I've been reading Trollope's Palliser novels again -- my third or fourth time through this series of six great big whoppers. It's a familiar tour -- but with enough forgettings and misrememberings on my part to keep me focussed and surprised.
I finished The Eustace Diamonds late last night. I know that I read this novel for the first time in 1961 because it was in the curriculum of a course taught by showman Professor Edgar Rosenberg. I haven't the siightest recollection of that early reading or of Rosenberg's lectures either, but then, sixty years have gone by and larger and larger cavities riddle my porous Swiss cheese brain.
The Eustace Diamonds is rich in both plot and character. In addition to the usual "who is going to marry whom" scenario (three separate instances here) and still another version of the handsome but weak hero who is going to the dogs but redeems himself in the last installment, there's a genuine cops-and-robbers mystery along with three separate detectives (none of them as competent as Mr. Bucket). And then there's also a riotous profusion of characters. Some, like Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Mealyus, products of Trollope's uncontrollable disgust with those nasty Semites, merely disfigure the page. Others are stock characters who appear in novel after novel, the name alone changed: in this case the the patient Griselda figure Lucy Morris. But then there's a glorious almost Dickensian abundance of highly-marked, genuinely individualized and extremely imaginative, credible inventions.
There's Lizzie Eustace, with her fibs, taradiddles and utterly conscienceless lies; George de Bruce Carruthers, who has an eye for the main chance but knows how to protect himself against pretty women; elderly Lady Linlithgow, who's all tart tongue and selfishness; Lord Fawn, a pitiful small-minded aristocrat; and the bustling opportunistic hypocrite Mrs. Carbuncle.
And then there's Lucinda Roanoke, who inhabits a corner of the novel but who is fascinatingly perverse. She's an American, very young and handsome, impecunious, who's being shopped around to snare a husband. Under pressure, and against all good sense, she accepts an offer from the brute Sir Griffin Tewett. Lucinda has no intention of becoming an obedient wife. The engagement becomes a war of attrition between the "lovers." Sir Griffin holds on only because, it appears, he doesn't like to lose and because he assumes that he'll be able to control Lucinda once he's married and has legal authority over her. He looks forward to the only sort of sex that might occur, which woud be nothing less than rape. Lucinda is sex-averse and finds even a kiss to be abhorrent. As the wedding day approaches, she announces that she will never be Sir Griffin's bride. She threatens both murder and suicide. On the morning of the long anticipated day, she simply refuses to leave her room. Trollope tells us that she has gone mad. And that's the end of the affair.
Lucinda doesn't quite fit into the space. On the surface, the episode makes the point that women were offered no place in society except obedient wife. But this is not comedy of manners; it's pathology. Sir Griffin is a sadistic monster. Lucinda does not want to submit, and therefore "chooses" insanity. Trollope does not follow Lucinda into her madness; instead, he dismisses her from his novel in exactly the same way that the English society dismisses such women. Trollope can't make a drop of sense out of the situation that he himself created. Lucinda deserves, and will earn, a novel of her own. But it won't be written by Anthony Trollope.
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