ABSTRACT
This essay investigates how Anthony Trollope’s fictional world-making employs representations of feelings about the self and others as construction materials. To a degree unusual among his Victorian peers, Trollope’s fictive places and persons come to life in the mind of the reader within a matrix of emotions. Among the core affects of narrativity, curiosity, surprise, and suspense, Trollope privileges curiosity as a driver of his plots, but he answers narrative enigmas almost as fast as they arise. Trollope’s narrator’s avuncular voice reassures the reader – this is the way the world works – never troubling us with too much suspense, avoiding shocks, and consoling us that any curiosity aroused by the conundrums of the characters will soon be resolved. With Trollope as a guide readers can pleasurably surrender to the representation of others’ feelings. I employ the tools of rhetorical narrative theory of fictional minds 1 and cognitive narratology 2 to investigate Trollope’s methods, specifically his use of narrated monologue (free indirect discourse) and psycho-narration (thought report) for revealing characters’ feelings from the inside, and his use of externalized narration (behaviorist or objective narrative) and intermental thought (communal views) to invite readers’ participation in assessing those characters’ feelings. It may seem perverse to delve into the narrative techniques of a writer who is sometimes regarded as lacking a consistent or rigorous manner of world-making. 3 Cognitive narratology helps reveal the sources of Trollope’s affective accomplishment, first described in detail by Henry James, to whose critique and appreciation of Trollope this essay returns in conclusion. 4
Trollope’s novel titles convey his commitments to his characters and their feelings. Thirty of his novels are named for characters or their roles (e.g., Rachel Ray [1863]; The American Senator [1877]). Six have catchphrases as titles, half of which evoke emotionally fraught situations: Can You Forgive Her? (1864-65); He Knew He Was Right (1869), and An Eye for an Eye (1879). Ten novels bear the names of places. Trollope’s Barsetshire, an enduring country of the mind, is chronicled in novels named for people ( The Warden [1855] and Doctor Thorne [1858]) and places: cathedral towns, a parsonage, a small house, and a county. This emphasis inclines readers to the view that Trollope creates memorable settings, as Juliet McMaster demonstrates in her readings of the emblematic valences of the settings and the allegorical uses of locations in the Palliser novels. When he describes, McMaster observes, Trollope is often “painstaking rather than vivid,” or diagrammatic in his precision about properties (182). Still, detailed depiction of places and spaces is rare in the pages of Trollope’s fiction. If a major use of fictional worlds is the replacement of the world of the reader with an alternative realm of story, Trollope’s fictional worlds are
constructed not so much out of realized spaces as out of the imagined beings that populate them and their behavior, thoughts, motives, and feelings, and their speculations about one another’s feelings. Orley Farm (1860-61) contains within a novel named for a place Trollope’s meditation on the limits of reliable knowledge about selves and the promiscuity of people’s feelings about the motives of others.
