Narrative, Artifice, and the Middle Class

At the beginning of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the reader is introduced to Lady Carbury, a widow with literary aspirations, working to get a particular book, “Criminal Queens,” published when she is introduced. However, as the narrator notes, for Lady Carbury, “that dabbling in Literature which had commenced partly perhaps from a sense of pleasure in the work, partly as a passport to society, had been converted into hard work by which money if possible might be earned (16),” pointing out that Lady Carbury’s writing is motivated primarily by a drive to attain wealth as opposed to any sort of artistic will to create. However, instead of being the result of some personal greed, the wealth sought by Lady Carbury by writing is shown to be for a rather specific purpose, that of the upkeep of her son Felix in his profligate lifestyle. For Carbury, the goal is to “add a thousand a year to her income, so that Felix might again live like a gentleman and marry that heiress who, in Lady Carbury’s look-out into the future, was destined to make all things straight (16),” her literary work thus propelling Felix into the ideal marriage which will bring an end to his, and his family’s, problems.

It should be noted here the ways in which this scheme is tied up with literature: not only is it supposed to be achieved through literary production, the assumption on which it is founded, that the proper marriage brings an end to ones troubles, is itself very “novelistic.” The idea that problems are resolved, that conflict it brought to a close, by a happy (or at least fortuitous) wedding is a common trope within the genre of the novel, used to bring an end to a character’s struggle and therefore the novel itself. In this sense, Lady Carbury is not only trying to use literature to end Felix’s problems, but is also employing literary thinking, particularly novelistic thinking, to formulate what would constitute an end.

One common criticism of the use of a wedding to bring a novel to an end is that it often feels forced, artificial; the closure provided by the marriage is sometimes experienced as an inorganic contrivance used in lieu of any “natural” conclusion to the work. In other words, it comes off as a false or inauthentic action by the writer. This would also seem to hold true for the novelistic manner by which Carbury endeavors to bring Felix’s own troubled story to a happy end. Discussing Felix’s previous attempts to procure “that heiress,” the narrator states that “when he [Felix] talked of love, he not only thought he was talking nonsense, but showed that he thought so (19).” For Felix, working to bring about the marriage involves behaving in a way that is far from natural for himself, talking of love is which is forced and artificial in a way that shows. Much like the marriage narrative common in literature, the marriage narrative for Felix is one which is artificially imposed upon him against his character. Felix’s romantic pursuits are invariably colored by this sense of artifice, manifested very clearly at Madame Melmotte’s ball, when the narrator says of Felix’s confession of love to Miss Melmotte that “he had studied the words as a lesson, and repeating them as a lesson, he did it fairly well (43),” Felix’s romantic confession more a result of something deliberately cultivated with words that seem unlike his own than any sort of expression of feeling. The narrator makes it clear that Felix’s marriage plot is seen as an artificial contrivance.

It would seem, ironically, that this conviction that novelistic narratives such as the marriage plot are a form of artifice is carried all the way to the novel’s own narrative. In several cases, the narrator seems to stop the narrative to directly address the reader and clarify what has just been shown. For instance, when describing a card game between Felix and his friends at their club, the narrator states that “the reader is not to understand that either of them [Felix’s friends] had cheated, or that the baronet had entertained any suspicion of foul play (46),” attempting to head off any misunderstanding on the part of the reader. Yet, why not merely write the narrative in a manner to emphasize the lack of cheating and suspicion, including details that point to such a situation? Why instead stop the narrative to declaim what was really going on to the reader? It would seem to be because much narrative itself is at times distrusted in the novel to convey truth, the truth of events needing to be told, not shown. The narrator here does not seem to think it possible to tell the truths of the card game as part of a story.

The false and artificial nature which the novel seems to attribute to novelistic narrative appears connected to the middle classes, or at least to the non-aristocratic. It is perhaps ironic that the minor aristocrat Lady Carbury connects refusal of the marriage plot to the upper echelons of the aristocracy. Her book, “Criminal Queens,” focuses on powerful women of history of whom Carbury says “of almost all these royal and luxurious sinners it was the chief sin that in some phase of lives they consented to be [men’s] playthings without being wives (2).” For Carbury, the main crime of these aristocratic (and royal) women was to decouple love and marriage, through infidelity or fornication, not being “wives,” and thus resisting the marriage plot so common to novels. This is perhaps further manifested in the novel itself, wherein many subplots revolve around the marriage between aristocratic and non-aristocratic individuals, as if the marriage plot cannot be (or at least rarely is) purely aristocratic.