Another Trollope Trope: Bad Husbands Self-Destruct
Bad Husbands and the Paradox of Power
There are two 21st century terms which apply to Trollope’s 19th-century bad husbands:
Toxic masculinity and death by despair. (I know “toxic masculinity” is sort of a sexist term, but it’s also the precise word for the cause of the downfall of these Trollope characters.)
In this blog series, I’ll discuss Trollope’s presentation of the paradox of power in relationships—that inequality destroys the power-wielder too. (That’s something the British Empire was learning during Trollope’s time, that extending British power worldwide by forcible colonization of other lands would diminish, not enhance, Britain.)
Two of the worst husbands in Trollope’s enormous cast of characters appear in the 6-book Palliser series. (The third worst husband is in the standalone and aptly titled He Knew He Was Right.) The characters who connect all the novels in this series are Plantagenet Palliser (who becomes Prime Minister) and his romantic and ambitious wife Lady Glencora. These books are all about the acquisition and execution of power, especially in Parliament.
Trollope uses the characteristics and evolutions of the three bad husbands in these stories to show how patriarchy doesn’t just harm women—it can also destroy the men who assume their gender entitles them to exert power over others.
“Not all men,” of course. “Planty Palliser” is a powerful man (eventually a duke AND the prime minister), who believes in checks and balances even on his own power (the government he forms as PM is a coalition government, and he steps down willingly when they lose confidence in him). In his marriage, he sometimes defers to his wife and puts her interests over his own (only “sometimes”—this is the 19th C, after all).
While Palliser is not a perfect man or a perfect husband, he has a long and productive life. Because of his willingness to compromise and share power, he ends up with the respect of his countrymen and the love of his family.
In contrast are these Three Bad Husbands, whose assumption of absolute power over their wives leads to misery and self-destruction. I focus here on the “husband” aspect of these men’s lives because while the level of power over their world varies (Robert Kennedy has great political and financial power, Ferdinand Lopez very little), they, like all men of that time and place, had near-total legal power over their wives and children. And all three of them abused the power to control their wives.
What these men don’t realize is that absolute power corrupts… from within. That’s the “toxicity” of the assertion of control. It can eat you away like a parasite in your gut.
The Power Parasite
None of these men survived their marriages—and yet their wives did not murder them (however justifiable that might have been in these cases). All three deaths were self-inflicted in some way. Ferdinand Lopez died by suicide, throwing himself in front of a train. The other two self-deaths were slow and painful. Robert Kennedy wasted away in his chilly Scottish manor house, with only his elderly mother there to nurse him. Louis Trevelyan’s descent into obsession made him feverish and unable to eat, cared for by the wife he refused to trust.
Through these men, Trollope demonstrated the dangers of patriarchy. All three thought they were entitled to control their wives because they were men and it was the 19th century.
Let’s start with the most powerful of them all. It’s a bit disconcerting that he shared a name with a powerful AMERICAN family.
Robert Kennedy was exceedingly rich, a member of Parliament, and a cabinet minister. His political position was what eventually won him the hand of Laura Standish, a brilliant young woman obsessed with Parliamentary politics. As a woman, she could never run for election or give a speech in Parliament, but her talent for strategizing helped the man she loved (Phineas Finn) win an election. Alas, she chose to marry for power rather than love, telling herself that she could do more for Phineas as Mrs. Kennedy, cabinet minister wife. She soon learned that the last thing Mr. Kennedy wanted to do was share his power with his wife (or help her to help Phineas).
Laura in Captivity 
One of Trollope’s themes is that women should marry for love, not money or power. (Of course, he portrays marrying for love as a foolish choice if the husband isn’t worthy of love, as we’ll see with Emily’s marriage to Ferdinand Lopez.) And Laura was certainly punished for her cynical strategy. She really was a political genius, and if the world were just, she would have had her chance to become the Victorian Maggie Thatcher. Instead, all she could hope for was to be the power behind the cabinet minister, gathering parliamentary gossip and intel, advising her husband on strategy, editing the maiden speeches of the young MPs, raising funds for the party. Unfortunately, Robert Kennedy, arrogant and all-powerful, denied that she had any contribution to make to his career. In fact, he wanted her far away from power and politics and Phineas, so he relegated her to his dark dank Scottish estate. While he wasn’t physically violent to her, his confinement of her was a form of abuse. Puritannical and punishing, he deprived her of company, comfort, and pleasure, even as it damaged his own happiness. Finally she chose to escape, leaving all his money and power behind to live with her father in Europe.
This was the beginning of the end for Mr. Kennedy. It wasn’t his heart, but his pride that was broken. He’d had total power over his wife, but now he was impotent to control her—and everyone knew it. Getting her back became his obsession, interfering with his career and ruining his health. Even after Phineas saved him from an attack by thugs, Kennedy conspired to disgrace him with false accusations. Eventually he even shot at Phineas, and that along with his obsessive pursuit of his wife alienated his former allies. 
The Impotent End
Defeated, he retreated to Scotland and began systematically narrowing his existence. He was one of the richest men in England, but “he exercised his mastery in acts of petty tyranny about his domain, becoming more and more close-fisted in regard to money, and desirous, as it appeared, of starving all living things about the place,–cattle, sheep, and horses, so that the value of their food might be saved.” (Notice the repetition there of “power” words—mastery, tyranny, domain—and the contrasting “impotence” words—petty, starving, close-fisted.)
Kennedy also starved himself, and died in absolute despair, cursing Laura at the last as a hard-hearted child of Satan. He was so ill he couldn’t follow through with his punitive desire to cut his wife out of his will. The wife he abused “would become mistress of her own fortune and of all Loughlinter, and would be once more a free woman, with all the power that wealth and fashion can give.”
In the end, this most pious of men believed that God was impotent like him. Trollope’s epitaph for him: “He died believing, as he had ever believed, that the spirit of evil was stronger than the spirit of good.”
This was a man who had all the power in the world, but his refusal to share it destroyed him. He throttled his wife’s independent spirit, and she foiled him with an escape so elaborate and public that it brought humiliation on him. Once his obsession rendered him useless to them, his allies deserted, and he lost all the influence he ever had.
There you have it—a tale of toxic masculinity, abuse of power, and death by despair.
More next week: Louis Trevelyan, domestic tyrant.