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A review by jonathanhonnor
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
It has taken me a while to finally come to see the reason why Trollope ascribed his later creative success to his unhappy childhood in his Autobiography, but it is a fact very much hiding in plain sight and revealed by the most famous character in his "greatest" novel -- Augustus Melmotte. Although there are many great characters in this novel for whom Trollope's close empathy and sensitivity is obvious -- the women, particularly, such as the Amazonian but tender Mrs Hurtle, the petty and desperate but sympathetic Georgiana Longstaffe, the unfortunate Marie Melmotte are all well done -- it is nevertheless Augustus Melmotte who dominates, who is at once a monstrous caricature and yet whose subjectivity is so surprisingly strong and leads to some of the most successful and memorable moments of the novel. I am thinking particularly of such imaginatively realistic details as Melmotte's methodical calmness after his fraud is first exposed publicly, the prose detailing every step he takes precisely as though bubbling with his anxiety, or how the particular thought of the Parable of the Unjust Steward and his regret that he had not "made friends to himself of the Mammon of unrighteousness" crops up, which is such an ingeniously specific and complex detail. It's also revealed specifically by chapters like 'Melmotte in Parliament' -- which is so revealingly reminiscent of a similar chapter in Phineas Finn when Finn first tries to speak in Parliament and has the intensity of an anxiety dream (all of the characters with whom Trollope seems most closely to identify are very anxious to get into Parliament and, like him, are not always successful in their careers).
The surprising aspect of Melmotte then is that Trollope seems to see so much of himself in Melmotte -- the monstrous caricature who represents so much that he despises: gross "commercial profligacy", the ugly disrespect of the New World for the tradition and beauty of the Old, meanness, self-seeking egotism and fraud. I am not alone in this assertion that Trollope has such sympathy for what he despises: Robin Gilmour calls it the "central paradox of Trollope's fiction -- that of all Victorian novelists he has the most intimate knowledge of, and respect for, the norms that hold society together, and yet is drawn again and again to the creation of characters who flout and transgress these norms. The loneliness of the outsider deeply interests him". Perhaps, looking over his oeuvre, you can begin to see a pattern among some of his most memorable characters: Mr Slope in Barchester Towers and Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister (even Phineas Finn and Francis Oliphant Tregear are heroic (in)versions of this type). They are all social climbers who are alien outsiders to the world that they are attempting to join, or, in Melmotte's case, to conquer.
Perhaps much of the creative impulse then inevitably does come back to his unhappy life at Harrow and Winchester for Trollope, where he appears to have felt isolated by his own father's poverty in contrast to the wealthier boys around him. There is much at this age that may be unconsciously formative in ways that are difficult to come to terms with later in life. Like Dickens, perhaps, this seems to have influenced later fixations on money and productivity through their art as a means of trying not to repeat the unhappiness of their poor childhoods. But further for Trollope it seems to have produced a sense of being an impostor and concomitant self-hatred, along with the ambivalence that feeling oneself an outsider to a particular group produces: desire to critique the group balanced with an equally intense desire to belong to it. Melmotte is his cathartic revenge against the inane aristocrats who populate the London clubs, an alter ego who acts, for a time, as an impostor among them and a scourge upon them, although one who, like Shylock, must be scapegoated by the conscious mind with a tragic end, so that all the other players in the drama may pair off in marriages in their own comic endings. But Melmotte, as a kind of artist in his own right, nevertheless lives on, as he himself remembers: "non omnis moriar"...
The surprising aspect of Melmotte then is that Trollope seems to see so much of himself in Melmotte -- the monstrous caricature who represents so much that he despises: gross "commercial profligacy", the ugly disrespect of the New World for the tradition and beauty of the Old, meanness, self-seeking egotism and fraud. I am not alone in this assertion that Trollope has such sympathy for what he despises: Robin Gilmour calls it the "central paradox of Trollope's fiction -- that of all Victorian novelists he has the most intimate knowledge of, and respect for, the norms that hold society together, and yet is drawn again and again to the creation of characters who flout and transgress these norms. The loneliness of the outsider deeply interests him". Perhaps, looking over his oeuvre, you can begin to see a pattern among some of his most memorable characters: Mr Slope in Barchester Towers and Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister (even Phineas Finn and Francis Oliphant Tregear are heroic (in)versions of this type). They are all social climbers who are alien outsiders to the world that they are attempting to join, or, in Melmotte's case, to conquer.
Perhaps much of the creative impulse then inevitably does come back to his unhappy life at Harrow and Winchester for Trollope, where he appears to have felt isolated by his own father's poverty in contrast to the wealthier boys around him. There is much at this age that may be unconsciously formative in ways that are difficult to come to terms with later in life. Like Dickens, perhaps, this seems to have influenced later fixations on money and productivity through their art as a means of trying not to repeat the unhappiness of their poor childhoods. But further for Trollope it seems to have produced a sense of being an impostor and concomitant self-hatred, along with the ambivalence that feeling oneself an outsider to a particular group produces: desire to critique the group balanced with an equally intense desire to belong to it. Melmotte is his cathartic revenge against the inane aristocrats who populate the London clubs, an alter ego who acts, for a time, as an impostor among them and a scourge upon them, although one who, like Shylock, must be scapegoated by the conscious mind with a tragic end, so that all the other players in the drama may pair off in marriages in their own comic endings. But Melmotte, as a kind of artist in his own right, nevertheless lives on, as he himself remembers: "non omnis moriar"...