ABSTRACT
In “Mary Gresley” and Sir Harry Hotspur, Trollope creates female protagonists who internalize the Law of the Father to a fanatical degree. Such strict adherence to Victorian duty leads to young women’s deaths-in the short story the death of a promising novelist (as well as charming potential wife and mother) and in the novella of an accomplished, beautiful, and right-minded potential wife and mother. Trollope exposes in “Mary Gresley” the role that provincial, unexamined religious tenets play in shaping womanly duty into sterile sacrifice, and in Sir Harry Hotspur he savages the pernicious influence of class and gender historiography on mate selection. From a perspective informed by 30-some years of the latest wave of feminist thinking, we conclude that Trollope means to show the dire effects of strict Victorian propriety on the best of young womanhood. If Sir Harry Hotspur and “Mary Gresley” may be taken as representative of Trollope’s later short works, we can be justified in asserting that Trollope in and around 1870 delivers a radical critique of the great machines of History and Religion, both of which grind up promising women. The argument, however, becomes complicated; in regard to the fates of young women intent on offering themselves up as sacrifices, Trollope both emphasizes the young women’s resistance to the uses made of them by men and appears to condemn them along with the cultural apparati that destroy them, at the same time that he presents them as rebelling into death to escape their burden of obedience.
