Trollope's Gentleman: Gentle Revisions

“HE IS (NOT) A GENTLEMAN” is a verdict that we frequently encounter in Trollope's novels. The writer's concern with defining the English gentleman is virtually obsessive; however, his effort is fraught with numerous frustrating contradictions, reflecting the Victorians’ struggle to decide what constitutes exemplary masculinity.¹

On the origins of the word “gentleman” David Castronovo writes:

In terms of gender, then, the word “gentleman” is a paradox, insofar as it refers both to gentleness (as in “the gentle sex”) and manliness, qualities that are presumably mutually exclusive. Although the etymology of the word “gentleman” makes no automatic connection between the gender and class denotations of “gentle,” the implications of this duality for the model of masculinity that I am creating here are worth dwelling on. My analysis centers on the male characters of Trollope's novel Doctor Thorne. Squire Gresham, a descendant of an ancient aristocratic family, and his son Frank obviously fit into the first, class-related definition of gentleness by virtue of their noble birth; however, their position in the novel's socioeconomic and romantic exchanges and their very characterization make them gentle in another sense as well.

Squire Gresham is an obedient husband to a strong-willed wife, while his son, Frank Gresham, is a “tractable” and “docile” object of exchange on the marriage market, looking to marry rich. To be sure, such characterization does not turn either male character into a female one. Nonetheless, both Gresham men bring into sharp focus the rarely-noticed relationship between the two meanings of the word “gentle,” nobility and docility, that ties class and gender in the word “gentleman” into such a complex knot. The idea of English gentlemanliness and a gentleman's code of behavior in their various definitions and permutations, from rural squires to Kingsley's muscular Christians and Brummell's dandies, are far too complex to conform to a unified pattern of manly behavior. Moreover, gentleness may also refer to an entire aggregate of moral rules and educational requirements to which the gentleman was subject, and which had little to do with softness and tractability of demeanor. By the same token, softness and femininity are by no means synonyms. But it is also undeniable that in the conventional discourse on gender, which, as I will demonstrate below, was partly endorsed by Freud, and to which Trollope's novels are no strangers, submissive, tractable, gentle behavior is identified with womanhood. My analysis of the Gresham men therefore draws attention to the relevance of gender-specific definitions of gentleness and suggests that Trollope's aristocratic gentlemen constitute a special, separate, non-normative, female-identified mode of Victorian masculinity: gentle manliness.

By allowing the class and gender implications of gentleness to merge, Trollope also produces an idiosyncratic combination of a regressive class and national ideology and a transgressively non-normative masculinity. Given the capitalist spirit of its times, the novel's somewhat anachronistic privileging of the Greshams, English squires and the scions of an old landowning family, and its rejection of self-made entrepreneur Roger Scatcherd and his offspring Louis Philippe, are co-extensive with its valorization of feminized, or gentle, men, who participate in the father-son marriage plot.³

Another upshot of this reversal is the redefinition of the “English” in the English gentleman. Contrary to the familiar critical argument, it is the quintessential Englishman, not the Other, foreign man who undergoes feminization.⁴

Freud and Trollope

MY READING OF DOCTOR THORNE makes a case for gentle men. They constitute a patriarchy in which, contrary to the mainstream psychoanalytical narratives that have come to define our understanding of masculinity, the fathers do not enforce the law, and the sons do not become fathers.⁵

In order to foreground the concept of the father-son marriage plot, I will deploy Freud's “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” better known as the case history of “The Wolf Man” (1918). At the center of this study is one of the principal tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal conflict. The psychoanalytic paradigm based on “The Wolf Man” that I am proposing here is to be seen primarily as the foundation of an unconventional narrative (the father-son marriage plot) that structures and drives an ostensibly conventional Victorian novel.

But while the link between history, social and cultural contexts, and psychoanalysis is never unproblematically direct, I would like to establish an additional connection between Freud's theory and Trollope's work that goes beyond the constitution of the narrative. In Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, Steven Marcus observes that, “Freud's specially favored mode of explanation was almost always historical. For Freud the privileged explanation of an event tends regularly to be a coherent account of its historical existence, and the innermost meaning of a phenomenon is likely to be inseparable from a hypothetical demonstration of how it came to be” (166). Marcus also suggests that Freud's writing is historical in “what may be thought of as more normative senses of the term,” because it records the chronological, teleological development of an individual psyche in “stories, as in his case histories” (166, 167).

In my own discussion, however, I would like to posit a way of tying together “The Wolf Man” and Doctor Thorne that is more specific than that achieved by noting Freud's general awareness of history, either as a context or as a method of organizing a text.⁶

“The Wolf Man” is one of the few Freudian texts that provide an extended definition of the so-called negative Oedipus complex. The more popular positive Oedipus complex offers a narrative of a rivalry between the father and the son over the mother's body and the son's identification with the father's position in relation to this body. Conversely, the negative one makes the son compete with the mother for the affections of the father. In this scenario, the son experiences a desire to be penetrated by the father and assumes a feminine, that is, the mother's, position in relation to him.

While the case history also relates the Wolf Man's multiple heterosexual attractions (his seduction by a governess, an attraction to his sister, and liaisons with female servants), the description of the son's desire for the father is the text's most groundbreaking achievement. Witnessing intercourse between his parents (one of Freud's most daring reconstructions of the primal scene)⁷

The trajectory of the Wolf Man's desire for the father is always seesaw-like. The young man's sexual development fluctuates between the normative and the non-normative, the positive and negative Oedipus: “In his sadism he maintained his ancient identification with his father; but in his masochism he chose him as a sexual object” (222). The portrayal of the father is equally ambivalent. In the mind of Freud's patient, the punishing, castrating father co-exists with “his father as the person castrated and as calling, therefore, for his sympathy” (246). The young child's reaction to the primal scene is thus an expression of his sympathy for the father. The stool that he passes when observing his parents having sex is meant, Freud suggests, to compensate the male parent for the castration that presumably results from intercourse with his wife.

Throughout the case history, Freud emphasizes the importance of faeces and links them consistently to matters of father-son desire and childbirth. After the father's death, the adult Wolf Man competes with his mother for the deceased's money and affection, a conflict that results for the Wolf Man in intestinal disturbances. For Freud's subject, faeces had the significance of the money; the money was his father's “gift” to him, or to continue the association further, the child he wanted from the father (240–41). The Wolf Man's desire to present the male parent with the child underscores his “feminine” position in relation to him and inevitably renders the child's mother a rival for the father's love: “In his identification with women (that is, with his mother) he was ready to present his father with a child, and was jealous of his mother, who had already done so and would perhaps do so again” (241). The significance of the child is dual: for the father, it is the son's “gift” or reparation for castration, and for the son it is the “gift” of the gratification of his desire for the father.

Freud insists, however, that insofar as it is constitutive of non-normative sexual development, this desire cannot be gratified. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” is, above all, a narrative of a young man's problematic but ultimately relatively successful incorporation into the regime of heterosexuality. Not unlike a Trollope novel, his is also a story of a young man from a landowning family coming of age and into an inheritance on the eve of major sociopolitical changes.⁸

In order to become such gentleman, the Wolf Man eventually disavows the “feminine” position in relation to the father. Freud thus formulates male sexuality in terms of a strict dichotomy, the understanding of which, coupled with the fear of castration, leads the Wolf Man to redirect his sexual aim: “He discovered the vagina and the biological significance of masculine and feminine. He understood now that active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as feminine” (204). The Wolf Man's refusal to continue to occupy the place of the mother signals his development into a father. He invests his libidinal energies in heterosexual encounters, notably with women of lower classes with whom his position is dominant both literally and figuratively: it reflects his superior class status and the “active” masculinity of the penetrator. His redirected desire makes him the father in his own right, which according to Freud mandates both rejecting feminization and reaffirming a traditional class hierarchy.

While the Wolf Man nearly manages both, his desire for the father and the unhappy, unconsummated father-son marriage plot remain behind the formation of his heterosexual masculinity.⁹

Crucially, like Freud's case history, the novel also contains a link between desire and property. Trollope's Squire Gresham illustrates the powerless, “sympathetic” facet of the Wolf Man's father, and while he does not undergo castration, his status as a patriarch is substantially weakened over the course of the narrative. The property restored to the father by his affectionate son, Frank Gresham, is, in Freudian terms, the “gift” that both supports Trollope's favored landowning gentry and symbolizes the consummation of the unorthodox marriage plot. In contrast, the Scatcherds, who epitomize the capitalist ethos that Trollope's writings seek to eradicate or at least contain, follow the conventional, positive Oedipal scenario of masculinity: they are their fathers' perennial rivals and occasional killers. They also actively and aggressively seek upward mobility and social and sexual domination. However, despite (or precisely because) of such an ostensibly manly demeanor, these characters have no place in the marriage plot and are extinct at the end of the novel.

Fathers and Sons: Trollope's Odd Marriage Plot

DOCTOR THORNE (1858) CONTAINS the portraits of two fathers:¹¹

From the outset of the novel, Trollope's narrator expresses his anti-commercial, pro-aristocratic sentiment:

In the description of Greshamsbury, the Greshams' ancient seat, Doctor Thorne also combines its valorization of the gentle (feminized) manliness of the gentry with its traditionalist, anti-industrial leanings:

Indeed, the decline of the Greshams begins with a son's betrayal of his father, an exchange of all-male “clanship” for heterosexual bonds. The squire Gresham, a staunch Tory, marries Arabella de Courcy, the daughter of an equally staunch Whig, and thus undermines the patriarchal political structures that had made East Barsetshire idyllic:

As such, Frank Gresham, heir to the pre-industrial paradise, “could not fill his father's shoes; they were too big for him. [He] was…so lukewarm, so indifferent, so prone to associate with the enemies of the good cause, so little willing to fight the good fight, that he soon disgusted those who most dearly loved the memory of the old squire” (5; ch. 1). Gresham Senior, the backbone of the traditional English socioeconomic order, cannot live up to the memory of his father. He becomes, in other words, the pitiable, weak father of Freud's “The Wolf Man,” and not the almighty, castrating patriarch of the positive Oedipus.

As an indication of this loss of power, Frank Gresham Senior takes a back seat to his wife, the ambitious Lady Arabella de Courcy who, like many of Trollope's rebellious female characters, is more involved in politics than is fitting for a woman: “[S]he cared for politics, or thought that she cared for them, more than her husband did:…she had been attached to the Court, and had been made to believe that much of the policy of England's rulers depended on the political intrigues of England's women” (5–6; ch. 1). The role reversal between the “lukewarm” husband and the “fashionable” (5; ch. 1) wife is obvious: while she engages in unacceptably “manly” pursuits, he assumes a feminized position. Doctor Thorne is not the only novel in which Trollope expresses his disapproval of women like Lady Arabella de Courcy, domineering and inappropriately involved in male affairs. The novel calls on the Gresham men to restore a patriarchal lineage interrupted by an “unpatriotic” marriage and a bossy woman. And while there is nothing unusual about the task, it is the way in which the male characters accomplish it that sets Doctor Thorne and its marriage plot apart. The two Frank Greshams are not compelled to prove their virility by “fighting a good fight,” showing women their place, and enforcing their political authority. It is the gentleness and reticence of the father and the obedience of the son that help reinstate the social order. These men's identification with women, according to the terms delineated in “The Wolf Man,” translates into their assumption of the position of the female subject in socioeconomic and gender relations and ultimately saves the day in East Barsetshire.

Throughout the novel, Frank Gresham, the squire's son, shows an attachment to and closeness with his feeble patriarch of a parent; he is, in turn, “the darling of his father's heart” (8; ch. 1). They have the same name and are both frequently described as boyish: the squire is “young” (4–5; ch. 1) and Frank is “very boy” (98; ch. 8). The father therefore does not constitute an authority figure for the son. Navigating the complexities of his parents’ relationship, the young man consistently chooses his father's side and always demonstrates his fondness for the silenced parent: “[A]nd with his father he had always sympathised” (488; ch. 64). When told by his cynical cousin John that one's “governor's” early death can be a “stroke of luck,” Frank is visibly upset, and his face “gr[ows] dark…instead of red” (47; ch. 4), at the very thought of his father's possible death. In keeping with the Freudian model, Frank also expresses resentment towards his mother and her treatment of Squire Gresham. When admonished by her not to repeat his father's financial follies and, instead, to make an advantageous match, Frank exclaims, “‘Do not speak against my father’“ (484; ch. 44). He resists, in his own ineffectual way, the de Courcy matriarchy: “‘My mother and aunt are always down on the governor, always; but the more they are down on him the more I'll stick to him'“ (63–64; ch. 5).

For the son, stick[ing] to the father means restoring the latter's financial viability, or, in Freudian terms, compensating him with a gift for the loss of patriarchal power. In order to salvage the father's estate, Frank must effectively sell himself into marriage, and my contention is that this necessity feminizes him, or more precisely, constructs his masculinity in terms traditionally applied to women. The exchange of a fetching male body for a substantial sum of money or a career was common in Trollope's time (and in his novels), but his attitude towards this particular transaction is ambivalent. In Doctor Thorne, the heiress Miss Dunstable, young Frank's potential wife, voices this gender quandary. Addressing Frank, she exclaims, “‘Sell yourself for money! Why, if I were a man I would not sell one jot of liberty for mountains of gold…. Have you forgotten your soul, your spirit, your man's energy, the treasure of your heart?’“ (230; ch. 20)

Although the heiress to “the ointment of Lebanon” fortune (77; ch. 6) is independent and assertive, the sentiment that she expresses is utterly conventional: “selling out” is betraying one's “man's energy,” an essentially unmanly act. Critical readings of Trollope's novels often echo Miss Dunstable's sentiment, maintaining that it is women who function as tradable commodities and circulate as objects of exchange on the marriage market. In his reading of The Eustace Diamonds, for example, William Cohen writes that the novel “elucidates the ideology that directs women to imagine their desires on the heirloom model and yet treats them as commodities, condemning them when they seek to govern their own value in the exchange economy in which they really do circulate” (171). Christoph Lindner, in “Sexual Commerce in Trollope's Phineas Novels,” makes a similar point: “Marriage, in turn, assumes the form of a marketplace for the enactment of a sexual commerce. In the binds and byways of the Victorian marriage market, women are relegated in Trollope's writing to the category of commodity” (343–44). Doctor Thorne evinces a more complex relationship between the demands of the marketplace and gender roles. The following passage discusses the matrimonial prospects of two middle-class upstarts, Mr. Moffat and Miss Dunstable, who plan to marry, respectively, Augusta Gresham and her brother Frank:

It follows from Trollope's excursion into the Victorian marriage market that male aristocrats are mere bodies for sale. They thus acquire, in the logic of the marriage plot, conventionally feminine traits. The young Frank Gresham is, to use William Cohen's phrase, “Trollope's trollop” (159), though one without the spunk and independence of a Lizzie Eustace or a Madame Max Goessler, Trollope's more famous female gold diggers. While there is a hint of censure in this passage regarding the idea that a gentleman can be bought and sold, the underlying sexual and social ideologies of the novel grant legitimacy to such transactions. The feminization of the son, that is, his location in what Freud defines as the submissive position of the woman (mother), ensures the consummation of the father-son desire and hence the triumph of the aristocratic gentle patriarchy.

To save his father from ruin, the young Frank Gresham “must marry money” (102; ch. 8); he becomes the family's only valuable commodity, the best body the Gresham-de Courcy clan has to offer for interclass intercourse. His sister Augusta possesses the qualities that, in the Victorian economy of gender, frequently characterize a gentleman: she is no beauty or wit, but “strong-minded” and “useful” (54; ch. 4). It is on her brother that Trollope's admiring narrative gaze, remarkably sexually fluid and attuned to physical beauty, both male and female, fixes itself. Frank is the best-looking and healthiest of all the Gresham offspring: “He did not share his sisters’ ill-health, and though the only boy of the family, he excelled all his sisters in personal appearance. The Greshams from time immemorial had been handsome” (8; ch. 1). Health and beauty make Frank a delectable marriage market “article” and firmly establish his position as the passive object (the specter of “The Wolf Man” again) of the multiple desires coursing through the text.

Frank's aunt de Courcy urges her attractive nephew to secure his future by making a good match: “‘Yes, Frank. I know no man whose position so imperatively demands it; and luckily for you, no man can have more facility for doing so. In the first place you are very handsome’“ (102; ch. 8). In response, Frank “blushed like a girl of sixteen” (102; ch. 8). The future squire's boyishness thus spills into “girlishness,” and although he makes attempts at asserting independence, they are as feeble and lightly treated as those of a marriageable daughter.

Frank's academic aspirations are a case in point. Desperate to defer being married off to Miss Dunstable, Frank pleads with his aunt de Courcy, “‘But, aunt, just at this moment I have to read for my degree like anything. I go up, you know, in October’“ (103; ch. 8). The de Courcy women deem his passion for knowledge eminently impractical: “‘Degree!’ said the countess. “‘Why, Frank, I am talking to you of your prospects in life, of your future position, of that on which everything hangs, and you tell me of your degree!’“ (103; ch. 8). Frank Gresham is no scholar, and we are not to take his stab at education any more seriously than the countess does, but the sheer improbability of the young man's intellectual ambition is precisely the point. Frank Gresham's “prospects in life” and his “future position” depend on his looks even more than on his aristocratic status. More importantly, the choice between finishing his course work and fulfilling the de Courcy ambition is not his to make. The lot of Trollope's gentle sons is that of any number of female characters in the Victorian novel.

In the end, “marry money” is precisely what Frank Gresham does: a happy plot reversal makes his sweetheart Mary Thorne the owner of Boxall Hill and his bride. He consents to his family's efforts to marry him off and the concomitant narrative pull to feminize him, thereby establishing and strengthening his identity as a normative man – heterosexual, English, productive, upper-crust – by redefining that role in non-normative terms. As I have suggested, the disavowed father-son desire in Freud's case study structures a narrative of masculinity in which men identify with the mother. But unlike Freud's case history that, in the end, cannot brook the Wolf Man's feminization, Doctor Thorne propels the gentle squire into eminence. Most crucially, by marrying well Frank Gresham can give his father the compensatory gift of land and hence bring about what I term the father-son marriage plot, a species of loving, familial, homosocial bond that simultaneously redefines patriarchy and keeps it intact.

Like many of Trollope's novels, Doctor Thorne ends with a wedding. The young Frank Gresham marries the niece of the eponymous doctor. However, an equally joyful event accompanies the requisite narrative closure: “Nothing can be more happy than the intercourse between the squire and his son. What their exact arrangements are, we need not specially inquire; but the demon of pecuniary embarrassment has lifted his black wings from the demesne of Greshamsbury” (528; ch. 47). Remarkably, the joy resulting from this “intercourse” not only equals but exceeds that of the heterosexual nuptials. And while the happy ending of the novel does not exclude heterosexual marriage, it certainly diminishes its importance. Though Frank Gresham attempts to disobey his mother's injunction to “marry money,” the plot insists on the completion of this transaction: “And thus after all did Frank perform his great duty; he did marry money” (514; ch. 46).

This sentence shifts the emphasis from “marrying” to “marrying money,” thereby suggesting that the young man's duty is not to enter into a marriage as a requisite rite of passage from “very boy” to man, from son to father. His duty is, first and foremost, to his father. If Frank Gresham does establish a degree of authority of his own, it is not significant. The narrator is quite skeptical about the young man's potential as a patriarch: “And thus Frank married money, and became a great man. Let us hope that he will be a happy man. At this time of the story…it is not practicable for the novelist to tell much of his future career” (527; ch. 47). Frank plans to run for an office, but “there is no chance of any opposition” (527; ch. 47), and his principal occupation will be hunting and keeping the hounds at Boxall Hill.

The change in the young man's marital status does not necessarily equal his unconditional incorporation into the regime of virility predicated on father-son rivalry and the son's identification with the father. Rather, Frank's marriage is, to use his own words, a way of “stick[ing] to the governor.” By sticking together and not to their wives, the father and the son both retain their gentleness and reconstitute themselves as financially and politically viable patriarchs: “Frank should be lord of Boxall Hill in his own right; and as to those other liens on Greshamsbury, let Frank manage that with his father as he might think fit” (523; ch. 47). “The intercourse between the squire and his son” is, then, happier and certainly more significant than the intercourse between Frank Gresham and Mary Thorne: it restores an all-male lineage interrupted by Frank Senior's treacherous residency in the de Courcy Castle and ensures the survival of the “chivalrous” agricultural England and its Tory gentlemen.

A Touch of Class: The Demise of the Self-Made Man

IN ORDER TO RECLAIM THEIR lawful place on the fatherland of East Barsetshire, the Greshams must also defeat Roger and Louis Philippe Scatcherd. The two families' clash for the title of the English gentleman is also a clash between two ideologies (Tory landowners and politically radical entrepreneurs). More importantly, however, it is a competition between two models of the father-son relationship, and hence of masculinity. The Scatcherds, a nouveau-riche family, claim the possession of Boxall Hill, an estate that had belonged to the Gresham family for generations. Roger Scatcherd seeks to establish himself and his son as legitimate members of the country gentry: “But any way, my son shall be my heir. I've had the gumption to make the money, but I haven't the gumption to spend it. My son, however, shall be able to ruffle it with the best of them. I'll go bail he shall hold his head higher than ever young Gresham will be able to hold his” (122; ch. 10). Scatcherd's crusade against the squire's family is, however, doomed. The principal reason for his debacle is not the illegitimacy of his claim to Boxall Hill. Rather, he fails, in large part, because of the conventionality of both Roger's and Louis Philippe Scatcherd's masculinities and their relationship as a father and a son. Both follow the dynamic of the traditional Oedipus complex rather than the counter-normative permutation seen in Freud's “The Wolf Man.” The Scatcherd family includes men whose characterization appears to be completely consistent with the Victorians' idea of manly behavior. Sir Roger Scatcherd is a man who has “gumption” to make his way in the world and produce children and money. Although he comes from “a low rank of life” (20; ch. 2), his professional skills and leadership enable him to cross class barriers:

In the course of his career, Scatcherd “conquer[s] the world” (105; ch. 9). “A hard-working hero” and “powerful beyond the power of ordinary men” (106; ch. 9), he is the antithesis of the “lukewarm” squire Gresham. Trollope introduces Roger Scatcherd by remarking that he “had also a reputation, but not for beauty or propriety of conduct” (20; ch. 2). Although a reference to “beauty” and “propriety of conduct” serves as an ironic transition between the description of Roger Scatcherd and his sister Mary, the mention of these two traditionally desirable female qualities establishes a contrast between the manly but unruly Scatcherd and the beautiful, well-behaved Greshams, the gentlemen whom the novel favors.

Sir Roger's physical description reveals his anxiety-provoking excess of virility: “The apron he had abandoned, but not the heavy prominent thoughtful brow, with the wildly-flashing eye beneath it” (105–6, ch. 9). A godlike figure, he has a “school of worshipers,” for whom he becomes a “superhuman, miracle-moving, inspired prophet” (106; ch. 9). The portrait of Roger Scatcherd intimates a connection between conventional, phallic masculinity and the biblical presence of God the father; it also makes him, as a patriarch, the complete opposite of the gentle, passive Frank Gresham. To Trollope, however, phallic masculinity represents transgression rather than the norm, lawlessness rather than the law, foreignness rather than Englishness. Roger Scatcherd, whose first name alludes to phallic penetration, is an aberration in the world of East Barsetshire: his penchant for violence, physical and verbal, as well as his alcoholism and his physical unfitness for survival, erase him from its map.

Scatcherd's career begins with breaking, not making, the law. To avenge his seduced and abandoned sister Mary, Scatcherd kills Henry Thorne, her lover and the doctor's brother: “With manly wrath, however, he set forth first against the man, and that with manly weapons. He took nothing with him but his fists and a big stick as he went in search of Henry Thorne” (21; ch. 2). The references to Scatcherd's manliness, “fists,” and a “big stick” are ironic. Describing a character as “manly” is usually Trollope's highest compliment, but here he betrays an aversion to phallic masculinity, associating it with physical and emotional excess.

Scatcherd's ferocious revenge on his sister's seducer spills over into his later political efforts. He habitually directs his aggression against the gentlemen by espousing radical political views: “One thing further must be told of Sir Roger. In politics he was as violent a Radical as ever, and was very anxious to obtain a position in which he could bring his violence to bear” (108; ch. 9). Political radicalism and an “anxious” effort to achieve political legitimacy are, for Trollope, an equivalent of a violent nature; hence the incompatibility of radicalism and gentlemanliness. This early episode of violence positions Sir Roger permanently beyond the pale of the law and brands him as an outsider. The sole reason for his short-lived success in politics is that he is an “extreme demagogue” who talks “in a manner dangerous to himself and others” (20; ch. 2). Delineating various performances of Victorian masculinities, Peter Gay describes “the virile male” who uses “verbal brutality” and “militant postures” (115) to prove his virility. Scatcherd's violent political rhetoric appears to be a legitimate, indeed quite routine, manifestation of patriarchal power. Yet for Trollope, such rhetorical prowess is frequently suspect. A true Englishman, he points out again and again, subscribing enthusiastically to the common nineteenth-century view, does not have a way with words; a skillful orator is both unmanly and un-English.

The text links Scatcherd's virility, verbal and otherwise, with the politics of class and national identity. In spite of his success, Sir Roger's aspiration to become a member of the Parliament encounters resistance: “He had made so much of the power of walking into that august chamber, and sitting shoulder to shoulder in legislative equality with the sons of dukes and the curled darlings of the nation” (251–52; ch. 22). Power does not make Roger Scatcherd fit to be included in the society of gentlemen, “the curled darlings.” Trollope's commitment to the Liberal idea that class borders are porous and fluid is well known. However, his belief in the natural rights of “the sons of dukes” and “the curled darlings of the nation” belies the convictions widely attributed to him. The manly politics of the capitalist enterprise, the virile rhetoric of political radicalism and, the attendant powerful and violent masculinity of a self-made man make the narrator more anxious than the gentleness of the landowning gentry. The narrative urge to kill Roger Scatcherd betrays a substantial degree of class and gender anxiety. The “master[y]” and “brute power” (252–53; ch. 22) that this upwardly-mobile character exhibits constitute an illegitimate performance of masculinity in the context of the novel, whereas gentleness (female identification) is virtually the only possible one. Similarly unacceptable is a career in commerce, to which this model of masculinity consistently corresponds.

Significantly, “the curled darlings of the nation” is a quotation from Othello (1.2.66–67). At the beginning of the novel, Trollope draws a parallel between England and Venice, and so profound is Sir Roger's national, social, and gender dislocation that his comparison to the unwelcome guests of Shakespeare's Venice becomes ineluctable. James Kincaid argues that the railway contractor is, “Trollope's version of Shylock” (xix). Though Shylock's alienation echoes Scatcherd's, the allusion to Othello draws a more urgent and evocative connection between race, nationality, and masculinity. The insistence on his “wild,” “brute” power racializes Scatcherd, as it does the Moor, and it certainly casts him aside as a foreigner. The “curled darlings,” in turn, bring to mind the Gresham men, entitled to the English land and a seat in the Parliament. Scatcherd's exclusion from both is inevitable and permanent.

The very idea that a Scatcherd could conceivably obtain a legitimate place in the British political system comes from outside of England, namely from France. Sir Roger names his son Louis Philippe after a French king, and Trollope takes another dig at the Scatcherds’ unwarranted ambition in his discussion of Louis Philippe Scatcherd's “royal” name: “If one wishes to look out in the world for royal nomenclature, to find children who have been christened after kings and queens, or the uncles and aunts of kings and queens, the search should be made in the families of democrats” (121; ch. 10). The predilection for French “royal nomenclature” is meant as a testament to the hypocrisy of Scatcherd and the likes of him, whose true aspiration is mastery, not equality. However, Sir Roger's attachment to France, with its double threat of cosmopolitanism and revolution, also solidifies his status as an outsider and stresses his lack of belonging and entitlement to the English soil.

Louis Philippe Scatcherd, Sir Roger's son, is punished and banished in a similar way. As evidenced by the royal name, Roger Scatcherd pins all his hopes for the triumph of democracy and commercial enterprise on his feeble and dissipated son. However, it is precisely the predictability of this paternal sentiment that prevents him from fulfilling these hopes. The difference between the Greshams' and the Scatcherds' respective father-son relationships is subtle, but worth heeding. The gentle patriarchy hinges on an affectionate “intercourse between the squire and his son,” neither of whom exercises his patriarchal authority. The relationship between the Scatcherd men is in many ways more traditional, that is to say, more consistent with Freud's normative Oedipal paradigm.

Unlike the young Gresham, not only does Louis Philippe defy his father's authority, but in keeping with the Oedipal narrative of a normative man, he also establishes himself as a figure stronger than his father, a father in his own right. Louis Scatcherd “in some matters was more than a match for his father” (272; ch. 24). While Sir Roger cannot escape his predilection for alcohol and self-destruction, the younger man “was not a fool, nor was he naturally, perhaps, of a depraved disposition”; he is “not ill-made by Nature” (272–73; ch. 24). Despite his “debauchery” (271; ch. 24), Louis Philippe is “acute, crafty, knowing” (273; ch. 24); when compared with the ever boyish Frank Gresham, the young Scatcherd looks “four years the other's senior” (269; ch. 24), although they are of the same age.

Louis Philippe establishes his patriarchal supremacy at a young age. He “kn[ows]…the value of a shilling” and becomes a “close-fisted reprobate” who rules the underworld of “blacklegs and suchlike” (273; ch. 24) with the same authority as his father rules the world of railway contracts and radical politics. Not only does he compete with the father for power and influence, but he also effectively kills Roger Scatcherd by complying with the latter's death-bed request for “a drop of brandy” (275; ch. 24) and hence enacts the traditional Oedipal drama. After his father's death, Louis Philippe seeks to reclaim the power his father wielded over women. He is just as tyrannical towards his mother, Lady Scatcherd, and in an effort to establish himself as a local squire, he unsuccessfully woos Mary Thorne, whose social position he mistakenly assumes to be inferior to his. However, the young Scatcherd fails to endear himself to either woman; they reserve their affections for Frank Gresham. Lady Scatcherd has her heart “fixed…with almost a warmer love on Frank Gresham…. There was, too, a joyous, genial luster about Frank's face which always endeared him to women” (274; ch. 24). One of our most fundamental assumptions about patriarchy is, of course, its exertion of power over women. But Louis Scatcherd's exercise of paternal authority fails, while the Greshams manage to sustain and amplify their power by means of their identification with women. Louis Scatcherd does not emerge as a normative man precisely because his body is not attractive and desirable; however, as I argued above, his gentle counterpart succeeds due to his docile charm and his ability to use his appealing body to his economic advantage.

The pursuit of power fails to earn Louis Philippe a place in the gentlemanly world of East Barsetshire. Though more educated than his father, Louis Philippe Scatcherd is subject to the same social limitations: “Be that as it may, two years at Eton, and three terms at Cambridge, did not make a gentleman of Louis Philippe Scatcherd” (121; ch. 10). Like the older man, he cannot make friends with “the sons of the dukes”; in Cambridge, for instance, he keeps the company of the “men who imitated grooms in more than their dress, and who looked on the customary heroes of race-courses as the highest lords of the ascendant on earth” (270; ch. 24).

While attempting to fulfill his father's dream of upward mobility, Louis Philippe invariably winds up on the wrong side of the tracks. He is also a national misfit, though unlike his father, his alienation from England does not acquire tragic, Shakespearean proportions. Whereas the Gresham men come from true English stock and are “broad browed, blue eyed, fair haired, born with dimples in their chins, and that pleasant, aristocratic, dangerous curl of the upper lip which can equally express good humour or scorn” (8; ch. 1), Louis Philippe has the visual traits of a lowly-born foreigner. Like his name, his appearance and speech are outward manifestations of his unfitness for the role of English squire: “His hair was dark red, and he wore red moustaches, and a great deal of red beard beneath his chin, cut in a manner to make him look like an American. His voice also had a Yankee twang, being a cross between that of an American trader and an English groom” (273; ch. 24). He looks and sounds like an American, but his name, it bears repeating, is distinctly French. The heir to the Scatcherd fortune is named after Louis-Philippe, the “Citizen King” of France, known for his sympathy for “the common man” and popularity with British radicals. The Franco-American axis that this very English young man comes to embody quickens the novel's deepest anxieties: the ethos of capitalism, a threat to the agricultural, chivalrous (or gentlemanly) England, and a challenge to its social order. The rough descendant of stone-masons from the West of England therefore becomes cosmopolitan and un-English.

Louis Philippe endeavors to obtain the status of an English gentleman, as well as his control over the land, through marriage. But even as he attempts to be a patriarch in his own right, the Scatcherd heir fails to perform a patriarch's foremost duty, that of marriage and procreation. Rejected by Mary Thorne, Louis Philippe dies of hereditary alcoholism, a bachelor and an outcast, and with him dies a line of patriarchs brutal in their ambition. The title of one of the concluding chapters of the novel announces, with a degree of satisfaction in its tone, that “[t]he race of Scatcherd becomes extinct” (471; ch. 43). This statement intimates the essential otherness of the Scatcherds as a separate race; it also conveys the triumph of the gentlemanly line of fathers and sons and the social and sexual order in which gentleness (or feminine identification) is constitutive of normative masculinity. The Gresham line of landowning gentlemen who partake of the joys of the father-son marriage plot inherits the fatherland, while the ambitious and conventionally masculine Scatcherds, who do not, are banned from fatherhood, marriage, and ultimately the novel's idyllic, rural England.

Anxiety-Free: Towards a New Model of Victorian Masculinity

MUCH LIKE “THE WOLF MAN,” the study of masculinities in general and Victorian masculinities in particular is a case study of a neurosis. Invariably, it tells the story of desire, anxiety, disavowal, masking, and fear. The critical consensus is that in order to conceal or reconcile the contradictions that threatened to erode his authority, the Victorian man had to maintain the costly and forced spectacle of manliness. Torn apart by conflicting identities, he knew that he must “get it right” and “be a man,” often at the cost of overcoming incapacitating psychic and physical hurdles. Violence purported to cover the loss of authority and askesis eliminated nameless but dangerous desires; sometimes the two traded places.

The critical discourse on Victorian masculinities is, however, as anxiety-ridden as its subjects. Like Freud, who when confronted with the complicated masculinity of the Wolf Man, tries to beat the contradictions into submission and invent a model that can help his patient function, the scholars of the Victorian period seek to come up with a workable model of maleness that would discipline its neuroses by exposing them. Though there are many ways of approaching the subject, the omnipresence of anxiety and strife unite all of them.

The uniqueness of Trollope's model of masculinity is its comparative freedom from such anxiety. Trollope lacks his contemporaries' suspicion of or cerebral distance from the body. He is, as Christopher Herbert argues persuasively in Trollope and Comic Pleasure, no stranger to pleasure, and it is precisely on pleasure that his paradigms of father-son relationships are based. For Trollope's men, identification with femaleness is virtually effortless and does not constitute the loss of power: it is, in fact, power. The fathers and sons whom I examine above are not the typical products of mid-Victorian England, whose passions, tamed and concealed by the somber black suit of bourgeois respectability, only occasionally manifest themselves in violence.

As I suggested earlier, Trollope's attachment to the squire and the English land goes back to the ideas of Romanticism. Yet this connection does not make the Greshams Heathcliffs or Rochesters, throwbacks to the Romantic period, whose performances of masculinity, though edgier and more variegated than those of the Victorians, still need to be disciplined by marriage or death. Rather, by pointing to the presence of the father-son marriage plot in the Victorian novel, I would like to propose a different paradigm of Victorian masculinity, one in which pleasure lies in relinquishing power and identifying with femininity without the usual anxiety. But paradoxically, pleasure-oriented, trangressive patriarchy participates in plots driven by tremendous national and class anxieties. Radically non-normative masculinity is therefore in the service of resistance to progress, and pleasure is in the service of fear. As Doctor Thorne demonstrates, unorthodox performances of masculinity such as gentlemanliness underwrite both well-known sociopolitical developments and traditional novelistic structures, such as the marriage plot.