Review: He Knew He Was Right
Feb. 6th, 2007 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zenithblueLast year I stumbled on some episode of BBC's Masterpiece Theater on PBS at three in the morning. It was during the last panic attack I had, one of the ones that wake me up. I used to get them all the time but they've slowed down to about one or two a year now. I know when they happen that I just have to get up and do something, and so I went to the front room and started flipping through channels trying desperately to find something besides an infomercial.
Lo and behold, here's this period costume drama. I watch for a while, trying to figure out what it is, thinking I know the standard Victorian fare. It has Bill Nighy in it, who is awesome, and the plot is really fascinating, sort of high and low all at once. Lots of scandal and gossip but also some serious Shakespearean jealousy and weird class consciousness and women's rights issues. I was so entranced I forgot how shitty I was feeling, but I could not figure out for the life of me what the book was. I finally had to look it up online: He Knew He Was Right, by Anthony Trollope. I'd never heard of it.
I ordered it on Amazon the next day. But it's taken almost a year for me to get around to reading it.
Lo and behold, here's this period costume drama. I watch for a while, trying to figure out what it is, thinking I know the standard Victorian fare. It has Bill Nighy in it, who is awesome, and the plot is really fascinating, sort of high and low all at once. Lots of scandal and gossip but also some serious Shakespearean jealousy and weird class consciousness and women's rights issues. I was so entranced I forgot how shitty I was feeling, but I could not figure out for the life of me what the book was. I finally had to look it up online: He Knew He Was Right, by Anthony Trollope. I'd never heard of it.
I ordered it on Amazon the next day. But it's taken almost a year for me to get around to reading it.
This is not the kind of book you recommend to a super-general audience. Weighing in at 900 pages, the thing is a doorstop, for one thing. Then, too, it’s quite Victorian; it takes place more often than not in parlors, drawing rooms, around whist tables, and in carriages. But I will say this: for the reader who is interested in the 19th century, for the reader with some love of Victoriana, He Knew He Was Right is the most intriguing study of gender relations in Victorian England that I have ever read.
The main plot concerns itself with Louis Trevelyan, an affluent middle-class Englishman who marries Emily Rowly, the daughter of the governor of the Mandarin Islands (a fictionalized tropical colony). Emily is beautiful and intelligent, every bit a lady, but her upbringing in the far reaches of the empire has rendered her ignorant of the nuances of London society. When she, with her sister Nora, accompanies Trevelyan home to England, at first all is bliss. Trevelyan and his wife have a lovely child and a lovely home. But when Emily encourages an intimate friendship with the dapper Colonel Osborne, the seeds of trouble are planted.
The book begins as a he-said-she-said misunderstanding between the man and wife. The fascinating part is that at first, neither of them are more to blame; it truly is a series of miscommunications. Trevelyan does not suspect his wife of infidelity, but is jealous of the affection given to the colonel, and also frustrated that she won’t blindly obey him. Emily makes a series of social blunders and plays passive aggressive games with her husband. But as the story evolves, something much darker emerges from what should have been an easily reconciled argument. Trevelyan’s need for dominance takes on a life of its own. As his obsession deepens, we see that what is at stake is not an improper friendship or a turf battle; it’s the very question of power. Trevelyan needs to be right. He needs submission, not feigned obedience or grudging respect but utter submission from his wife: “Had not his wife sworn to obey him, and was not her whole conduct one tissue of disobedience? Would not the man who submitted to this find himself driven to submit to things worse (362)?” The couple is separated, Emily unwilling to place herself beneath his shoe.
Of course things amplify to the point of Trevelyan's madness. Incapable of taking her back until she submits, he hires a private detective to watch her, kidnaps his own child from her, flees the country, and sinks into a morbid pit of despair and obsession. Drama-rama. I hung on every word of this book; Trollope is pretty standard out-of-the-box as far as Victorian prose stylings are concerned, but the plot and depth of his characterization are incredible. The willingness to really examine the subjectivities of each character makes him the closest precursor to James I have encountered.
Because it’s a Victorian novel there are a million subplots that weave in and out of the main narrative, and they would take a long time to unpack and explain. But the fascinating thing is in Trollope’s writing of women. Every last female character is in some way strong, willful, unwilling to submit. Several are spinsters because it suits them better to live proud and alone. Even the meekest of the women quietly goes ahead and decides to marry the man she’s forbidden to marry. There is an implicit criticism of the lack of women’s rights, even while there is an acceptance of certain elements of the status quo—by this I mean that Trollope is by no means a revolutionary, and accepts that given the nature of the world there will be inequality. But on the other hand there is inequality, and there is inequality, and the fact that a woman can have her child ripped away because her husband deems it for the best, or that a woman can be shuffled around from relative to relative only because her husband’s decided he won’t live with her, the fact that a woman is helpless to improve her own lot except through marriage...these are all facts that Trollope holds up for his reader.
It’s interesting, too, that Trollope introduces a subplot involving American women as well. I’d never thought of it before reading this (though it seems obvious now), but it brought home to me just how much the different class structures of Britain and America influenced each respective women’s movement. The British women in the novel are so much less concerned with having a political voice than the Americans. Trollope, I think, is more domestic than political in his emphasis. The power disparities he examines are less about people from far different walks of life occupying the same planet, but about people from the same basic class (albeit the relatively new and elastic middle class) trying to occupy the same household (and of course you can argue that the one is just a smaller version of the other).
Definitely pick this up, if you are at all inclined to find something cozy and harrowing and dramatic and also keenly intelligent, if you don't mind parlor drama. It's so worth the 900 pages.
The main plot concerns itself with Louis Trevelyan, an affluent middle-class Englishman who marries Emily Rowly, the daughter of the governor of the Mandarin Islands (a fictionalized tropical colony). Emily is beautiful and intelligent, every bit a lady, but her upbringing in the far reaches of the empire has rendered her ignorant of the nuances of London society. When she, with her sister Nora, accompanies Trevelyan home to England, at first all is bliss. Trevelyan and his wife have a lovely child and a lovely home. But when Emily encourages an intimate friendship with the dapper Colonel Osborne, the seeds of trouble are planted.
The book begins as a he-said-she-said misunderstanding between the man and wife. The fascinating part is that at first, neither of them are more to blame; it truly is a series of miscommunications. Trevelyan does not suspect his wife of infidelity, but is jealous of the affection given to the colonel, and also frustrated that she won’t blindly obey him. Emily makes a series of social blunders and plays passive aggressive games with her husband. But as the story evolves, something much darker emerges from what should have been an easily reconciled argument. Trevelyan’s need for dominance takes on a life of its own. As his obsession deepens, we see that what is at stake is not an improper friendship or a turf battle; it’s the very question of power. Trevelyan needs to be right. He needs submission, not feigned obedience or grudging respect but utter submission from his wife: “Had not his wife sworn to obey him, and was not her whole conduct one tissue of disobedience? Would not the man who submitted to this find himself driven to submit to things worse (362)?” The couple is separated, Emily unwilling to place herself beneath his shoe.
Of course things amplify to the point of Trevelyan's madness. Incapable of taking her back until she submits, he hires a private detective to watch her, kidnaps his own child from her, flees the country, and sinks into a morbid pit of despair and obsession. Drama-rama. I hung on every word of this book; Trollope is pretty standard out-of-the-box as far as Victorian prose stylings are concerned, but the plot and depth of his characterization are incredible. The willingness to really examine the subjectivities of each character makes him the closest precursor to James I have encountered.
Because it’s a Victorian novel there are a million subplots that weave in and out of the main narrative, and they would take a long time to unpack and explain. But the fascinating thing is in Trollope’s writing of women. Every last female character is in some way strong, willful, unwilling to submit. Several are spinsters because it suits them better to live proud and alone. Even the meekest of the women quietly goes ahead and decides to marry the man she’s forbidden to marry. There is an implicit criticism of the lack of women’s rights, even while there is an acceptance of certain elements of the status quo—by this I mean that Trollope is by no means a revolutionary, and accepts that given the nature of the world there will be inequality. But on the other hand there is inequality, and there is inequality, and the fact that a woman can have her child ripped away because her husband deems it for the best, or that a woman can be shuffled around from relative to relative only because her husband’s decided he won’t live with her, the fact that a woman is helpless to improve her own lot except through marriage...these are all facts that Trollope holds up for his reader.
It’s interesting, too, that Trollope introduces a subplot involving American women as well. I’d never thought of it before reading this (though it seems obvious now), but it brought home to me just how much the different class structures of Britain and America influenced each respective women’s movement. The British women in the novel are so much less concerned with having a political voice than the Americans. Trollope, I think, is more domestic than political in his emphasis. The power disparities he examines are less about people from far different walks of life occupying the same planet, but about people from the same basic class (albeit the relatively new and elastic middle class) trying to occupy the same household (and of course you can argue that the one is just a smaller version of the other).
Definitely pick this up, if you are at all inclined to find something cozy and harrowing and dramatic and also keenly intelligent, if you don't mind parlor drama. It's so worth the 900 pages.
