Husbands, wives, and lawyers: Gender roles and professional representation in Trollope and the Adelaide Bartlett case

Furnival stresses the incompatibility of her guilt and her successful performance of the duties of life, repeatedly directing the jury to "look" at Lady Mason and resolve, if they can, her beauty and her guilt. In the second half of this line of defense, he challenges the absurd notion that a wee slip of a girl could possibly have outwitted the vigilance of legal men. Here he expresses his assumption about superior masculine intellect (especially legal intellect) as part and parcel of his defense resting on the impossibility of feminine guilt.

The logic behind this line of defense challenges the jury to consider the basis of character, especially feminine character. In order to find Lady Mason guilty, they would have to admit that she lived twenty blameless years, committed a premeditated crime, and then lived another twenty spotless years. Such a conclusion would deny the innate naturalness of gendered behavior or even the consistency of character. One resulting corollary to this "inescapable" femininity is a naturalizing of the roles played within heterosexual marriage. Furnival borrows from the heterosexual model of marriage both for Mason's defense and for defining his own role as a masculine and thus vocal, authoritative, and knowledgeable professional man. His assumptions in court help erase the constructed nature of those roles: women are naturally silent, and barristers necessarily speak for those who cannot.6 Cultural assumptions about "wifely" behavior and his line of defense thus mutually constitute one another.

Defending a woman against charges of forgery hardly seems like a privilege to be hotly contested, but representing a woman also has its rewards. Although Lady Mason's trial causes Mr. Furnival much turmoil, he still refuses to yield the field to either her son or her suitor. Furnival receives approval from the legal community for his able defense or, in other words, he loses no professional ground from championing her cause (II. 331). The case also receives wide notoriety, and the participants become mini-celebrities. Yet I would suggest that Furnival, Lucius, and Orme take interest in the case for reasons that go beyond, while overlapping, professional or public notice. Their contest to represent Lady Mason turns on their desire to perform their own masculinity and garner the attendant privileges and power.

Lucius Mason is a young man, eager to prove his ability to represent a woman and to be the legal and economic head of the house. He boasts, "I would take the burden from her shoulders" (I. 273). He takes deep offense at his mother's decision to place her trust elsewhere. His campaign to take over the public representation of his mother occurs simultaneously with his courting of Mr. Furnival's daughter. He fails in both. Sir Peregrine Orme is in his twilight years and anxious to exercise his virility and gallantry one more time. He asks, "Will you give me the right to stand there with you ....There I may boast that I should be strong" (1.356). Orme wishes to validate the privileges he already enjoys by playing knight, but he cannot fight in court. Mr. Furnival is middle-aged, unchallenged by work, and seeking excitement by "running after strange goddesses" (I. 99). As Mason's legal representative, Furnival plays pseudo-husband, taking pleasure in her beauty and sexuality and justify=ing his professional powers. Lady Mason is a goddess for all three men because her endangered womanhood and her attacked purity provide them with the opening to be correspondingly masculine and protective. The chance to represent her-as a mother, wife, or client-offers the opportunity to play with the mirror in which they are reflected, to exercise a kind of wish fulfillment and to justify the privileges they enjoy as men. The binary opposition between masculine and feminine qualities ensures that a manipulation of Lady Mason's representation will be reflected onto the men in her life. By making characters, or representing people, they can more effectively shape a world and amass the power that accompanies representing another person, whether it be legally, politically, economically, or socially. Rather than in marriages where we normally expect to see men exchange credible representation for control of women's property and persons, in Orley Farm that exchange of power is exercised most visibly in the courtroom by professional men.