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

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.

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.

Thus the appeal to the principle of contract, which was seen as asserting female subjectivity in the face of its legal denial, pervades the discourse of women's rights throughout the nineteenth century. Activists repeatedly point out that marriage laws violate the allegedly contractual nature of marriage. In 1825 (early on in the struggle), William Thompson derided the contradiction in the phrase "marriage contract": "Each man yokes a woman to his establishment and calls it a contract. Audacious falsehood! A contract! Where are any of the attributes of contracts ... to be found in this transaction? ... Can even both the parties, man and woman, by agreement alter the terms as to the indissolubility and inequality, of this pretended contract?(10)" In 1855, Caroline Norton, urging the reform of the common law, similarly argued that marriage laws fail to evince the contractual logic that the wedding ceremony purports: "As her husband, he has a right to all that is hers; as his wife, she has no right to anything that is his. As her husband, he may divorce her (if truth or false swearing can do it): as his wife, the utmost "divorce" she could obtain, is permission to reside alone, --married to his name." Marriage is a contract, a "civil bond," for the husband, but not for the wife, for whom it is an "indissoluble sacrament."(11) And in 1869, on he eve of the passage of the

first Married Women's Property Act, John Stuart Mill observed that although "the most frequent case of voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business," marriage laws do not follow the laws of contract. "If the law dealt with other contracts as it does with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the common business as if it were his private concern" and "that the others should have only delegated powers."(12)

If married love provided a framework for articulating marriage as a contractual ideal, then conversely, a contractual ideal enabled feminists to associate women's rights with marital happiness: "the highest possible union" between husband and wife is intrinsically a corollary of contract.(13) Of course, an ideal of marital love could be used to support conservative interests as well. Lord Penzance, who led the opposition to married women's property rights in the House of Lords, speculated that if a married woman could own property and was therefore able to participate in business, a man might be startled by the information that his wife had determined to set up a rival shop in his neighbourhood" or "still more startled at hearing that she had entered into partnership with her cousin, who need not be a woman."(14) But feminists disputed the logic of such claims, arguing that if love is by definition freely given, then domestic relations, founded on and sustained by love, ought to be voluntary rather than coerced: only then, as William Thompson notes, will marriage provide the "delights" of "esteem, of reiendship, of intellectual and sympathetic intercourse."(15) Similarly, Cobbe argues that oppressive laws for women are in fact incompatible with wifely love and devotion. If men believe "that a woman's whole life and being, her soul, body, time, property, thought, and care ought to be given to her husband" and that "nothing short of such absorption in him and his interests makes her a true wife," then denying women their rights undermines rather than furthers this goal:

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).

What is Trollope's position vis a vis these feminist arguments? Given his focus on women's issues, it is not surprising that critics have often debated the extent and nature of Trollope's liberal views regarding women. In general, they conclude that despite the progressive tendencies in many of his novels (particularly those of the 1860s), he is fundamentally ambivalent about feminism.(20) But if He Knew He Was Right is not unambiguously valuable as feminist polemic, it is nevertheless valuable to feminist polemic. This is because it espouses an ideal of married love that, as we have seen, has already been articulated within the discourse of Lockean contract. Thus by wholeheartedly endorsing marriage for love, and by following through on the contractual implications for women of that endorsement, He Knew He Was Right exemplifies the connections between married love, the domestic ideal, progress, and liberty that Victorian feminists invoked. In this case, Trollope's "feminism" has less to do with his attitude toward women than with his attitude toward marriage.

Like nearly all of Trollope's novels, He Knew He Was Right shows that for those fortunate enough to find love in the world, marriage is a joy as well as a duty, while marrying without love is a sin. When Hugh Stanbury, the novel's hero, deliberates about whether or not to marry on his small income, "there came upon him some dim ideal of self-abnegation,--that ... the poetry of his life, was, in fact, the capacity of caring more for other human beings than for himself."(21) Nora Rowley (the woman he loves and Emily's sister) reaches a similar conclusion, rejecting a brilliant match with the future Lord Peter-borough because she does not love him. Characters who use marriage for economic or social advancement, such as the French sisters, come in for heavy punishment. It is better to lead the lonely and penurious life of a spinster, like Hugh's sister, Priscilla Stanbury, than to marry without love.

If marriage for love is a duty, it is also a right--a right that even justifies female rebellion, as the stories of Nora and Dorothy Stanbury show. Marriage for love, in other words, legitimates a woman's desires and choices, recognizing the very personhood and autonomy of which the law would deprive her after marriage. When Nora's parents forbid her to marry Hugh, she firmly insists both that she will marry the man she loves and that it is her right to do so: "There is a time when a girl must be supposed to know what is best for herself, --just as there is for a man" (658).

Dorothy also exercises her right to choose her husband freely. When her aunt and adoptive guardian, Miss Stanbury, informs her that plans have been readied for her marriage to a local clergyman, Mr. Gibson, Dorothy refuses. Miss Stanbury is shocked that Dorothy, with her meager fortune and poor prospects, would dare to reject such an offer, which includes her own generous gift of 2000 pounds: "An offer from an honest man, with her friends' approval, and a fortune at her back as though she had been born with a gold spoon in her mouth! And she tells me that she can't, and won't, and would't, and shouldn't, as though I were asking her to walk the streets" (342). But Miss Stanbury is indeed asking Dorothy to "walk the streets" insofar as she is asking her to prostitute herself--to negate her desires (she shudders when she thinks of embracing Mr. Gibson) and to commodify herself, exchanging her person and devotion for a good establishment. Not only does Dorothy assert her right to veto her aunt's choice of husband, but later she engages herself to the man she loves despite her aunt's disapproval.

The polemics of married love frequently dovetailed with the feminists' account of moral evolution; as the arguments of feminists did, He Knew He Was Right emphasizes that the right of marital choice had not always existed and that it is in itself evidence of progress. Miss Stanbury clearly associates Dorothy's refusal of Mr. Gibson with the changing role of women: "I don't know what has come to the young women;--or what it is they want" (342) she says, after Dorothy rejects her arranged marriage. Moreover, the novel suggests that denying women the right of marital choice is retrograde and in the end impossible, given contemporary mores. When Nora's father finds she is determined to marry Hugh, he threatens to curse and disinherit her, like the unyielding father in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. His wife points out the absurdity of such a threat in the modern world: "On the stage they do such things as that ... and, perhaps, they used to do it once in reality. But you know that it's out of the question now. Fancy your standing up and cursing the dear girl, just as we are all starting from Southampton!" (844).

More importantly, He Knew He Was Right suggests that social expectations had changed with regard to the relationship between husband and wife as well as between child and guardian; such changes are inherent in a contractual view of marriage. The novel presents what we might call "gentle patriarchy" as a successor to a tyrannical version of male power. While a husband still ought to retain supreme authority in his household, such authority should manifest itself through persuasion rather than force. So Hugh tells Trevelyan that rather than insulting his wife by forbidding her Colonel Osborne's company, he ought to have hinted his disapproval (184). Trevelyan himself, on the brink of madness, hears the internal voice of a better, saner self, which urges this form of exercising authority: "A man should be master in his own house, but he should make his mastery palatable, equitable, smooth, soft to the touch, a thing almost unflet" (44). Such a view receives offical sanction within the novel when Dorothy reads aloud from Jeremy Taylor's sermon, "The Marriage Ring," (486) which advocates exercising patriarchal power in just this sort of way.(22)

Gentle patriarchy assumes compliance. A man can assert his authority in muted ways because he can depend on his wife to know what is expected of her. Emily's problems are due in part to the fact that as a colonial, she has incompletely internalized the laws of English etiquette. In one sense, such scrupulous attention to the rules on the part of both husband and wife exemplifies the self-policing that is always the mark of well-regulated society in Trollope's novels, as D. A. Miller has demonstrated.(23) But this kinder, gentler patriarchy also demonstrates Trollope's attempt, although one that is doomed to the failure of contradiction, to bring patriarchy into accord with the consensual nature of contract and with the world's evolution from the rule of force to the moral law of consent.

Gentle patriarchy thus demonstrates the progressive implications of contract theory for gender, opening a space for the redefinition of gender roles in ways that potentially challenge patriarchy, even as it simultaneously undermines its own subversive implications. By showing that gender roles can change, and by evoking a less forceful mode of male authority, gentle patriarchy raises the possibility--albeit only the possibility--of an equal division of power between men and women. Furthermore, the self-discipline it exacts from women grants the principle of a separate female subjectivity. Indeed, it is the possibility of Emily's autonomy that threatens Trevelyan more than his fear or her adultery, which he never believes wholeheartedly. For him, the quarrel is above all about obtaining Emily's capitulation and being able to control her. Thus, like the ultra-conservative Lord Penzance, who worried that a married woman with property would go into business with a lover-partner (192), Trevelyan imagines a causal relationship between female autonomy and wifely infidelity. And because he is unable to put his faith in the moral law of self-discipline where Emily is concerned, he resorts to the "rigours of surveillance" (254): unable to trust his wife to police her own behavior, he hires an ex-policeman to do it for her, even though this is degrading to himself and insulting to her. He is altogether unable to allow his love for his wife to temper his need for mastery, although he knows he ought to do so in order to resolve the quarrel.

At some level of awareness, Trollope is as threatened by the contractual ideals he endorses as is his character, Trevelyan. He attempts to resolve this dilemma by equating true masculinity with persuasion rather than power. Since he rejects authoritarianism, a conventional sign of manliness, he aligns masculine strength itself with gentle patriarchy, with the ability to rule without bluntly displaying force, but with a settled confidence in male authority. In this way, what might seem to be a ceding of power on the part of patriarchy is reinscribed as a more potent form of control. And Trevelyan, who exemplifies an older model of male power, is shown to be less than manly. Trevelyan has problems with "mastery" because he is not "man enough" to admit his fault, as Hugh makes clear when he reproaches him for his inept handling of the quarrel. You have only to bid her come back to you, and let bygones be bygones, and all would be right. Can't you be man enough to remember that you are a man?" (310). Emily also equates his petulant behavior with a lack of "manliness" (81).

To underscore the manliness of gentle patriarchy, the slur of effeminacy haunts the "masterful" Trevelyan throughout the novel. From the start, he possesses distinctly feminine characteristics. Inhabiting the domestic rather than the public sphere, he leads a life much like that of an intelligent Victorian lady. Rather than work at a profession, he chooses to lead a life of leisure, dilettantishly pursuing intellectual interests. He is unusually domestic. Unlike other men, he takes no joy in being able to dine at his club or in any similar "release from the constraint imposed by family ties"; on the contrary, he is one "to whom the ordinary comforts of domestic life were attractive and necessary" (174). Even Trevelyan's madness is the sign of an inherent effeminacy; women were supposedly more susceptible to insanity than men because "the instability of their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual, emotional, and rational control."(24) Trevelyan's behavior throughout the novel thus supports Hugh's charge that Trevelyan's autocratic character is evidence of a failure to be "man enough." Yet the novel's very need for this defensive strategy is an index of the potential threat posed by the concept of contract.

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)

Yet contract theory was nevertheless an important stepping-stone for feminism. By granting the premise of an independent female subjectivity, it opened a utopian space for feminists to argue against oppressive laws. If we now see the perniciousness of contract, which was formerly obscured, that knowledge does not negate its utility as a political tool for feminists in the past. Trollope's somber novel of marital unhappiness remains a memorable testament to such utility.(29)

Cornell University

Notes

(1.)The legal information in this essay is indebted to Lee Holcombe's Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983) and Mary Lyndon Shanley's Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England: 1850-1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

(2.)Williams defines "structure of feeling" as a "cultural hypothesis" that enables us to define individual perception within a given period of culture without reducing it to either the individual or the collective (Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 132). The contractual as I define it falls into this category, since it embraces thought, feeling, theory, and ethical imperative.

(3.)For the history of the conceptualization of marriage as a contract, see Mary Lyndon Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract," Western Political Quarterly 32 (March 1979): 79-91. Although married love began as a middle-class ideal, by the nineteenth century it had been accepted by the aristocracy. See J.R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 105.

(4.)The history of Locke's reception in England is a complex subject, beyond the scope of this essay. See e.g. Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 120-45.

(5.)John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 284, 367. I use "contract" to refer to a Lockean contractual ideal.

(6.)Cited by Holcombe, 18. Cf. Blackstone's less aphoristic expression of the same idea: "The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband" (William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols., Book I [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-66], 430).

(7.)Frances Power Cobbe, "Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Is the Classification Sound?," Fraser's Magazine 78 (1868): 77-94.

(8.)The one exception in common law was real property, which a husband could not dispose of without his wife's consent, although he had a right to any income it generated.

(9.)Such reform came about slowly. The 1857 Divorce Act allowed for legal separation (but not divorce) for women physically abused by their husbands and also granted women who obtained judicial separations or divorces, or who were deserted by their husbands, the property rights of single women. This was limited relief, for the determination of physical abuse would be left to judges who were often biased, and in any case, poor women could not afford to apply to the Divorce courts for separation orders and/or to activate their independent status. The first Married Women's Property Act (1870) allowed three kinds of property to be treated as separate: earnings, investments, and legacies of less than 200 pounds. The Married Women's Property Act of 1882 allowed women to enter into contracts independently and to will property to beneficiaries of their choice. Both property acts and the law of equity nevertheless recognized the rights of a wife's property rather than her personal rights. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 enabled a wife who was a victim of physical abuse to apply for a separation order from a local magistrate's court. But it was not until 1891 that the courts ruled that a man was not entitled to imprison his wife.

(10.)William Thompson, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery: in Reply to Mr. [James] Mill's Celebrated "Article on Government" (London, 1825; New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 55.

(11.)Caroline Norton, Selected Writings of Caroline Norton: Facsimile Reproductions with an Introduction and Notes by James O. Hoge and Jane Marcus, (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978), 4, 13, cited by Mary Poovey, in Uneven Developments; The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 64.

(12.)John Start Mill, "The Subjection of Women," in Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 168-69. Future references will appear in the text.

(13.)Cobbe, 788.

(14.)Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 192, June 21, 1870, Column 604. Future references to Parliamentary Debates will be cited by volume, date and column number and will appear in the text.

(15.)Thompson, 70.

(16.)Cobbe, 788, 790.

(17.)Frances Caroline Cornwallis, "The Property of Married Women: Report of the Personal Laws Committee (of the Law Amendment Society) on the Laws Relating to the Property of Married Women," Westminster Review 66 (1856): 358-59.

(18.)Cobbe, 791.

(19.)Josephine Butler, Introduction to Woman's Work and Woman's Culture: A Series of Essays, ed. Josephine Butler (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), xxxii.

(20.)Discussions of Trollope's feminism include Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); P.D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); N. John Hall, A Feminist In Spite of Himself," Trollopiana: The Journal of the Trollope Society 10 (August 1990): 13-19; and Jean Nardin, He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). Trollope's two extended discussions of women's rights appear in his "Higher Education of Women," Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable and Co., 1938), 67-88 and North America (New York: Knopf, 1951), 256-65. For summaries of Trollope's overtly expressed views on feminism, see Hall, 14-15; Nardin, 16-18, and John Sutherland's introduction to the novel (in the edition cited in note 21), xxi-xxii.

(21.)Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 237. Future references will appear in the text.

(22.)See Ruth apRoberts, "Emily and Nora and Dorothy and Priscilla and Jemima and Carry," in The Victorian Experience: The Novelists, ed. Richard A. Levine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 116. Taylor, a seventeenthcentury divine, was an authoritative religious guide for the Victorians; most households possessed his sermons. As this reference indicates, the revision of ideals of masculinity implied by "gentle patriarchy" was not new to the Victorians. A similar ideal had been popular with the Puritans. But it was always in conflict with sterner models of masculinity, and at this particular time, would appear "new" once more since it followed closely on a resurgence of autocratic patriarchy at mid century. On ideals of masculinity in the Victorian era, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109-13.

(23.)D.A. Miller, "The Novel as Usual: Trollope's Barchester Towers," The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 107-45.

(24.)Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York: Penguin, 1987), 55.

(25.)Robert Polhemus observes that Trevelyan is driven mad by the changing role of women (The Changing World of Anthony Trollope [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968], 164).

(26.)See Susan Moller Okin, "Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family," Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982): 65-88 and Ruth Perry, "Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism," Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (Summer 1990): 449-50. However, Okin also suggests that Locke's theory, posits a version of patriarchy that is "very limited" when compared to contemporary laws and customs. For additional analyses of the feminist potential of Locke's theories and the limits thereof, see Theresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, "'Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth': Women and the Origins of Liberalism," Political Studies 27 (1979): 183-200; Melissa Butler, "Early Liberal Roots of English Feminism," The American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 135-50; and Shanley, "Marriage Contact," 87-91.

(27.)Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 3.

(28.)Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), chaps. 7 and 8; Pateman, chaps. 1, 6, 7 and 8.

(29.)I would like to thank Alison Case, Dorothy Mermin and Harry Shaw for their invaluable comments on various drafts of this essay.

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