Can You Forgive Her? Read Free Page B

indicate, the initial argument that she was not fit for Grey must apply even more when she has added the insult of her engagement to George to the insult of jilting him.But her motives for resisting Grey for so long are, as usual, mixed and confused, as Trollope makes clear in one of his more searching pieces of analysis:
    But there still clung to her what I fear we must call a perverseness of obstinacy, a desire to maintain the resolution she had made, – a wish that she might be allowed to undergo the punishment she had deserved. She was as a prisoner who wouldfain cling to his prison after pardon has reached him, because he is conscious that the pardon is undeserved. And it may be that there was still left within her bosom some remnant of that feeling of rebellion which his masterful spirit had ever produced in her. He was so imperious in his tranquillity, he argued his question of love with such a manifest preponderance of right on his side, thatshe had always felt that to yield to him would be to confess the omnipotence of his power. [ Chapter 74 ]
    As Trollope dryly concludes a few pages later, Alice grudgingly regarded her final happiness as an ‘enforced necessity’.
    The place where Alice first rebels against Grey is the balcony of the hotel at Basle, and she capitulates to him at the same place ( chapters 5 and 75 ). It is when she ison her Swiss holiday with George and Kate Vavasor and later when she stays at the Vavasor home in the Lake District that Alice feels the appeal of romance, an appeal which is not exerted by the idea of domesticity with John Grey amidst the boring countryside of Cambridgeshire, in Trollope’s roundly expressed view ( chapter 10 ) the least attractive county in England. What she has to come round tois the idea that George’s ‘romance’ is a specious and self-interested imitation and that underneath the gentlemanly decorum of Grey’s manner lurks the real thing. George is prepared to exploit the romantic tendencies in Alice and in his sister but he has no belief in any mode of conduct that is not purely opportunist; John Grey seemsstuffy, but his constancy and honourableness are in realitydeeply chivalrous. Trollope’s use of the Swiss settings to underline the fact that in the end he is the more romantic of the two lovers shows a care and consistency in the use of landscape that is not always present in his novels (although apparent in the Highland scenery of another of the ‘political’ novels, Phineas Finn).
    But
Can You Forgive Her?
is in general one of Trollope’s most coherentlyorganized novels. In a book like
The Last
Chronicle of
Barset
(written two years later) the relation between the Barset parts of the book and its London scenes is only of a tenuous and nominal kind, and a critic has to work very hard to connect the-matically the two areas of the book with any plausibility. The integration of different but concurrent plots into some sort of ‘organic’ unity maynot be as necessary for artistic success as the modern criticism of Victorian fiction often presupposes, but the interrelation of the three stories in
Can You Forgive Her?
is too obvious to miss. The way in which Alice Vavasor hovers between male alternatives is clearly paralleled by the difficulty of Mrs Greenow in deciding whether to prefer Mr Cheesacre or Captain Bellfield, and by the temptationto desert her husband offered to Lady Glencora by Burgo Fitzgerald.
    The parallelism of the three situations may soothe those who like a novel to have pattern, but the natures of the cases vary enough to make the discrepancies between them more important to the actual life of the book than the similarities. The dilemmas of Alice, Glencora, and Aunt Greenow partly differ simply because one is unmarried,the second is a wife, and the third a widow. Of course, Mrs Greenow is presented in a comic light to which the other two are not exposed. In the
Autobiography
Trollope speaks of her as being ‘very good fun’,