Can You Forgive Her? (2 page)

Although Trollope provides
some descriptions of Alice’s temperament and suggests some of the factors by which she has been conditioned, it is important to pay as much, if not more, attention to what is dramatically shown as to what is analytically asserted. ’How am I to analyse her mind, and make her thoughts and feelings intelligible?’ Trollope exclaims in
chapter 37
– as if he felt he lacked the vocabulary to describe
adequately the internal conflict he envisages so clearly. At any rate, it becomes plain early on that as soon as Alice makes a decision she feels trapped by it Her engagement to John Grey is so eminently satisfactory – not least because she really is attracted by him – that she feels a perverse necessity to resist it. The factors involved in this recalcitrance are various and – as is so often the
case in Trollope’s most sensitive portrayals – the motives behind it are not only mixed but inconsistent. One source of resentment against the admirable Grey is
the feeling that he is too admirable. His reply to her letter announcing her proposed trip to Switzerland in the company of her cousin George could not be more proper – ‘she knew that he was noble and a gentleman to the last drop of his
blood’ – but in Alice ‘there was almost a feeling of disappointment’ that he has behaved so correctly (
chapter 3
). During the scene between them in
chapter 11
, which takes place after she has asked to be released from her engagement, Alice wishes that Grey’s self-control were not so great; she is equally infuriated and mortified by his composure in
chapter 63
. All the same, his assumption of mastery,
even his imperturbability, also attract her, and eventually in Switzerland she has to give in to their sustained pressure.

Another apparent source of dissatisfaction is Grey’s quietism. The noiseless tenor of a country life near Cambridge is not what Alice thinks she wants – even though her present life in London, with a father who takes little interest in and spends little time with her, could
in effect hardly be more retired. And she dislikes Grey’s assumption that his life will suit her, just as she resents the conventional social judgement that it ought to suit her. She has the understandable feeling that her individuality is not being acknowledged. It is not a question of woman’s rights, however. Trol-lope brings up the question only to put it on one side: a ‘flock of learned ladies’,
bold enough to ask the question what should a woman do with her life, are alluded to briefly in
chapter 11
, but a consciously adopted feminist position is not an effective element in Alice’s motivation. Her feeling that she would like to identify herself with a cause, her willingness to support the career of George Vavasor, are as much symptoms of self-negation as of self-assertion. Apart from
a general inclination towards Radicalism, the most obviously militant force in the established politics of the period, she does not seem to spend her abundant leisure in the serious study of public issues and events; it is more given over to morbid self-analysis. When she is introduced to the world of wealth and power at Matching Priory, she is too socially inhibited to make very much of an opportunity
that a more committed woman would surely have grasped – although she stands up to Palliser vigorously enough when her integrity is impugned.

Part of Alice’s difficulties come from her tendency to be attracted by possibilities which frighten her when they threaten to become realities. Her restlessness and what she diagnoses as frustrated ambition easily attach themselves to George Vavasor, whose
energy and aggressiveness she is encouraged by his sister Kate to see as part of a heroic struggle to make his way in the world. But when George, not unreasonably, wants from Alice some sign that her renewal of her engagement to him means a revival of her physical feelings towards him, he is refused it. The latent sense of violence which George carries about with him (and of which his facial scar
is the rather obvious signification) excites Alice as long as it remains latent, but it horrifies her when it surfaces into his attack on her in
chapter 46
. One is bound to wonder whether Alice’s troubles are partly due to sexual timidity and an instinct for self-preservation. Grey over-awes her physically: It was the beauty of his mouth, beauty which comprised firmness within itself, that made
Alice afraid of him’ (
chapter 11
). However, she feels something like panic when she contemplates the physical relationship with George that she finds herself committed to:

Was she able to give herself bodily, – body and soul, as she said aloud in her solitary agony, – to a man she did not love? Must she submit to his caresses, lie on his bosom, – turn herself warmly to his kisses? ‘No,’ she said,
‘no,’ – speaking audibly as she walked about the room; ‘no; – it was not in my bargain: I never meant it’ [
Chapter 37
]

She is perfectly prepared to let George have her money as long as he doesn’t touch her, as indeed a substitute for touching her. Given the conventions of fiction in his day, and given too the innate delicacy of his own mind, Trollope cannot be very explicit about such things,
but the ungovernable attractions and repulsions of sexual feeling operate powerfully in his novels, even if actual references to them are often as restrained as they are in these passages.

Alice’s tendency to shrink from experience is partly rationalized (as we might now say) by her tendency to self-punishment It is as if she ‘pays’ for her independence by self-accusation. Going
back to Grey
after the Vavasor episode is even more difficult for her than throwing him over in the first place, because she will be making herself happy in a way that she feels she does not deserve. As her reflections recorded in
chapter 70
indicate, the initial argument that she was not fit for Grey must apply even more when she has added the insult of her engagement to George to the insult of jilting him.
But her motives for resisting Grey for so long are, as usual, mixed and confused, as Trollope makes clear in one of his more searching pieces of analysis:

But there still clung to her what I fear we must call a perverseness of obstinacy, a desire to maintain the resolution she had made, – a wish that she might be allowed to undergo the punishment she had deserved. She was as a prisoner who would
fain cling to his prison after pardon has reached him, because he is conscious that the pardon is undeserved. And it may be that there was still left within her bosom some remnant of that feeling of rebellion which his masterful spirit had ever produced in her. He was so imperious in his tranquillity, he argued his question of love with such a manifest preponderance of right on his side, that
she had always felt that to yield to him would be to confess the omnipotence of his power. [
Chapter 74
]

As Trollope dryly concludes a few pages later, Alice grudgingly regarded her final happiness as an ‘enforced necessity’.

The place where Alice first rebels against Grey is the balcony of the hotel at Basle, and she capitulates to him at the same place (
chapters 5
and
75
). It is when she is
on her Swiss holiday with George and Kate Vavasor and later when she stays at the Vavasor home in the Lake District that Alice feels the appeal of romance, an appeal which is not exerted by the idea of domesticity with John Grey amidst the boring countryside of Cambridgeshire, in Trollope’s roundly expressed view (
chapter 10
) the least attractive county in England. What she has to come round to
is the idea that George’s ‘romance’ is a specious and self-interested imitation and that underneath the gentlemanly decorum of Grey’s manner lurks the real thing. George is prepared to exploit the romantic tendencies in Alice and in his sister but he has no belief in any mode of conduct that is not purely opportunist; John Grey seems
stuffy, but his constancy and honourableness are in reality
deeply chivalrous. Trollope’s use of the Swiss settings to underline the fact that in the end he is the more romantic of the two lovers shows a care and consistency in the use of landscape that is not always present in his novels (although apparent in the Highland scenery of another of the ‘political’ novels, Phineas Finn).

But
Can You Forgive Her?
is in general one of Trollope’s most coherently
organized novels. In a book like
The Last
Chronicle of
Barset
(written two years later) the relation between the Barset parts of the book and its London scenes is only of a tenuous and nominal kind, and a critic has to work very hard to connect the-matically the two areas of the book with any plausibility. The integration of different but concurrent plots into some sort of ‘organic’ unity may
not be as necessary for artistic success as the modern criticism of Victorian fiction often presupposes, but the interrelation of the three stories in
Can You Forgive Her?
is too obvious to miss. The way in which Alice Vavasor hovers between male alternatives is clearly paralleled by the difficulty of Mrs Greenow in deciding whether to prefer Mr Cheesacre or Captain Bellfield, and by the temptation
to desert her husband offered to Lady Glencora by Burgo Fitzgerald.

The parallelism of the three situations may soothe those who like a novel to have pattern, but the natures of the cases vary enough to make the discrepancies between them more important to the actual life of the book than the similarities. The dilemmas of Alice, Glencora, and Aunt Greenow partly differ simply because one is unmarried,
the second is a wife, and the third a widow. Of course, Mrs Greenow is presented in a comic light to which the other two are not exposed. In the
Autobiography
Trollope speaks of her as being ‘very good fun’, adding rather cryptically, ‘as far as the fun of novels is’. Unlike Alice and Glencora, she finally chooses the more unsound of her two suitors, but then as a wealthy widow she can afford
to please herself. She also realizes that a practical woman who knows that life rarely begins at forty might as well secure a bit of dash while she can. Although the Greenow part of the book is, from one point of view, a burlesque variant on the serious dramas played out elsewhere in its pages,
Trollope can keep it going longer than many readers may feel is necessary because he feels no contempt
for the actors involved. The charm of the woman was in this, – that she was not in the least ashamed of anything that she did’ (
chapter 7
). Aunt Greenow’s patent enjoyment of her money, her disingenuous exploitation of her mourning and absurd invocations to her departed lord, her adroit manipulation of others and the general vulgarity of her style add up to a kind of vitality that makes tolerable
what would otherwise have been a tedious distraction from what is important in the book.

And what is really important in
Can You Forgive Her?
is the situation of the Pallisers. Our sense of Lady Glencora’s nature is certainly sharpened by the continual contrast between her candour and Alice’s reticence, between her volatile spontaneity and Alice’s enclosed self-consciousness, between her provocations
and Alice’s correctness. But although he often draws our attention to the comparisons to be made between the two women Trollope’s presentation of Glencora’s personality has from the first a remarkably independent life. By the end of the drive between the station and Matching, when Glencora is first introduced and chatters away so incessantly (
chapter 22
), Trollope has already indicated many of
the main elements in her character. Alice herself hardly knows what to make of such a mixture of precociousness and immaturity, vivacity and underlying melancholy, principles and irreverence. Glencora fastens on Alice because – married against her will to Plantagenet Palliser and still in love with Burgo Fitzgerald – she needs a friend to keep her straight and she needs someone to love who will love
her in return. One of Glencora’s difficulties – which here leads her to the brink of the tragedy which Henry James criticized Trollope for baulking and which recurs in the novels which trace her later career – is that she wants to be loved with the kind of reckless demonstrativeness that is natural to her own temperament. She has to learn to be satisfied with the inarticulate devotion which Palliser
discovers in himself and which he can never quite forgive Glencora for arousing. Her affection for Alice has an element of unscrupulousness: she loves her for her own purposes. When she says to Alice, at the end of
chapter
25
, ”Someone’s love I must have found, – or I could not have remained here’, it is both a tribute to Alice’s friendship, and an indication that another equally well-disposed
person might have done equally well.

Glencora’s vulnerability and her resentment at having been bullied into a false position breed in her a certain ruthlessness which she applies as much to herself as to others. The scene in the Priory Ruins (
chapter 27
) is remarkable not only for the self-knowledge that Glencora there shows, but for the harshness of the judgements she passes on herself:

Alice,
look here. I know what I am, and what I am like to become. I loathe myself, and I loathe the thing that I am thinking of. I could have clung to the outside of a man’s body, to his very trappings, and loved him ten times better than myself! – ay, even though he had ill-treated me, – if I had been allowed to choose a husband for myself. Burgo would have spent all my money, – all that it would have
been possible for me to give him. But there would have been something left, and I think that by that time I could have won even him to care for me. But with that man –.

It is hard not to sympathize with Glencora’s feeling that an irreparable wrong has been done to her when it is supported by such a shrewd assessment of Burgo’s character and by such economic realism. The ruins at Matching in which
this scene takes place stand, for Glencora, for the suggestion of romance which makes Alice shiver at Basle, but despite the cold which she is said to have caught there her powers of resilience are much greater than her cousin’s.

It is her sense of things as they really are – in which, for all her childishness, she is so much more mature than her husband – that stops Glencora’s
Bovaryisme
from
getting out of hand. Persecuted by Mrs Marsham and Mr Bott (whose characters she reads with more penetration than Palliser does), Glencora may console herself with fantasies about being on a marble balcony in Italy with Burgo (
chapter 43
), but her conduct on the crucial evening at Lady Monk’s party has a sanity which her former lover loses all sight of. Unlike Burgo, she does not forget where
she is or who is watching them when they dance together, even if she would like to. His
insistence that the old days of their love-affair must return recalls her to reality in a way that Trollope records with great simplicity: