The Literary Sporting Gentleman

I'm nearly two hundred pages into Can You Forgive Her? now and it strikes me that Trollope is a determinedly masculine author.  Whereas Dickens and Eliot and Collins write in a style that transcends gender (at least I think so), and in terms that embrace both men and women at once, Trollope writes with an entrenched manliness that I find quite interesting.  First, there is the way he talks to the reader, as though from a position of authority, with a tone that is one part patronising and one part nudge-nudge-wink-wink chummy, as though he is envisioning an audience made up of on the one hand of women, whom he is instructing in opinions, and on the other of men, with whom he is sharing opinions.

Then there are the glimpses 'behind the scenes' in the life of an unattached young man of means, which I haven't come across before.  Trollope becomes a correspondent from the smoking room, a literary sporting gentlemen who writes about pursuits from which his female contemporaries were not only removed (as they were from much of professional life) but from which they were actively excluded.  So much so that reading his descriptions of George Vavasour's lifestyle - the 'Club', and the gambling den, and the scrabble of the Edgehill hunt - makes me feel voyeuristic. I feel as though I am peeking between the curtains into a hall of manliness that I could never have properly known; even if I had lived 150 years ago I would have inhabited an almost completely different world (although, of course, this would have been more or less determined by my class). 

But it is not just that he writes these scenes, it is the way he writes about them, like a passionate insider.  The Edgehill hunting chapter is a case in point: it begins with the meeting of horsemen and grooms in the field, and then follows the chase throughout the day, recording each wood, ditch and hedge with a breathless enthusiasm.  It is quite clearly the work of a man who hunts, and of a man who hunts frequently.  The endnotes in my addition tell me that Trollope fits that bill, and even points out that one of the Edgehill men, Pollock, who drops from the chase because he is carrying too much weight for his horse, may be loosely modelled on him.  Women, who make up so much of the novel, have almost no role in this section.  The narrator tells us that Edgehill is not a 'women's hunt' and that, although a few women have gathered in the lane in chaise and waggonettes, they are very rarely present.  The whole thing is pure testosterone.

In other news I have had a very welcome email from Henry Holt about the cover art for A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World.   My ARC has a dreadful frontage.  So bad, in fact, that my work colleagues have mocked it (and me) mercilessly.  But I'm told that it will be changing before publication (perhaps because of all the negative feedback from ARC holders!) and I think you'll agree that the new design does look a thousand times better.  You can see it here (because for some reason it won't format properly into Typepad).

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Amber]

As always, I both much enjoy and appreciate your entries. In this case, you made me realize perhaps another facet of why I don't enjoy Trollope - stylistically he has always put me off, but maybe another reason I always felt so distant from him as a reader is because of what you mentioned above. Hmmm...thank you!

[Amateur Reader]

The "young men at play" scenes are actually fairly common in Dickens - see "Nicholas Nickleby" for examples - and are everywhere in Balzac, maybe a little too common there. So Trollope in part of a tradition here.

Your comments about Trollope's maculinity are right, I think, and pretty interesting. It's all impressionstic, but I roughly agree. Scott is masculine, too. Dickens and Stendahl are polymorphous - probably a reason they're more universal authors. George Meredith, at least in "The Egoist", seems feminine.