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

He Knew He Was Right represents gentle patriarchy (like married love) as an ideal that exemplifies progress, since it replaces an older model of social convention. In this sense, it also accords with the feminists' evolutionary account of social relations. He Knew He Was Right further underscores the progressive nature of the social norms it endorses by stressing that Trevelyan, whose view of the family is outmoded, is unable to change with the times. He is shown to be consistently nostalgic, longing for a past when, in his view, methods of social control were more direct and forceful. He laments the fact that "as wives are managed now-a-days, he could not forbid to her [Emily] the use of the post-office" (254).(25) Trevelyan believes that in an earlier age, his problems would have been quickly solved by a duel: "Gentleman of old, his own grandfather or his father, would have taken such a fellow as Colonel Osborne by the throat and have caned him, and afterwards would have shot him, or have stood to be shot. All that was changed now" (253-54).

In the end, Trevelyan, the most domestic of men, ironically destroys his home: such is the logical consequence of his retrograde attitude, played out to its most drastic possible conclusion. For the very concept of home as a refuge and haven, the kind of home that Trevelyan holds dear and that Victorian society idealizes, accords with a contractual ideal of domesticity, at odds with his intolerant style of mastery. Such a home depends on respect, complaisance, and above all trust. As Emily points out, "A wife does not feel that her chances of happiness are increased when she finds that her husband suspects her of being too intimate with another man" (100). Trevelyan's story thus tacitly endorses the feminists' equation of autonomy with domesticity, even if Trollope's gentle patriarchy simultaneously and paradoxically upholds male supremacy.

He Knew He Was Right undermines its subversive implications in other ways as well, even in the subplots where it most strongly asserts the progressive aspects of contractual relationships. Because Nora's parents and Miss Stanbury eventually capitulate, Trollope never has to take the part of parents against children, the logical telos of his advocacy of married love. Dorothy's "rebellion" is also muted, since Miss Stanbury is neither a father nor a parent. And both Nora and Dorothy are perfectly happy with their domestic fates and willing to look on their men as gods. Nevertheless, He Knew He Was Right reveals the feminist implications of the logic of contract. Starting from the premise that it is right to marry for love, it elaborates the implications of that premise for female subjectivity, and therefore necessarily arrives at the same conclusions as the Victorian feminists: that contract accords rights, and, in line with the world's moral progress, that relationships between men and women ought to be consensual.

I would like to conclude with a brief appeal to historical context in assessing the relationship between contract theory and feminism. In our own time, the two have been at odds. Feminists generally agree that contract theory is complicit with women's oppression. They point out that Locke asserts the natural subordination of women and that he rejects the notion that family and government are analogous, thereby authorizing a separate feminine sphere in which women are isolated and powerless.(26) Moreover, as Carole Pateman argues, contract theory takes for granted that political right originates in male sex-right or conjugal right, which ensures the subordination of women: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contractarians incorporated this right, implicit in the theories of their patriarchalist opponents, thereby transforming "the law of male sex right into its modern contractual form."(27) Moreover, contractarian ideals tacitly assume a male political subject, thereby denying specific political recognition and accommodation of women's needs. In our own day, the concept of equal, genderless (but really male) political subjects has been used to deny women maternity leave and to gain control of children from the mothers who bore them.(28)