Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:46:28.540Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“THE INTERCOURSE BETWEEN THE SQUIRE AND HIS SON”: THE FATHER-SON MARRIAGE PLOT AND THE CREATION OF THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S DOCTOR THORNE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Helena Gurfinkel
Helena Gurfinkel
Affiliation:
Tufts University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“HE IS (NOT) A GENTLEMAN” is a verdict that we frequently encounter in Trollope's novels. The writer's concern with defining the English gentleman is virtually obsessive; however, his effort is fraught with numerous frustrating contradictions, reflecting the Victorians’ struggle to decide what constitutes exemplary masculinity. In some instances, Trollope's gentleman is a product of a certain class, while in others such elusive and intangible criteria as physical appearance and moral conduct come to define him. Despite the perennial identification of the name “Trollope” and Trollope's writing with thoroughly conventional ways of constructing gender, I argue that his gentleman is an expression of his nostalgia for an ideal of manhood that possesses traditionally feminine characteristics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 451 - 469
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams James Eli. 1995. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP
Bersani Leo. 1995. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP
Boyarin Daniel. 1997 Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: U of California P
Butler Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge
Castronovo David. 1987 The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society. New York: Ungar
Cohen William A. 1996. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Durham: Duke UP
Edelman Lee. 1994. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge
Everett Nigel. 1994. The Tory View of Landscape. New Haven: Yale UP
Freud Sigmund. 1993. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” (“The Wolf Man”). Three Case Histories. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Macmillan, Collier, 161– 280.
Gay Peter. 1993. The Cultivation of Hatred. New York: W. W. Norton
“Gentleman.” Merriam-Webster Online. 26 February 2005 <http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=gentleman>.
Herbert Christopher. 1987. Trollope and Comic Pleasure. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Kincaid James. 1997. “Introduction.” Doctor Thorne. Ed. Hugh Osborne. London: J. M. Dent, xvii– xxiv.
Lindner Christoph. “Sexual Commerce in Trollope's Phineas Novels.” Philological Quarterly 79. 3 (Summer 2000): 343– 63.
Marcus Steven. 1984. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity. Boston: George Allen & Unwin
McDermott Jim. 1999: “New Womanly Man: Feminized Heroism and the Politics of Compromise in The Warden.” VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal 27 71– 90.Google Scholar
Newsome David. 1961. Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal. London: John Murray
Pollard Arthur. 1982. “Trollope's Idea of the Gentleman.” Trollope Centenary Essays. Ed. John Halperin. New York: St. Martin's, 86– 94.
Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP
Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P
Stone Donald D. 1989. “Prodigals and Prodigies: Trollope's Notes as a Son and Father.” Victorian Perspectives. Ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier. Newark: U of Delaware P, 42– 67.
Sussman Herbert. 1995. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Trollope Anthony. 1997. Doctor Thorne. Ed. Hugh Osborne. London: J. M. Dent
Weiner Martin. 1981. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge UP