ABSTRACT
At the opening of his 1870 lecture “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement,” Anthony Trollope told his audience that “A man must, I think, have but a sorry existence upon whose bosom is forced a conviction that he gets his bread by doing evil and not good in the world” ( Four Lectures 94). Trollope is speaking in defense of his own profession as a novelist, but the claim is one that pervades his fiction in his treatment of men in all walks of life. The belief expressed in that moment is significant to my discussion of masculinity in Trollope mainly for two reasons. First, it suggests that a man’s own feelings , rather than any rules or customs external to himself, are his best and truest guide to his behavior. And second, it is inclusive of all men, regardless of class, age, education, religion, or any other mode of categorization. My aim in this essay is to show that for Trollope, a man is defined first and foremost by what he feels, and only secondarily by what he does. Or rather, what a man does is less worth noting, for Trollope, than the feelings that led him to do it. In this way, Trollope was writing what I call conduct book fiction for men, in which men are encouraged to examine and sort out their own feelings and act according to their dictates before all else; at the bottom of this we always find the position indicated by the above quotation, that no man who follows his less noble impulses can ever be contented. Trollope’s men are not divided into those who would never dream of behaving badly and those who choose not to behave well, thus giving readers an easy choice of whom to emulate; instead Trollope takes us deep into the process by which men who explore their feelings arrive at courses of behavior.
