Family Friendships with Trollope’s Women

Finally the Bechdel Test!

The Bechdel test is the invention of cartoonist Allison Bechdel, who in the 1980s noticed how frequently Hollywood films diminish women characters into at best mere adjuncts of the far more important male characters. (At worst? Hmm, the “woman in the fridge,” where a woman is abused, killed, even trapped in a refrigerator to provide motivation for the male characters to act in heroic or villainous but usually violent ways. Another “worse” is what I call the “stripper #1” character, who is usually unnamed and exists only for titillation.)

So she came up with the test now named for her: A film should have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. Virginia Woolf called for something similar in A Room of One’s Own, that fiction should show women in relationship not just with men but with other women. What would this mean for a story, if two women just… talked to each other? Well, they’d get to talk about their own lives. Maybe they’d find they had common interests—or opposing interests. With every interaction, each woman could be revealing something about herself, her values, her conflicts, her inner life—all of which would be irrelevant if her only role in the story was as an adjunct to the hero.

Anthony Trollope, I submit, passed the Bechdel test. His women characters interacted with each other constantly—as sisters and daughters and friends and as rivals. Most important, their relationships with each other changed as they changed—evidence that Trollope recognized the “dimensionality” that made them come to life on the page.

The friendships between women both revealed and caused change in the characters and in the stories. For example, we learn far more about Madame Max and Lady Glencora in the Palliser books from their evolving relationship (from rivalry to alliance to true friendship) than from their relationship with their husbands.  And the change in women’s friendships in response to story events also revealed unexpected depths, as shown in the compassionate response of the loyal Mrs. Orme to her friend Lady Mason’s betrayal.

I’ll deal with those two significant friendships later. Let’s focus first on the primary relationships between women, within families.

Family Friends

Trollope above all was a domestic author. He wrote about “big things”, of course, Parliament and the law and religion. But those big things always happen within a community or a family, as with Parliament’s appointment of a new bishop in Barchester Towers. This certainly had ramifications for the Anglican Church and the government… but far more significant was the effect on the families in the diocese.

Trollope didn’t agree with Tolstoy’s edict about happy families all being alike. Happy, unhappy, Trollope’s families were individualized, and often characterized by the complex relationships of the women. His sisters and mothers and daughters were often each other’s primary relationships, and yes, in their conversations, they discussed and disputed about all sorts of subjects other than the men in their lives.

Let’s look at one of these family friendships, one between a mother and daughter, and another between sisters.

The Dales

The Small House at Allington is one of the Barchester Chronicles, taking place on the farm estate of a squire in the county. The squire had allowed his widowed sister-in-law Mrs. Mary Dale and her two daughters Bell and Lily to stay in the “small house” within the grounds. They lived in genteel poverty, sharing in domestic chores and keeping a beautiful garden. The squire’s kindness was meager and inconsistent, but he did invite them to social activities so that the daughters could meet other people of their class. His unspoken expectation was that Bell should eventually marry her cousin, the heir Bernard. He didn’t provide dowries for the Dale girls, so their marital opportunities were otherwise limited.

When the young civil servant Adophus Crosbie comes to visit his friend Bernard at Allington, he was immediately attracted to the younger daughter Lily. He assumed that the squire would be giving her a dowry, and quickly proposed. But the engagement was short-lived, once he learned the truth, and soon he married a woman from a rich family. This was when Lily responded in a way that modern readers find baffling—she forgave Adolphus, and vowed never to love again. And she never did, rejecting another suitor, and almost rejoicing in her self-chosen status of “Lily Dale, Old Maid.”

Lily and Mary Dale were “surplus women,” the term used then for the many women who did not have the opportunity to marry. In England around the middle of the 19^th Century, for some reason, women greatly outnumbered “marriageable” men. While marriage was hardly a certain route to financial stability, single women were often in a precarious situation. Socially also they were at risk of being ignored or scorned. One solution was to join together with another woman in what was essentially a non-sexual marital relationship. Jane Austen wrote about this sort of situation (based on her own) in Sense and Sensibility, though those sisters ended up with a “happy ending,” that is, married.

The Dales were mother and daughter, but after Lily was jilted and chose to “retire”, they functioned almost as a couple, sharing responsibilities, finances, and emotional support. While she had never married Crosbie, she vowed that she had given herself to him body and soul and couldn’t go back. She compared her situation to that of her mother, who was still young enough to remarry but never considered it. So they lived together like “two old widows,” in harmony and serenity in their small house. (The other daughter, Bell, did wed, but first she refused the man her rich uncle chose for her, and instead married for love.)

An Evolving Equality

What I found interesting about this relationship is how it evolved from parent-child to friendship. Before Lily’s broken romance, she treated her mother rather like a favorite old couch—a comfortable, comforting, and undemanding presence in the lives of her daughters. The theory of (mother’s) life one may say was this–that she should bury herself in order that her daughters might live well above ground.

Trollope showed this in a devastatingly understated scene where Mrs. Dale picked and shelled peas in the garden while her daughters played croquet with their young gentleman, and then prepared to go to supper at the squire’s manor. When asked why her mother wouldn’t also be going, Lily answered with an offhanded if loving dismissal, “Mamma will stay at home to eat the peas.”

The more mature post-heartbreak Lily was better able to recognize her mother’s sacrifice. And yes, while they definitely spent a lot of time talking about the fellas, they like true friends conversed on their books and their friends and especially their values and feelings.

Even when they discussed Lily’s broken romance, they talked much less about the man involved than about her emotional state and her intentions to live on as if she, like her mother, had lost a husband.  Some readers might say that Lily inherited her mother’s penchant for martyrdom! And both of them were stubborn in their martyrdom.  Lily positively gloried in her renunciation of romance and love and marital fulfillment. And together she and her mother transitioned into a partnership of equals, uniting to resist the squire’s bullying, and with that alliance, even winning his approval and support. A sign of their new equal relationship was Mrs. Dale’s acceptance of Lily’s continued devotion to the unworthy Crosbie.

In several other “family friendships”, Trollope illustrated his belief in the need for equality between the friends. This would be especially difficult with existing relationships in a family, where there’s likely to be a hierarchy—parent above child, older sibling over younger sibling. A good example of a friendship that subverts the natural hierarchy is in Framley Parsonage. Lucy, the impecunious sister-in-law of the vicar, fell in love with Lord Lufton. His formidable mother of course expected a better match for her son, and made her displeasure clear. Lucy sensibly rejected the lord’s initial offer, realizing that he was somewhat frivolous and fickle, but also that their marriage was unlikely to succeed without the mother’s approval. But her essential goodness was revealed when she risked her life to nurse a local woman through typhoid. This heroism and her respect for Lady Lufton’s approval won the older woman over. In the end, Lady Lufton drives to Lucy’s home and humbly asks for her hand in marriage (to the son, that is).

In this way, the soon-to-be mother-in-law showed her willingness to give up her privilege in order to have an equal friendship with Lucy.  This expectation of equality is a real hallmark of women’s friendships in Trollope—at least, the healthy ones! He was less egalitarian with his male characters, whose friendships were often distorted by inequality and exploitation.

Not all of the women friendships in Trollope’s novels were healthy and mutual, of course. Next I’ll discuss a terrible friendship, the exploitative relationship of Kate Vavasor with her cousin Alice in Can You Forgive Her?

Alicia’s traditional Regency romance Royal Renegade will be released soon at Bookview Cafe.