Bad Women of Trollope
Trollope’s Bad Women
As I’ve shown, Trollope clearly had no preference for the patriarchy. He presented the undoubted reality that men had more power, more privilege, more important roles in the world. But he also showed the venality, the irresponsibility, and the puerility of many aspects of male lives during that time, especially men born into privilege.
As for Trollope’s women, he didn’t necessarily like them better. But he did clearly find women as a group more interesting, which is pretty unusual in male (and female) writers of the time (or even now). While he showed the relative narrowness and inconsequentiality of many women’s lives, he also granted his ladies a full repertoire of emotions and character traits, and showed how they were changed by their experiences and relationships.
Unlike some male authors of the time, he didn’t demonstrate an idealized view of women as angels or saints—that really would be sexist. He also created bad women—women who exploited their loved ones, abused what power they had, and even committed crimes. Paradoxically, his willingness to create bad women and show their motivations and consequences derived from the simple belief that “women are people too.”
So let’s look at three “bad women” who are bad in interesting ways that reveal the effects of discrimination. The first two are criminals—Lizzie Eustace steals diamonds, Lady Mason steals a farm—and the third, Mrs. Proudie, is a figure of religious importance, the wife of a bishop. (In religion as well as politics, 19th C women derived what power they had from their husbands’ positions.)
(There is another bad woman, Kate Vavasour, but I’ll reserve her for the “friendship” section. More than a bad person, she was a bad friend, which is a greater sin in Trollope’s reckoning.)
Trollope, like Dickens, enjoyed legal cases and lampooning the characters who got involved in interminable lawsuits, especially those around wills and estates. It does make sense in a time and place where inheritance was a primary way the powerful kept power and the wealthy passed on their wealth. Primogeniture—leaving an estate and/or title to the male heir—meant that creditors couldn’t foreclose and that wastrel heirs couldn’t gamble away the fortune. That way land remained in the male line of this family and didn’t get broken up and dispersed. Unfortunately, that also meant that widows and children could be kicked out of their homes and left destitute if the heir felt no responsibility to them. (Jane Austen—who was indeed displaced when her brother inherited—wrote about this inequity in several novels.) This reinforced the patriarchy power by keeping property away from many women.
Letting Her Be Her Bad Self
It isn’t surprising that some women would break the law to keep what they thought was rightfully theirs. This was the situation of Lady Lizzie Eustace, who married an elderly rich man for his money and soon produced his heir. This foolish man came too late to the realization that she was venal and deceitful, and died before he could change his will to exclude her.
Most of his fortune was entailed on their son, but because of the Married Women Act of 1870, Lizzie inherited a good deal. The problem came when she claimed sole ownership of the famous Eustace Diamonds. Lord Eustace’s family thought the jewels should stay with them, but she swore that the besotted old man had given her ownership. She maintained possession while considering and discarding a number of candidates for a second husband. Finally, when the family attorney threatened to sue to get back the jewels, she pretended they had been stolen. Then, rather unbelievably, thieves actually did manage to steal the necklace.
Her ruse eventually revealed, she had to defend herself in court. She escaped imprisonment because her testimony was needed to convict the thieves, but her reputation (such as it was) was ruined. All the potential second husbands deserted her, and she had to endure the insulting proposition of the even less scrupulous Ferdinand Lopez to join him in a “coffee and guano” scheme in Guatemala. (She proved to be just as immoral but not as stupid as he assumed, and refused him.)
Trollope had little sympathy for Lady Eustace, but could use her to depict the personal corruption caused by a society obsessed with wealth and materialism. He clearly had a good time creating her, as he endowed her with several usually admirable traits like resourcefulness and courage. That she used these in furtherance of her greed and ambition made her no better but certainly no worse than a male villain would be. It’s another example of Trollope’s insistence that “women are people too,” with the right to be as rotten as any man. In fact, she was something of a backhanded crusader against the legal and cultural restrictions on a clever woman. Yes, she was a gold digger, but her husband was a licentious old fool who chose to be snared by a young wife. Yes, she didn’t deserve the diamonds, but as the woman who had to share his bed, she probably deserved them more than his family did.
Most of all, Trollope didn’t give her undue protection or punishment, as other Victorian authors might have done. He let her be her bad self, and reap the consequences, which showed a certain respect for a character who had her own ambitions and the skills to achieve them.
The Bad Wife/Good Mother
Another thieving woman but with a more sympathetic motive was Lady Mary Mason of Orley Farm. She also married and had a son with an older man of property who conveniently died and left a fortune. However, as convention demanded, he left most of his estate to his older son Joseph from an earlier marriage, and only a minor competence to his wife and baby Lucius. But Lady Mason tricked him by forging a codicil, leaving one farm to her infant son. The stepson, furious at being denied even a small portion of the inheritance, sued. But Lady Mason produced several people who said they had witnessed the signing of the codicil, and she won the lawsuit and her son’s legacy.
Unfortunately for the second-family Masons, this wasn’t the end of the litigation. Twenty years later, the young Lucius became obsessed with “scientific agriculture” and, in order to experiment with new methods, ended the land lease of Samuel Dockworth, a longtime tenant who happened to be an attorney. Angry at being dispossessed from what he considered his own property, Dockworth recalled the earlier lawsuit and persuaded the stepson to prosecute Lady Mason for lying about who wrote the codicil.
Trollope adroitly engendered sympathy for this young widow, then undercut it in the middle of the book by revealing that she did indeed commit the forgery. It was too complicated a scheme to summarize here. Suffice to say, she was guilty. But compared to Lady Eustace, Lady Mason acted out of good intentions, protecting her baby’s interests. She wasn’t overly greedy, taking only a small part of a large fortune from Joseph Mason, who was far from a loving son to the old man. And she and her son were entirely within their rights to cancel the lease to the belligerent Dockworth.
Of course, she shouldn’t have committed the crime, and she certainly shouldn’t have spent twenty years lying about it. Trollope didn’t let her off easy. Through the adroit legal maneuvers of her attorney, she was acquitted of perjury. But her guilty conscience made her confess to her elderly rich fiancé Sir Peregrine, who broke off the engagement. She also had to tell her son that in fact, his father had left him no legacy at all. And in the end, she deeded Orley Farm back to the greedy stepson. Like Lizzie Eustace, she was punished for her cheating. But she chose her own punishment. Trollope granted her the moral capability to recognize what she had done wrong and rectify it by giving up the disputed property.
This act of conscience differentiated Lady Mason from Lizzie, and also showed the moral complexity and conflict many authors (then and now) reserved for male characters. Her choices were plausible, given the situation and her values—wrong, of course, but understandable in a way that the greedy Lizzie’s theft was not. She also recognized her crime, repented, and made amends at great cost (she and her son lost everything). The difference in outcome for the two women thieves is interesting. Lizzie keeps most of her inheritance but loses what little respect she had from her acquaintances. Lady Mason lost almost everything, but at the end, one friend, Edith Orme, recognized that forgiveness was allowed, if not required. As Trollope concludes:
Criminal as the woman was, disgraced and debased, subject almost to the heaviest penalties of outraged law and justice, a felon against whom the actual hands of the law’s myrmidons would probably soon prevail, a creature doomed to bear the scorn of the lowest of her fellow-creatures,—such as she was, this other woman, pure and high, so shielded from the world’s impurity that nothing ignoble might touch her,—this lady took her to her heart again and promised in her ear with low sweet words of consolation that they should still be friends. I cannot say that Mrs. Orme was right. That she was weak minded I feel nearly certain. But, perhaps, this weakness of mind may never be brought against her to her injury, either in this world or in the next.
Mrs. Orme’s example inspired more forgiveness from her father-in-law, the erstwhile fiancé Sir Percival Orme. Here Trollope showed that corruption can spread from one person to another, as the inequity of Lord Mason and his first son spread to Lady Mason. But so can kindness. The Ormes’ compassion saved Lady Mason—and their willingness to forgive resulted from her willingness to repent.
The First Lady Bishop
The two thieving ladies were in their way defying the inequitable laws of inheritance. Our third villainess did her own battle against discrimination, and was remarkably successful until, inevitably, she learned that secondhand power was no real power at all. Like the other bad women of Trollope, Mrs. Proudie was brought down by her own actions—again, evidence of Trollope’s ability to create women characters who, within the limits of their time, could at least sometimes control their own fate.
Mrs. Proudie’s power came from her position as the wife of the new bishop of Barchester Cathedral. In a nation with an official state religion, bishops had both religious and political influence. Bishop Proudie, a kind but ineffectual man, rose to his rank the old-fashioned way (being an educated white man from an affluent family). Universally regarded as unsuited for his job, he ceded most of his power to his far more forceful wife. And she wielded that power to further her own religious agenda of Sunday schools and plainer services, even hiring a chaplain, Obadiah Slope, who was antithetical to the “high-church” traditions of the cathedral. She and Slope pushed out the popular Reverend Harding who represented the extravagant excesses of the established church. (Among other faults, Mr. Harding was in charge of music at the cathedral, and Mrs. Proudie disapproved of the pomp and expense of choirs and organists. She was on the “Protestant” side of the centuries-old conflict between the ‘low-church chapel’ wing of the Anglican church, and the traditional wing that maintained most of the splendor of its Roman Catholic past.)
The bishop had hardly had time to get his clerical robes on before Mrs. Proudie took over. She definitely wore the metaphorical pants in that relationship, and the bishop, desiring only peace, just receded into figurehead status. He wasn’t even a good figurehead, as everyone in the diocese recognized that his wife was the one in charge of hiring, firing, and funding. She frequently humiliated her husband in front of his staff by ordering him around and assigning many of his duties to the obsequious Rev. Slope.
Then Again…
Mrs. Proudie’s goals were, all in all, laudable. She wanted to start a Sunday school to educate children, and to limit corrupt and extravagant practices in the diocese. She tried to correct the problem of absentee clergy, as when she required Rev. Stanhope to return to his parish from his years-long paid sojourn in Italy. She forced the bishop to fulfill the promise of a better paying position he made to the impoverished Rev. Quiverfull (he with the fourteen children!).
It wasn’t her goals but her methods that were villainous. I don’t spare a lot of sympathy for her husband the bishop, whose rise to great power was more evidence of the corruption of patriarchal systems like the church. And I have to admit that the diocese probably benefited from many of her projects. Like Laura Kennedy (the wife of the cabinet officer), Mrs. Proudie might in a more just era have ended up in a position of true power like archbishop due to her undeniable organizational and tactical skills.
But, well, she took her borrowed power and used it abusively. She acted as a dictator, forcing others to further her own aims. She was scathing and contemptuous of those with less power (including her cringing husband), and refused to compromise. After she turned on her minion Rev. Slope, she ended up with no allies at all, and the bishop finally had enough.
And yet… here I am, thinking that Mrs. Proudie was the worst of the three bad women, and why? At base, it’s because she humiliated her husband. I find myself using gendered insults when I describe the situation—she was a bitch, a ballbreaker. Finally her husband gathered up his gonads, and gave her what she deserved—ostracism and exile.
Trollope made me buy into the patriarchal assumption that the worst thing a woman can do is humiliate her husband—“emasculate him.” As I read, even as I sort of admired her dedication to educating children and her insistence on making the vicars and rectors show up and do their jobs, I couldn’t get past that idea that she was bad to make her ineffectual and overpaid husband to look bad.
I’m trying to puzzle that out. I wouldn’t want to be in the same room as Mrs. Proudie, wouldn’t want to work for her. Trollope showed that when strong women could only get secondhand power, they often used it wrongly. But he also showed corrupt, lazy, careless men misusing the power they thought was theirs by right.
Trollope’s “bad women”, as unique as each was, together illustrated not only the negative effects of the patriarchal system, but also his skill at creating women characters who had values and strengths and were capable of effective action. Most of all, he endowed them with their human reality by showing them creating their own fates by their choices and actions.
And in the end, the author tricked me. And then… then he made me realize exactly what I’d done and how even as a 21st Century reader, I had fallen into the trap judging a woman as her contemporaries would have, in sexist and demeaning ways, while giving the men a pass.
So three villainesses—one as bad as she wanted to be, one crippled with guilt, and one whose great crime was exercising a man’s power without actually being a man.