Dear Serial Readers,
Thanks Julia for your perspective in light of your happiness and virtue conference! I also wanted to share an insight I had about this novel while hearing a wonderful lecture last week on "Global Trollope" by Trollope scholar Mark Turner. He stressed how transitoriness is crucial in Trollope's serials, just as Trollope himself was frequently in motion through his travels for the postal service as he traversed both local and global networks. Movement in Trollope, Mark Turner explained, is about spread and diffusion rather than cohesion.
This very observation makes me think of the eponymous "Small House," now the site of emptying and evacuation as its inhabitans move elsewhere. The chapter about the Dale women packing up their house gives a very different kind of inventory of household goods than, say, Alexandrina shopping for carpets in London. And Trollope stresses the class difference here when the narrator points out that often the labor of relocating falls to others offstage, presumably servants and other hired help, while the family "goes for a fortnight to Brighton" and then on return finds the crockery installed in new cupboards. Household objects pass through the hands of the Dale women in this chapter--a very tangible emptying out of the once-central "Small House." At first I'm tempted to align this emptying out of the house with the emptying out of the marriage plot for Lily, since the two seem entwined, and Lily also declines the invitation to Guestwick Manor, thus thwarting the plan to unite her with Johnny Eames. But this first chapter also, without fanfare, marks Bell's engagement to Dr. Crofts.
I admit I'm fond of the Roper establishment in London as a kind of "low" comic relief to the Barsetshire small and great houses. The all-service "little back room behind the dining parlor" and across from the kitchen stairs functions as the closet space where the only private encounters can occur. I found this cramped room balanced well the opening scene of packing up and moving on from the Small House. This episode begins with the Dale women making plans to relocate, and closes with Johnny doing the same--so yes, transitoriness, diffusions, departures rather than anchored and secure locales.
Next week, #18, chaps 52-54. Only two more after that! What's next? I read somewhere that Trollope considered The Last Chronicle of Barset his best novel. It's available in a Penguin edition, and also via Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3045
Or should we return to Dickens, this time, Little Dorrit? I get the sense that Romola is off the list. Any others?
Serially yours, for more serials,
Susan
1 comment:
I enjoyed Susan and Julia's connections to their scholarly activities; and reading Susan's entry, I realized this section of the novel connects to the talk I heard yesterday about unpaid labor and how it should be included as we think about GDP. Nancy Folbre defined "work" as anything you could pay someone to do, and it's intriguing that Trollope recognized the value of the labor that the Dale women do, and the fact that some can now pay others to do it while most people need to do it themselves. Folbre showed us that in the 1860s in a British census, women worked at home for no pay were classified as workers, but by around 1900 they were classified as dependents.
I find myself a little bemused that Lily will take years to get over her great 3-week love, but I guess I understand it in a context where one really does only expect to love once.
I heard Lupex's words in last week's reading as angling for a commission now that Eames has friends who can afford portraits. Yet I'd like to think that Trollope is willing to use less attractive characters to voice truths--Lupex could be angling for a commission and be voicing good truths. And I feel quite sure that happiness follows virtue in Dickens, but much less sure of that in Trollope!
My vote is for Little Dorritt or Romola or Wives and Daughters. I want to sit down with The Last Chronicle of Barset as early summer break reading! All at once!
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