Research-reading Trollope: The Garden-Variety Bad Husband
The Garden-Variety Bad Husband
Now, after the operatically self-destructive Kennedy and Trevelyan, we come to a more conventionally bad husband, Ferdinand Lopez. He was an attractive scoundrel, an outsider who relied on his connections and good looks to charm his way into the most elite British institutions, politics, and the drawing room of Lady Glencora Palliser. He also won the heart of the sweet and clever Emily Wharton, and much of the fortune of her father. Then his garden-variety corruption broke his wife’s heart, and almost brought down the government of Lady Glencora’s husband, the Duke of Omnium.
What was impressive about Ferdinand Lopez’s early success was that he was exactly what the 19th Century English distrusted—a foreigner with a foreign name. Like most foreigners in Trollope novels (and, for that matter, in 19th Century England), he was suspected of being Jewish (Trollope left that uncertain). Anti-semitism was both casual and common then, even as the country elected a prime minister of Jewish descent – he did convert to Anglicanism in childhood, but kept his clearly Jewish surname, Disraeli. And one of the richest commoner families in the country was Jewish, the Rothschilds, whose fortune started in a most patriotic way of insider trading—the first Rothschild reportedly had advance notice of the victory at Waterloo and bought up stocks ahead of time.
Whatever his actual religion-of-origin, Lopez was a man with no principles or values. One early scene showed him arm-twisting Mr. Parker, his partner/employee, into cosigning one of his loans. Something like this happened to Trollope in his youth, and he found himself dangerously in debt for a “friend’s” loan. Ever after, Trollope used this kind of “friend-request” as a sign of an unscrupulous man.
Ferdinand had a chip on his shoulder, definitely, as a result of being cold-shouldered by the society he felt entitled to join. And it really was a credit to his good looks and oily charm that he got as far as he did, considering he started as a mere stockbroker in the City. In the Victorian era, ambitious “city men” like Lopez could often finagle their way into the lower echelons of high society, by helping the old landed families to keep or restore the wealth they used to take for granted. Of course, he was an unscrupulous man, promising high returns for what were clearly pretty dubious investments.
His Best and Her Worst Investment
Through an acquaintance with her foolish aunt, he was able to meet Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy attorney. He worked fast to charm Emily into falling in love with him, before her father found out. Mr. Wharton knew right away this man was an unscrupulous bounder, and kept trying to get her instead to marry the reliable Arthur, a family friend. But like many of Trollope’s women, once she gave her heart, she wouldn’t take it back. Mr. Wharton was finally forced to agree to the marriage so that he wouldn’t lose his daughter. For awhile, he kept Lopez in line by judicious applications of money.
But Lopez, as bounders do, got above himself. He might have been able to make it in the upper middle class professional set of the Whartons. But his charm and connections bring him into contact with the romantic and wealth Lady Glencora, whose husband Plantagenet Palliser was a powerful political leader. (He eventually became prime minister.) Lady Glencora had her own love-at-first-sight with an unscrupulous man, Burgo Fitzgerald. She gave him up to marry the much more suitable Palliser, but never got over the heartbreak. Ever after, she was a champion of the Romeo-and-Juliet type of young love, and so she tried to help this young couple to overcome society’s and Dad’s disapproval.
Playing Both Ends against the Middle
When Lopez decided a political career would further his ambitions, Lady Glencora was there to help with her connections and money. Lopez lost the election, but only after going into debt. He demanded that Palliser pay off his debts because he claimed Lady Glencora inveigled him into a campaign he couldn’t afford. (He also got Emily’s father to pay the same amount, without telling either benefactor about the other, thinking, “Was it not spoil got from the enemy by his own courage and cleverness?”) This almost ruined Palliser’s political career, and seriously damaged the Palliser marriage. But Lopez characteristically felt no guilt at abusing the generosity of his patrons.
His father-in-law didn’t want Emily to live in precarious penury, so would give her money. But he drew the line at paying Lopez directly. And this led Lopez to emotionally (and perhaps physically) abuse his wife, who was too loyal to refuse him entirely. As he became more bitter and abusive, she withdrew emotionally. Her loving father watched in anguish, but in an era when divorce was mostly unattainable, all he could do was offer her funds and shelter if needed.
Lopez was so unscrupulous that he used the Whartons’ love for each other against them. When Wharton refused to give him even more money, Lopez said he would make Emily (now with child) accompany him to a new “coffee and guano” business in Guatemala, though it was not a healthy climate for a European. When Wharton agreed to the price of 5000 pounds, as long as Emily was allowed to stay in London, Lopez demanded even more, insisting that she use her father’s love to please her husband.
Trollope observed, “It cannot be supposed that Ferdinand Lopez at this time was a very happy man. He had, at any rate, once loved his wife, and would have loved her still could he have trained her to think as he thought, to share his wishes, and ‘to put herself into the same boat with him,’–as he was wont to describe the unison and sympathy which he required from her. To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain.”
Brutal but Poetic Justice
But then, Mrs. Parker, whose husband was ruined because he cosigned that loan for Lopez, accosted Emily, begging for help. Now Emily could no longer doubt his villainy. But wives had few rights then, and she knew that Lopez could force her to go with him. Trollope revealed then that her great love had been worn away: “She was eaten up by remorse. Gradually she had learned how frightful was the thing she had done in giving herself to a man of whom she had known nothing. And it was not only that she had degraded herself by loving such a man, but that she had been persistent in clinging to him though her father and all his friends had told her of the danger which she was running. And now it seemed that she had destroyed her father as well as herself!”
Lopez was already making alternative plans, trying to get a rich widow, Lizzie Eustace, to buy shares in his new company—and to join him there as his paramour. In Lady Eustace, he met his match in lack of scruples. When she contemptuously rejected him, he returned to extorting his father-in-law. Finally they agreed on terms that would send Lopez to Guatemala and leave Emily alone. But his new partners had second thoughts about employing him. Soon he had no options left. Even his fellow clubmembers were shunning him, and that was the last straw. Like the other two bad husbands, he killed himself, but in a characteristically dramatic way, with one last abuse of his wife: “He walked down before the flying (train) engine–and in a moment had been knocked into bloody atoms.”
It took Emily months to recover from the horror of her marriage and her sudden widowing, but eventually, she could accept the proposal of the loyal Arthur Fletcher.
Yet Another Trollope “And Yet”
Earlier in this series, I mentioned Trollope’s presentation of what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability,” the ability to tolerate uncertainty, even to induce uncertainty, for greater meaning. It might initially seem like incoherence that Trollope could make a claim like “Women need husbands” and then undercut that by presenting a series of bad husbands that proved to be far worse than eternal singlehood. He could sternly insist that women should marry only men they love, and show how wrong Laura Kennedy was to instead marry for power. But he also gave us the Two Emilies, who each married for love and were almost destroyed by it.
This isn’t incoherence. It’s instead that negative capability. We learn more about love and marriage and men and women by examining all cases and the factors that make them unique. Women might have needed husbands in the patriarchal society where they had virtually no rights. “And yet,” a bad husband was worse than none at all. Love was the best of all reasons for marriage. “And yet,” a man of bad character could be magnetically attractive but unworthy of love.
With Trollope’s conundrums, there are no easy answers. Character matters—that is a central truth in his novels. Lady Glencora was right to marry the honorable Plantagenet Palliser. “And yet,” even in her last moments, even she lamented leaving the husband she came to love, she thought of that the worthless Burgo she loved so passionately. Character matters, and yet the frivolous and somewhat amoral Phineas Finn gained success, fortune, and a devoted wife without much moral evolution.
And for me, the most intriguing “and yet” is Trollope’s seeming acceptance of the patriarchy and rule by men… but his reality, that his most interesting characters, with the most complex and meaningful relationships, are women. So next I’ll be talking finally about Trollope and the Bechdel test— “At least two named female characters who sometimes talk to each other about something other than a man.” That should be an easy pass, and yet think of all the modern films like Top Gun that can’t meet that meager standard.
Well, Trollope routinely passed the Bechdel test, as shown in the many and varied relationships and non-men-oriented conversations women have together in his novels. It’s almost, you know, like he understood… women are people too. 😊
