Can You Forgive Her? Read Free

underline in a less orthodox but no less rigorous way the remorseless moral consequencesof wrong actions, as George Eliot might have done. Alice is really let off very lightly: apart from a few lectures from Lady Midlothian and some other tickings-off, she is rewarded in the end for her errors by a husband who comes round to doing the very thing that he earlier enraged her by refusing to consider. John Grey stands for Parliament – and under much more favourable auspices than were everavailable to George Vavasor. However, what happens to Alice
in the end
is not what interests Trollope most; indeed, the final chapters of many of his novels are as predictable, and one might almost say asperfunctory, as they are in this case. What, surely, kept Alice’s situation in Trollope’s mind for so long was not the way in which she finally resolved her dilemma, but what it was in her naturethat precipitated it.
    Like an interestingly large number of Trollope’s central characters, Alice is a vacillator. The question why Trollope was so fascinated by people who change their minds is a large one, but it is obvious that to follow the processes by which a person first comes to, and then reverses, a decision must be to discover a good deal about their personality. The reasons for vacillationwill vary according to the individual case. Alice’s changes of mind might seem, in summary, very similar to those gone through by Clara Amedroz, the heroine of
The Belton Estate
, which immediately followed
Can You Forgive Her?
, Clara hesitates between a physically urgent cousin who is a gentleman farmer, and a correct, eligible, but cold M.P.; it is clear that she really loves the former, butshe feels that she ought to marry the latter – a decision she later regrets and retracts. But the situation of the later novel is only superficially like that of the earlier; in fact, the experience offered by the two books is quite different, partly because the two heroines are quite different. And it is in what makes the difference that the fictional interest lies.
    Although Trollope providessome descriptions of Alice’s temperament and suggests some of the factors by which she has been conditioned, it is important to pay as much, if not more, attention to what is dramatically shown as to what is analytically asserted. ’How am I to analyse her mind, and make her thoughts and feelings intelligible?’ Trollope exclaims in chapter 37 – as if he felt he lacked the vocabulary to describeadequately the internal conflict he envisages so clearly. At any rate, it becomes plain early on that as soon as Alice makes a decision she feels trapped by it Her engagement to John Grey is so eminently satisfactory – not least because she really is attracted by him – that she feels a perverse necessity to resist it. The factors involved in this recalcitrance are various and – as is so often thecase in Trollope’s most sensitive portrayals – the motives behind it are not only mixed but inconsistent. One source of resentment against the admirable Grey isthe feeling that he is too admirable. His reply to her letter announcing her proposed trip to Switzerland in the company of her cousin George could not be more proper – ‘she knew that he was noble and a gentleman to the last drop of hisblood’ – but in Alice ‘there was almost a feeling of disappointment’ that he has behaved so correctly ( chapter 3 ). During the scene between them in chapter 11 , which takes place after she has asked to be released from her engagement, Alice wishes that Grey’s self-control were not so great; she is equally infuriated and mortified by his composure in chapter 63 . All the same, his assumption of mastery,even his imperturbability, also attract her, and eventually in Switzerland she has to give in to their sustained pressure.
    Another apparent source of dissatisfaction is Grey’s quietism. The noiseless tenor of a country life near Cambridge is not what Alice thinks she