Trollope, the Postal Pillar-box, and the Fourth Wall
But first, a digression into postal history! (British history and literature are so charmingly replete with such odd anecdotes. Trollope most of all would approve, I know.)
Fun fact: Anthony Trollope, when he wasn’t writing forty-seven long novels, was a civil servant, a postal inspector for the Royal Mail. His greatest achievement (aside from the literary) was the invention of the pillar box, the iconic mail bin still seen around the UK.
Here’s a plaque on a pillar box, dedicated to its inventor. This is near Green Park, across from the Ritz Hotel. (I love that this plaque ignored Trollope’s second job, you know, great novelist.)
Here are a few examples of this iconic Trollope design. The green color was the original choice, but red was considered more noticeable.
Trollope’s Self-Own
You won’t be surprised that this most self-aware and post-modern of Victorian novelists incorporated his own achievement into his stories, and in a drolly critical way.
Miss Stanbury carried her letter all the way to the chief post-office in the city, having no faith whatever in those little subsidiary receiving houses which are established in different parts of the city. As for the iron pillar boxes which had been erected of late years for the receipt of letters, one of which–a most hateful thing to her–stood almost close to her own hall door, she had not the faintest belief that any letter put into one of them would ever reach its destination. She could not understand why people should not walk with their letters to a respectable post-office instead of chucking them into an iron stump as she called it out in the middle of the street with nobody to look after it. Positive orders had been given that no letter from her house should ever be put into the iron post.
In fact, Trollope connected the pillar box to the frustration of parents and guardians, the liberation of women, and the success of rascally rakes. Jem Bloomfield recounts how in Mr. Scarborough’s Family, one exasperated mother complained to her daughter, “We ought to have prevented you from receiving or sending letters.”
She reflected, Here Mrs. Mountjoy touched on a subject on which the practice of the English world has been much altered during the last thirty or forty years;–perhaps we may say fifty or sixty years. Fifty years ago young ladies were certainly not allowed to receive letters as they chose, and to write them, and to demand that this practice should be carried on without any supervision from their elder friends.
A young lady, before she falls into a correspondence with a young man, is expected to let it be understood that she does so. But she does not expect that his letters, either coming or going, shall be subject to any espial, and she generally feels that the option of obeying or disobeying the instructions given to her rests with herself. Practically the use of the post-office is in her own hands.
And what do you know, Mrs. Mountjoy was right. Rather than dutifully marrying her cousin the wealthy heir, young Florence Mountjoy struck up an epistolary relationship with the handsome Harry Annesley. And with a pillar-box right there on the corner, she could write to him without letting her parents know:
This letter, when she had written it and copied it fair and posted the copy in the pillar-box close by, she found that she could not in any way show absolutely to her mother. In spite of all her efforts it had become a love-letter. And what genuine love letter can a girl show even to her mother?
Trollope several times had characters mention the danger of young women being able to carry on a correspondence unknown to their parents and guardians—and as a result fall in love and even abscond with ineligible young men. And of course the young women went on and did just that, almost inevitably. Mrs. Mountjoy, faced with Florence’s insistence on loving Harry, longed for the domination of old:
Dim ideas presented themselves to her mind of farther travel. But wherever she went (with Florence) there would be a post-office, and she was aware that the young man could pursue her (daughter) much quicker than she could fly. How good it would be that in such an emergency she might have the privilege of locking her daughter up in some convent!
This conflict brings up an issue for readers of Trollope, for he was so good at creating believable characters and presenting their viewpoints. Readers might be forgiven for thinking that he agreed with Mrs. Mountjoy, for example, in lamenting that in England parents could not follow the continental model where daughters “are still watched close till they are given up as brides to husbands with whom they have had no means of becoming acquainted.” This ability to reflect chauvinist opinions (along with his ill-chosen “a husband is her best right” comment) has led many to regard him as “anti-feminist”.
In this case, Trollope quickly undercuts the patriarchy, immediately adding the argument that “as this spirit of self-conduct has grown up, the morals and habits of our young ladies have certainly not deteriorated.”
Negative Capability
Some readers might consider Trollope to be waffling here, moving from one opinion to the opposite as he portrayed each character’s viewpoint. They might prefer the moral certainty of Dickens, who never made a secret of which characters he agreed with and which he opposed. But Trollope possessed the quality John Keats praised in Shakespeare: “negative capability,” which he defines as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Shakespeare, for example, could make Bassanio the “hero” of Merchant of Venice, and Shylock the “villain,” while presenting their interactions in a way that could flip reader sympathies. He didn’t have to resolve the uncertainty or make a clear statement which he supported. Bassanio ended up the victor in the trial, but the sentence passed on Shylock was so draconian for the “crime” of suing to collect a debt. This guides the reader into a kind of productive uncertainty—forced to wonder, could it be that Shylock’s real crime was… being Jewish?
Trollope, like Shakespeare, possessed the gift of making characters think and act and interact in ways that create complexity and conflict that cannot be easily resolved. And often—as Shakespeare did—he would undercut a certainty (Mrs. Proudie really was mean) with a complexity (but she died alone and heartbroken) that challenged the reader to consider questions like “Can She Be Forgiven?” (That’s the title of one of his novels, in fact.) His plots and his characters provided more questions than answers, leading readers to speculate and debate—witness the arguments after 150 years—is Trollope anti-feminist or feminist?
I think of Trollope’s plots as setting up a question and also an answer (“Should a young woman marry for love or for position? Well, of course for love!”), but then adding a “Then again….” Yes, a woman should marry for love, as Florence does when she marries her ha
ndsome Harry! But then again, Emily Wharton married that rascal Lopez for love, and he almost destroyed them both. And furthermore, Lady Glencora refused the man she loved to marry for position, and she was miserable for a long time, but her seemingly emotionless husband was the one who really loved her and ended up making her happier.
Trollope and the Fourth Wall
Trollope created a constant state of tension not just for the characters but for the readers too. And that makes it harder for us to pin down what he really thought, which is especially intriguing because he’s an author who often told us exactly that, and also how to react…
… And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. “Oh, you needn’t be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end.” “How very ill-natured you are, Susan,” says Kitty with tears in her eyes: “I don’t care a bit about it now.” Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please–learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
This is an example of Trollope “breaking the fourth wall,” meaning making a direct connection from a character to audience. According to screenwriter Ken Miyamoto, “The original term was born from the theatre in the 1800s, where box sets were constructed with three physical walls that could be manipulated for any production needs, with the fourth wall being the imaginary wall between the stage and the audience.” In this way, the characters show an awareness that they are in a story, creating all sorts of clever echoes and repercussions to the reader experience.
Trollope takes this a step further into post-modernism when he makes himself the author (and, by the way, the inventor of that infamous postal pillar-box) into a character and addresses his readers directly. For me, that’s a great deal of fun, that this “authorial persona” is also a character. That is, we can’t really assume that “Offended Author Trollope” above was really Anthony Trollope the civil servant/husband/father or just a part the real man was playing. Again, this uncertainty was designed to tease us, taunt us, make us think.
Trollope is an author who can’t be taken literally. No one of his characters (even the “intrusive author breaking through the fourth wall” character) speaks Trollope’s exact thoughts. If readers think it’s important to know what Trollope’s true opinions were (and I’m not sure that actually is very important), then we’d do better to look at his exploration of various themes and conflicts throughout his works. What questions does he pose about women’s rights, about marriage, about love, about money and power? What different answers do his stories provide? He was too complicated a thinker to have only one answer to each question, or one question to each answer!
Analyzing Trollope is like constructing a collage, then backing off to look at it as a fragmented and yet somehow coherent whole. I’ve been fortunate that he tells such fun and entertaining stories that I enjoy creating that mental collage!
Next week I really will get into the “bad husbands,” and how their values and their expectations lead to their “deaths of despair”. These stories are quite relevant in the 21st Century, when so many people, like these men, have become their own worst enemy.
