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Feminism, fiction and contract theory: Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right.'

Criticism, Summer, 1994 by Wendy Jones

Anthony Trollope wrote He Knew He Was Right from November 1867 to June 1868, years during which a bill to grant property rights to married women under common law was being fiercely debated in both Parliament and the press. The first Married Women's Property Act passed in 1870.(1) As an editor and writer for popular periodicals, and as a politician manque who actually stood for Parliament in November 1868, Trollope was certain to have been familiar with arguments on both sides of this issue. He Knew He Was Right, an exploration of male authority and women's rights within marriage--core issues in arguments over married women's property--is Trollope's timely contribution to this debate. I attempt to make explicit the nature of this contribution by showing how He Knew He Was Right intersects with the broader cultural discourse of contract, which informs Victorian Feminist arguments, and which was central to an ideal of married love.

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He Knew He Was Right is about a marital quarrel that begins when Louis Trevelyan forbids his wife, Emily, to see Colonel Osborne, an aging but flirtatious bachelor friend of the family, thereby casting aspersions on her honor and bullying her in a way considered unacceptable among people of their class. Although Emily resentfully complies with her husband's orders, Trevelyan finds he cannot master his wife's spirit; she refuses to submit gracefully to his command, for to do so would be to countenance the insult. As Trevelyan becomes progressively more obsessed with his right to "mastery," the quarrel escalates and they separate. He eventually goes mad, demanding that his wife confess to her "infidelity," which he has come to allege in his disordered condition. In the end, debilitated by mental illness, Trevelyan dies, freeing both himself and his wife from his monomania. Yet despite such an escape, Emily has essentially lost the quarrel, for as a married woman, she is not only unable to divorce (or even legally separate from) her husband, but she also has no right to custody of their child, despite Trevelyan's inability to care properly for the boy.

At stake in the quarrel is the definition of marriage itself. In Trevelyan's view, Emily's insubordination threatens the very foundation of their union; in her view, his orders undermine their loving partnership. Trollope had of course written about marital unhappiness in earlier novels such as The Bertrams (1859) and Phineas Finn (1869), while the theme of female autonomy had been the focus most famously in Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5). But in no other novel did he concentrate so fully on the relationship between a husband's authority and the legal and social structures that undergird that authority, nor had he previously interrogated the relative merits and justice of patriarchal laws and customs as he does in He Knew He Was Right. And in no other novel did he concentrate so fully on the implications of marriage as a contract.

Contract theory and the ideal of marital love had been associated since early modern times. The rise of an ethical imperative to marry for love in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England was part of a new "structure of feeling" (in Raymond Williams's phrase) that emphasized a contractual ethic.(2) To a large extent, voluntarism came to be asserted as the legitimate basis of all relationships and institutions, including the founding moment of civilization itself. The valuation of love as a basis for marriage was not new, as earlier literature demonstrates. But as the idea of "married love" entered into the discourse of contract, it was transformed. Prior to (roughly) the eighteenth century, married love existed as an ideal, not available to or even desirable for all people. Marital love now became an expectation as well as a duty, and marriage was defined as a relationship voluntarily entered into for the benefit of each party. Marriage theoretically became a contract, like all the other contracts that held society together.(3)

According to John Locke, whose political writings came to define contract for the English, the decision to enter a contract must be voluntary.(4) People cannot contract their liberty away altogether; a self-destructive contract is not valid; and if either of the parties to a contract violates its terms, their agreement is dissoluble.(5) Locke's theory thus posits a "self" who possesses certain inborn and inaliable rights and whose basic liberty is inviolable. If women were to marry on contractual grounds, then presumably they too had such a "self." But this version of female subjectivity was at odds with English marriage laws and institutions.

The law was aptly characterized by a maxim ascribed to William Blackstone, the great eighteenth-century English jurist: "in law a husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person."(6) Marriage laws ensured the non-subjectivity of women in a variety of ways. A married women was classified in the same legal category as "criminals, idiots and minors," to use Frances Power Cobbe's well-known formulation.(7) A wife was completely in the power of her husband: he could beat her, lock her up, and live openly with his mistress, and she had no recourse at law. In some cases, upper- and middle-class women had a limited amount of protection since their families routinely made marriage settlements of separate property held in trust for them under the legal system of equity; if the money had been settled in such a way as to allow the woman access to it, her funds could function de facto as a form of alimony. But it was more often the case that women were denied direct access to their separate property. And working- and lower-class women were forced to cede all property to their husbands, including wages.(8) In fact, Parliament's growing recognition of the inequity of the law (i.e. the discrepancy between common law and equity), rather than the support of women's rights, was a primary motive for reform of married women's property laws.(9) The gendered control of property was consequently crucial to both feminists and their opponents: both realized that if women were allowed economic independence, they would have some rights and power within marriage, and hence some control over their lives. For feminists, therefore, separate property came to stand for a complex of other demands; indeed, they saw their arguments for reform of marriage law as the first step in an agenda that included such women's rights as suffrage, accessible divorce, equitable child custody laws, and respectable employment opportunities.

Feminism, fiction and contract theory: Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right.'

Criticism, Summer, 1994 by Wendy Jones

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