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

Is perfect love to be called out by perfect dependence? Does

an empty purse necessarily imply a full heart? Is a generous-

natured woman likely to be won or rather to be alienated and

galled by being made to feel she has no choice but

Submission? Surely, there is a great fallacy in this direction.... Real

unanimity is not produced between two parties by forbidding

one of them to have any voice at all.(16)

The consensual logic of contract thus enabled feminists to argue that the reforms they urged furthered the ideal and harmonious domestic relations valued by all. Not only does coercion hinder the development of a happy home, but it is also redundant where such a home exists. Frances Cornwallis therefore opposed denying women their civil rights in order to guarantee male authority on the grounds that loving and responsible women do not need to be forced into being good wives:

We are taught from our childhood to value the civil rights of

a free citizen as the best inheritance of an Englishman, and

when our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives ask for this

birthright of their nation, can we tell them, without offering

an insult which our countrywomen have by no means mer-

ited, that they are unfit for exercising it?--that if they are not

bound by no less a penalty than the loss of all personal iden-

tity, they would rend asunder all the dearest affections of the

human heart ... [that] they would at once abandon their best

hopes, both here and hereafter, and defy both God and man

in their licentious madness? Those who say this, we may

venture to affirm, do not believe it.(17)

Feminists also drew on contract theory to claim that women's rights were a necessary consequence of progress. Locke and other contractarians had identified the beginnings of civilization with the initiation of a social contract--a move from a society governed by force to one governed by consent. Feminists extrapolated from this logic to argue that gender relations free of force ought to constitute the next episode in the story of human development. Cobbe observes that because the "feudal structure" of gender relations is outmoded in the modern world, granting women their rights is clearly in line with an overall scheme of moral development: "It is clear enough that we have come to one of those stages in human history which, like a youth's attainment of his majority, makes some change in the arrangements of past time desirable, if not imperative."(18) Along similar lines, Mill argues that "the law of force was the avowed rule of general conduct" through much of the world's history, and it is only recently "that the affairs of society have been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law.... "[I}nequality of rights" is "a relic of the past ... and must necessarily disappear" (134, 142).

To these feminists, marriage for love was evidence that the world was changing for the better. They might criticize marriage for failing to live up to its allegedly contractual character, but they also assert that the contemporary emphasis on married love was a sign of progress. Josephine Butler notes that in "an advanced and Christian community" marriage is based on "free and deliberate choice,--a decision of the judgment and of the heart."(19) Mill observes that "until a late period in European history, the father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers"; we now adhere to a "better morality" (157-58).