ABSTRACT
The formal means by which Trollope produces fictional complexity are both simple and unique. Trollope complicated the straightforward action of his main plots with disruptive subplots, for one thing, and, for another, he complicated the novels' moral implications through the reflections of his narrator's interventions, which, although reviled by many for being reductive, are actually qualified or even undermined by narrative events. Trollope's subplots always counter the main action rather than reinforce it, often parodying the moral or thematic lessons of the main plot by means of mirrored themes and motifs instead of through narrative action. These reversals make it very difficult to reduce the meaning of any particular novel to a single, noncontradictory moral position. Trollope developed his use of these subplots in increasingly sophisticated ways over the course of his career, and they eventually allowed him to conceal unorthodox ideas beneath the conventional surface of his narratives, as in his subtle but systematic championing of female independence in the later novels (a good example is the flattering treatment of the minor character Mrs. Hurtle in The Way We Live Now [1875]). Trollope's narrator, while intrusively moralistic, often intervenes to point out how wrong predictable judgments can be and how likely it is that his readers have already drawn the wrong conclusions-interventions that are themselves often qualified by later events in the novels. The effect of these techniques-subplot reversals and dramatized narratorial intervention-is to complicate readerly responses without necessarily overturning them. In this way, Trollope's narrative style both sustains traditions of formal realism and undermines them. As Walter Kendrick (1980) has put it, "The realized novel, for Trollope, is never a static structure to be contemplated or reflected upon. It is always dynamic, a process rather than an object." From being regarded as the naive victim of an outmoded realistic tradition, then, Trollope has lately come to be seen as a writer who sheds a great deal of light on realism's complex potentials and thus as someone who occupies an intriguing position between traditional and modern forms of the novel.
