and objectifi-cation. In other words, Trollope must write against his own falteringfaith in the ability of narrative to tell a coherent, comprehensible story,not to mention a moral one. For a novelist who saturated the literarymarket with realist fiction, an ethical dilemma of this sort could nothave been an easy thing to dismiss. If Trollope were to represent‘‘faithfully’’ the world as Theodore Burton imagines it, he could notpossibly save Harry Clavering or the Burtons; it is not a world inwhich people do the right thing, but one in which they do whatever ittakes.12 Acting as a restraint on his imagination, as we have seen, isthis objectified desire, the idea that something heroic is still expected.But, as the narrative likewise tells us, the field of heroism is not as itonce was. Indeed, epic or romantic heroism, as in Fielding, has givenway to comic heroism. Direct enforcement of chivalric ideals of honorand fidelity—‘‘to fly at the enemy’s throat, and carry out his purposeafter the manner of dogs’’—retains its attraction to this day and is stilllatent in the structure of consciousness that epic and romantic aes-thetic forms once established and nurtured. In a ‘‘Christian’’ world,however, such direct enforcement has been displaced, sublimated, ordiffused, a displacement for which the novel and its cultivation ofAddisonian disinterestedness is partly responsible.

The Claverings reveals that Trollope is directly conscious of thefunction of comic disinterestedness in distancing basic emotionalreactions from their immediate physical, external consequences. Assuch, he redeploys in the ‘‘realist’’ narrative a common strategy

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demonstrated by, among others, Scott and Austen. In her essay onHeinrich Heine, Eliot writes of the slow evolution of the comic fromprimitive, physical pranks and the Hobbesian laughter of superiorityto an elevated moral wit and humor (193�96). Her theory clearlyrecognizes that the vestiges of the old comedy are still present in our‘‘old brain’’ and are liable to resurface at any time with particularvirulence. One thinks, for example, of Grandcourt’s pleasure inabusing his pet dogs in Daniel Deronda (110�11); his treatment ofGwendolyn is similar in nature, but emotionally distanced, as isTheodore Burton’s desire for vengeance upon Harry Clavering.Indeed, Grandcourt and his ilk remind us of the constant threat of thisold comic, Hobbesian brain. Yet while a depraved, abusive noblemansuch as Grandcourt, or for that matter Lord Ongar or Sir HughClavering, might be written off as one of a long line of morally corruptEnglish noblemen dating from Mr. B and Lovelace, the eminentlyrespectable Theodore Burton’s murderous impulses cannot be so easilydiscounted. In fact, they seem even more threatening to the verymiddle-class culture Trollope appears to revere.

As a representative of the professional classes, Burton leads a well-regulated life that exemplifies the Victorian domestic ideal. He reignssupreme both in the public domain of business and the private,domestic sphere. He is Thackeray’s doting father, who showers hiswife and children with love and sympathetic attention at the hearth,while maintaining a strictly separate professional sphere. Burton is, atleast on the surface, a model practitioner of Thackeray’s concept ofgenial, amiable humor:

He shows his love by his conduct, by his fidelity, by his watchful desire tomake the beloved person happy; it lightens from his eyes when sheappears, though he may not speak it; it fills his heart when she is presentor absent; influences all his work and actions; suffuses his whole being; itsets the father cheerily to work through the long day, supports himthrough the tedious labour of the weary absence or journey, and sendshim happy home again, yearning towards the wife and children. Thiskind of love is not a spasm, but a life. (Thackeray 270�71)

We have already seen how Trollope holds Harry to this Thackerayeanstandard of chivalric love, then chastises him for unheroic conductwith Lady Ongar. Now Theordore Burton is weighed in the balanceand found wanting as well. With his clockwork routine and addictionto the comforts of the hearth, Theodore enacts this moral-aestheticmodel of amiability, a model Trollope might call ‘‘comic heroism.’’ Buteven Theodore, the comic hero in the Thackerayean mode, is prone to

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the sudden reassertion of the old brain, which both retains theimpulses to epic and romantic forms of action and acts out of a vin-dictive sense of Hobbesian superiority.

The novelist is thus always playing with fire. By writing a novelthat meets reader expectations and enforces the ideal of comic hero-ism, Trollope must risk activating the ancient emotional responsesassociated with epic and romance. Just as Scott and Austen ultimatelywrite against romance, Trollope must first rehearse romantic expres-sions of emotion in order to distance them. Theodore’s carefullymodulated response to Harry’s treachery, in which he passes throughincreasingly distanced rationalizations of his emotional reactions untilconcluding that ‘‘there could be no punishment,’’ reveals both thethreat of violence and the means of suppressing it, or more accurately,sublimating it into a comic-aesthetic form. James Kincaid suggeststhis process when he argues that Trollope parodies the comic myth ofintegration. ‘‘The result is a pattern whereby comic educations areconducted without comic knowledge being gained or comic rewardsbeing bestowed—what Northrop Frye terms the mythos of winter,irony, where the central images are of isolation, motion without pur-pose, meaningless frustration,’’ Kincaid observes. ‘‘The rhetoric ismade to deceive us, to make us expect a resolution which, when itcomes, is turned on its head’’ (64). Instead of taking Harry’s scalp,Theodore takes Harry as a brother-in-law. Here the myth of integra-tion is partially satisfied, but only formally. One of the primary func-tions of the comic aesthetic in this novel, it seems, is to put the badgenie—the violent impulses of Eliot’s old brain—back in the lamp.

Trollope inscribes the internal mental process of differentiationbetween aesthetically patterned emotional states—the act of themind experiencing its own division into progressively more dis-tanced and disinterested modes of consciousness—thus workingtoward a resolution of the ethical dilemma inherent in provokingthe old brain. It is as if by imitating this process in fiction over andover again, the novelist might achieve a complete distance from‘‘real’’ life, a realism grounded on a structure of consciousnesstotally independent of any but fictional stimuli. In her seminalstudy that virtually revived Trollopean criticism, Ruth apRobertsrightly says that Trollope ‘‘masters complexity; he makes us forgetthe words while we apprehend effortlessly the most tenuous deli-cacies of nuance in psychology, or social situations of the mostextreme complexity. We grasp these and then cheat him of hispraise, for he distracts us from the manner with his matter’’ (Artistand Moralist 22). She might also have added that in so distractingus, Trollope emphatically reminds us that the manner is all.

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Trollopean comedy, as realized in The Claverings, is true ‘‘meta-comedy,’’ an exercise in the internalization of emotional stressesthat leads us to the point of realizing, as Theodore Burton does,that what happens in the external world is neutral, absolutelyindifferent to the conduct of individual and collective relations.

To put it another way, Trollope disconnects ‘‘realism’’ from therepresentation of quotidian material life altogether.13 Here I divergesomewhat from George Levine, who places Trollope generally within‘‘realism’s central comic tradition,’’ while shying away from the trueimplications of realism’s inherently self-conscious, unstable mode.‘‘But Trollope,’’ Levine writes, ‘‘with a consistency astonishing for awriter who could range so freely through so many different types of‘reality,’ remained always the realist, sacrificing the ‘chequeredintensities’ of romance fiction for the faithful portrayal of recognizablecharacters. Though his novels may flirt with the tragic, they tend toremain in realism’s central comic tradition, in which his first respon-sibility as writer was to his audience’’ (183). Levine’s claim may applybroadly to Trollope’s oeuvre, but it overdetermines the Trollope of thisnovel. In The Claverings, Trollope employs the conventions of Victor-ian realism to demonstrate realism’s artificiality and the necessity forits substitution with an Addisonian comic aesthetic of disinterested-ness. In the terms of this comic aesthetic, the only thing that mattersis the way in which the reader internalizes the emotions called forthby different fictional modes: the epic, the romantic, the tragic, thecomic. Consequently, these fictional modes and the responses theyelicit are the only ‘‘reality.’’ Moreover, the only significant, and evenpossible, moral action is the interior process of sublimating emotionalresponses in accordance with aesthetic patterns, culminating in acomic self-consciousness that recognizes human relations in terms ofdisinterested sympathy. Comedy is civilizing not because it makes usfeel good about one another, but because it empties feelings andemotions out of relationships altogether, substituting in their place astandard of comic heroism, an aesthetic model for life that governsintersubjective relations without the necessity, burden, or danger offeeling.

A wonderful, if lengthy, example of Trollopean conversion of emo-tional stress into comic disinterestedness is found in Chapter 19.Harry is at dinner with Count Pateroff, who attempts to thwartHarry’s attempt to deliver a hostile message from Lady Ongar bydiverting the conversation to other subjects. With a ‘‘simple pathos’’that interests Harry, the count laments that ‘‘there is one poor fellow Ido pity more even than they’’ who cannot enjoy a good meal—‘‘Theman who cannot digest’’:

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‘‘[ . . .] To digest! Do you know what it means? It is to have the sun alwaysshining, and the shade always ready for you. It is to be met with smiles,and to be greeted with kisses. It is to hear sweet sounds, to sleep withsweet dreams, to be touched every by gentle, soft, cool hands. It is to bein paradise. Adam and Eve were in paradise. Why? Their digestion wasgood. Ah! Then they took liberties, ate bad fruit—things they could notdigest. They what we call ruined their constitution, destroyed theirgastric juices, and then they were expelled from paradise by an angelwith a flaming sword. The angel with the flaming sword, which turnedtwo ways, was indigestion!’’

We might be tempted here to dismiss the Count’s absurd account of theFall as an over-the-top example of Trollope’s well-known disdain forhis ‘‘foreign’’ characters. Count Pateroff is indeed negative and morallysuspect, but Trollope nevertheless allows him a certain charm andsang-froid. Moreover, the Count’s lightly veiled sarcasm, which isentirely lost on the humorless Harry and blocks his effort to speak toPateroff on Lady Ongar’s behalf, serves to emphasize Harry’s limitedability to communicate. Recalling Harry’s difficulty in either writing orspeaking his confession to Lady Ongar, here Count Pateroff gives fullexpression to the contortions and distortions of narrative that lead usin the opposite direction from the real. The Count continues:

‘‘There came a great indigestion upon the earth because the cooks werebad, and they called it a deluge. Ah, I thank God there is to be no moredeluges. All the evils come from this. Macbeth could not sleep. It was thesupper, not the murder. His wife talked and walked. It was the supperagain. Milton had bad digestion, because he is always so cross; and yourCarlyle must have the worst digestion in the world, because he neversays good of anything. Ah, to digest is to be happy! Believe me, myfriends, there is no other way not to be turned out of paradise by a fierytwo-handed turning sword.’’

‘‘It is true,’’ said Schmoff; ‘‘yes, it is true.’’‘‘I believe you,’’ said Doodles. ‘‘And how well the count describes it,

don’t he Mr. Clavering? I never looked at it in that light; but, after all,digestion is everything. What is a horse worth, if he won’t feed?’’

‘‘I never thought much about it,’’ said Harry. (197�98)

If this broadly satirical passage is not a conscious tribute to ProfessorTeufelsdr€oockh, it certainly should be. We know that Count Pateroff is ascoundrel, a mercenary preying on Lady Ongar. By all convention, weshould reject him on moral grounds and applaud when Lady Ongarrepudiates him. But like Teufelsdr€oockh, Pateroff is not to be taken athis word or by his actions. His presence in the text reminds us thatwhere concepts such as ‘‘morality’’ and ‘‘justice’’ are concerned,

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digestion is just as likely an explanation of immorality and injustice aseither transcendental discourses or tortured psychological analyses ofpeople’s motives or emotions. Pateroff emerges from and returns toWeissnichtswo, leaving us baffled as to the meaning of his discourse,not a ‘‘recognizable character’’ at all. Trollopean realism is indeedturned on its head, and the novel’s moral dilemmas, so praised bycontemporary reviewers and nostalgic readers, fade with the conven-tional notion of personal moral choice into similar irrelevance.

Ross Murfin has argued that ‘‘Trollope’s ultimate vision of the worldis one in which all identities are unstable, all truths relative—and amatter of perspective. Thus, all representations are at best true for themoment, or true from the vantage point chosen by their representa-tive, who cannot be among those truths and attempt to represent themat the same time. The ‘realistic’ novelist himself is involved in a game,a play, of signifiers (or ‘shibboleths’) without any real significance’’(48). While Murfin rightly identifies Trollope’s detachment of the‘‘real’’ from ‘‘realism’’ in a self-reflexive, interiorizing move, I think onthe contrary that the ‘‘play of signifiers’’ is of the utmost significance.The result is not realism, but comic heroism, a stage of consciousnessin which emotional responses are so distanced from the external actsthat trigger them that any correspondence between words, actions,and expectations is arbitrary and fictionally constructed. This is not tosay that people do not feel, but that feeling, like (in)digestion, isirrelevant to moral or aesthetic standards in a civilized society. Inorder to survive our own passions and to exist collectively, this must beso. And it is with a heroic effort that it must be so.

If the comic is prosaic and even dull, because it is emptied of thepassion of romance or the pathos of tragedy, it is also regenerative.Trollope’s conception of the comic in The Claverings is the only way tokeep the old brain—and, for that matter, the old stomach—in itsplace, thereby enabling communal life, or ‘‘civilization.’’ As apRobertsasserts, ‘‘Trollope is the novelist of community par excellence. No oneelse has exhibited with such power, control, and clarity the greathuman institutions of church and state (although Stendhal makes thishis m�eetier too), how they work, and how the individual relates tothem’’ (Zeitgeist 269). Such community becomes central because‘‘Darwinian, historicist man is multiform, variable, infinite in poten-tial. To know himself he must act in a variety of circumstances, reactwith a variety of persons, test the possibilities of enabling institutions,and must make his moral self in response to ambiguous anddemanding situations’’ (271). For Darwinian beings to learn to livecollectively with other Darwinian beings, they must forget they are,well, Darwinian. Trollope’s narrative is thus one of forgetting our

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stomachs, of forgetting the material ‘‘real’’ in favor of a comic aestheticof pure, disinterested self-consciousness. Fictions are realistic to theextent they mimic the mind’s process of self-division, and novels likeThe Claverings are records of consciousness that enact in readers thevery process they imitate and record.

NOTES

1. The Claverings, Introduction viii-ix.2. On the way Trollope structures the serial segments of the novel to

provide mnemonic aids to the reader and reinforce the novel’smoral weight, see Harvey.

3. Kincaid argues that Trollope ‘‘clearly does not abandon theassumptions of the comedy of manners tradition nor the aestheticsof closed form, but neither does he fully accept them’’ (4).

4. See especially Paulson, Chapters 1 and 3.5. For a lengthy discussion of Smith’s conception of self-division, see

Franklin, Chapter 3. On Smith’s theory of sympathy, see alsoMarshall. Cain earlier identified Hume and Smith as sources forHazlitt’s use of the concept of disinterested sympathy.

6. All citations from the novelist are to The Claverings.7. For a discussion of the way Trollope establishes an implied moral

standard in his novels and then tests his characters to determine ifthey measure up to it, see Sheila Smith.

8. For a discussion of Thackerayean and Trollopean realism as areduction of the novel to commodity status, see Brantlinger,Chapter 6. Herbert also discusses Trollope’s fear of the commodi-fication of literature at 5�6.

9. On Trollope’s use of metonymic devices to create comic effects, seeRiffaterre. These comic intrustions tend to cancel out the effect ofverisimilitude created by Trollope’s descriptive realism (274).

10. One might say that Herbert locates this dissatisfaction in thespace between comedy’s endorsement of pleasure and moraluncertainty over the ‘‘legitimacy’’ of such pleasure. For Herbert,the comic imagination explores this ambivalence and destabilizesthe comic text. See Herbert 15�16. For a contrary reading of thenovel’s ending, see Terry 73.

11. On Trollope’s self-conscious use of the deus ex machina as aromantic convention, see Terry 68.

12. Kincaid puts it another way, arguing that The Claverings involvesthe ‘‘conflict between prudence and romance’’ (147). Characters areplaced in various situations in which they have to choose between

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‘‘prudent’’ and ‘‘romantic’’ courses of action, but ultimately thenovelist has to step in to rescue them from their inability to choosecorrectly. Trollope’s ‘‘comic resolution’’ is thus forced; the real storyis the paralysis of doubt endured not only by singularly unat-tractive characters, but by the reader as well (147�49).

13. Skilton had a similar insight long ago, but he reached a differentconclusion from it. ‘‘Trollopian realism does not work by referringoutside itself to another world, but by absorbing the necessaryfacts and relationships of the world into the fiction itself ’’ (AnthonyTrollope and His Contemporaries 146). Skilton points the meaningof ‘‘Trollopian realism’’ toward the guiding hand of the narrator inleading the reader to moral judgment, not to what I see is thenecessity of detaching the external world from aesthetic reality inorder to save morality.

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Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.Cain, Roy E. ‘‘David Hume and Adam Smith as Sources of the Concept of Sympathy in

Hazlitt.’’ PELL 1 (1965): 133�40.Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.———. Daniel Deronda. London: Zodiac, 1978.———. ‘‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine.’’ Selected Critical Writings. Ed. Rosemary Ashton.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 193�233.Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist

Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.Harvey, G. M. ‘‘Trollope’s Serial Craft in The Claverings.’’ Wascana Review 10 (1975):

40�47.Herbert, Christopher. Trollope and Comic Pleasure. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.Kincaid, James. The Novels of Anthony Trollope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady

Chatterley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.Marshall, David. ‘‘Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments.’’ Critical

Inquiry 10 (1984): 592�613.Murfin, Ross C. ‘‘Novel Representation: Politics and Victorian Fiction.’’ Victorian Con-

nections. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. 31�59.Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1998.Riffaterre, Michael. ‘‘Trollope’s Metonymies.’’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982):

272�92.Skilton, David. Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and

Convention of Mid-Victorian Fiction. London: Longman, 1972.———. Introduction. The Claverings. Ed. David Skilton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

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Smith, Sheila. ‘‘Anthony Trollope: The Novelist as Moralist.’’ Renaissance and ModernEssays: Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday.Ed. G. R. Hibbard. London: Routledge, 1966. 129�36.

Tave, Stuart. The Amiable Humourist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of theEighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.

Terry, R. C. Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding. London: Macmillan, 1977.Thackeray, William Makepeace. ‘‘Charity and Humour.’’ The English Humourists.

London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1912. 267�86.Tracy, Robert. Trollope’s Later Novels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.Trollope, Anthony. The Claverings. Ed. David Skilton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

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