Dear Serial Readers,
Yes, as Maura suggests, it seems like Amelia R. is being squeezed out, or rather, she's supplied just a side-dish interest. But she's bound to return. Another Trollopian (also a Medievalist, like one of our current bloggers) who's not reading with us now, but knows this novel, commented to me the other day about Trollope's extraordinary talent with grayness, especially in the realm of men (and even has one character suitably named John Gray in the Palliser series)--that is, grayness in terms of morally and socially (class position) in-between--perhaps even in terms of gender as well, at least the hobbledehoy boys who are not your Christian muscular vintage of masculinity. Perhaps there's some connection between ordinariness and grayness here.
After my comment last week about all the pages devoted to the unmaking of Lily's marriage plot, I thought how there is so much more energy devoted not to marrying, but to the undoing of engagements and potential marriages, if not to the marriages themselves. Do you think Dickens typically devotes so much space to unmaking marriage plots?
That said, this installment exhibits lots of exuberance on the part of senior men (especially the earl and the squire--who NOW considers pitching in some funds for Lily's settlement this time around after refusing Crosbie--live and learn) around Johnny and Lily! I love this part, the male biddies, or the chief biddy, Earl De Guest, who has taken up Eames's suit and Lily's redemption through this marriage plot. Worrying about marrying off daughters and nieces usually seems the province of women, like Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. So I loved the scheming commitment of the earl to cementing the tie between J and L.
On the other hand, there's attention to not just unmaking (or remaking) marriage plots, but to the fall out of marriage entirely. In a brief exchange, the earl and the squire admit that "the time" of marriage "has never come to you and me"--and the narrator alludes to their respective disappointments in love long ago. But rather than the pathetic old maid figure, we get something different: "We have retricked our beams in our own ways, and our lives have not been desolate." What about the possibility of an unmarried elderly female character who has "retricked her beams"? I don't think we have much evidence along these lines in this novel, but perhaps elsewhere in Trollope. Or can widows "retrick" their beams?
Next week, chapters 34-36.
Serially supposing,
Susan
2 comments:
I was fascinated this week by the duality of Lily's life following the jilt from Crosbie. Time and again we see the externally stoic Lily (who "stood up as a tree that stands against the wind") masking an internally raw Lily (the "wounded fawn," p. 304). It's also interesting that there's no proper way, it seems, for the characters to interact with Lily after this catastrophic event (just as there's no proper way to respond to Crosbie). Trollope captures the problematic nature of her situation so aptly with his analogy to a fall in the gutter on a wet day: "did you not find that the sympathy of the bystanders was by far the severest part of your misfortune? Did you not declare to yourself that all might yet be well if the people would only walk on and not look at you? And yet you cannot blame those who stood and pitied you; or, perhaps, essayed to rub you down, and assist you in the recovery of your bedaubed hat" (311). Similarly, any response to Lily's misfortune seems to have its drawbacks.
Lily's pained response to the sympathy of others (described at one point as "shrinking from the finger that threatened to touch her sore," p. 312) makes me wary of a happy marriage plot coming out of the schemings of Squire Dale, Earl de Guest, and Johnny Eames. At the same time, it does seem like a perfect solution to the problem...
Like Susan, I enjoyed the men conniving to match Eames up with Lily, and I also appreciated them thinking about not going too fast--well, all but DeGuest, who is in quite a hurry. I think it matters a lot that another senior landed man requests that Dale settle some money on Lily, and that makes it much more likely to happen, though Dale hasn't committed yet. I also was delighted by Lady Julia's interest in this match and the futures of Eames and Lily. It seems to me that often in such circumstances the old biddies have a match all wrong, but in this case I suspect they don't.
I wonder what a pickled orange tastes like, which Johnny is eating as he tastes the wonderful '20 port. Is it more vinegary or more candied? It takes me back to the homey cabinet in Drood.
I also was struck by Lily's duality, and the duality of the title, with the chapter still linking Lily and Crosbie, and though she is explicitly the "wounded fawn" he and his suffering are included in the same chapter. Will the novel ever set Lily free from Crosbie? I find I don't really care that he suffers for his choice; I'm satisfied to have heard it once or twice and now to leave him behind!
But we do see his grey, and the grey in the men in particular, it seems to me.
I'm starting to think that Bell will never be a very full character in this novel.
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