ABSTRACT
There is a wide critical consensus that Anthony Trollope was anti-Semitic and that his later novels especially are notable for the ugliness of their anti-Semitism. 1 This view has its roots in the assumption that Trollope was a conservative whose views either never changed or became more reactionary as he got older and in the anxiety of critics to condemn Trollope for anti-Semitism in order to establish their own purity. Yet the argument that Trollope was anti-Semitic has been built almost entirely upon one novel, The Way We Live Now (1875), and almost entirely upon the portrayal of one character (Augustus Melmotte) in that novel – a narrow foundation that is unfortunately in keeping with a consistent critical tendency to make sweeping statements about all of Trollope’s works based on a few of them. 2 The critical condemnation of Trollope as an anti-Semite has also rested upon an assumption that Trollope’s narrative technique is uni-layered and that all quotations from his novels can therefore be taken at face value, despite a growing body of scholarship that suggests Trollope’s narrative technique is in fact complex and embodies a moral relativism. 3 More troublingly, in making their case that Trollope was anti-Semitic, critics have leaned upon an implicit definition of “the Jew” as male. Further, critics have assumed that the Victorians constructed Judaism exclusively in terms of race without regard to religion; this critical reluctance to deal with Victorian religiosity, for fear of being thought religious, has served to elide discussion of the relations between racism and religious belief. In fact, Trollope’s Christian Protestant views undercut his own attempts to deconstruct prejudice, but if we reconsider The Way We Live Now in light of the sophistication of its narrative technique and include in our consideration the novel’s portrayal of multiple characters, including female ones, we can see that the novel also satirizes anti-Semitism and deconstructs “the Jew” as a male racial Other in order to argue for greater tolerance of both religious conviction and female independence.
