My post for this week is not filled with grand conclusion, but is rather just a reader response based on comparison. As I was reading The Way We Live Now, I was very struck by how Great Gatsby-esque the world seemed. The Great Gatsby is often summarized as rich people behaving badly and I think Trollope offers a critique of just such a world. Trollope certainly offers the reader a few more bright spots through certain characters, but on the whole Melmotte is greedy and conniving, Felix is a selfish gambler trying to maintain the life to which he has become accustom, Lady Carbury married for convenience and suffered a horrible marriage, but did her best to maintain appears for the life she had also become accustomed to. Like the grind of the modern world for Fitzgerald, the grind of capitalism in the Victorian era seems to bring out the very worst in people. The competition for social and economic capital is grounded in the fact that there is a limited amount of capital to go around and was must manipulate, lie, marry up, and do whatever one needs to do to secure money, especially forgery on the part of Melmotte. If you’re not working an angle to secure some kind of status, power, or money, you are unlikely to survive in this capitalist society.
Just in general, I think this book has a very modern ideology about it.The way we live now is not how we used to and its awful. Trollope is horrified by the world around him and makes it his job to hold up a mirror to the society that has been degraded in every aspect by the Darwinist struggle for economic and social capital. While he certainly accomplishes this critique in a more light-hearted manner than Fitzgerald in many respects, the fact that something like domestic abuse is directly at the forefront of the novel makes our often romantic grand reimagining of the Victorian era seem quiet silly. It was a human moment as are all the other moments in history and, unfortunately, that involves a lot of horrible things that humanity is capable of. I don’t know I feel like Gaskell’s North and South is mere child’s play in depicting the realities of class difference and class struggle when compared to The Way We Live Now.
Just in general, I think this book has a very modern ideology about it.The way we live now is not how we used to and its awful. Trollope is horrified by the world around him and makes it his job to hold up a mirror to the society that has been degraded in every aspect by the Darwinist struggle for economic and social capital. While he certainly accomplishes this critique in a more light-hearted manner than Fitzgerald in many respects, the fact that something like domestic abuse is directly at the forefront of the novel makes our often romantic grand reimagining of the Victorian era seem quiet silly. It was a human moment as are all the other moments in history and, unfortunately, that involves a lot of horrible things that humanity is capable of. I don’t know I feel like Gaskell’s North and South is mere child’s play in depicting the realities of class difference and class struggle when compared to The Way We Live Now.
Kadee,
ReplyDeleteI really like your point about the Darwinian struggle for economic and social capital that The Way We Live Now stages. As you incisively observe, Trollope’s novel establishes a strong connection between money, power, and survival. I think that this insight goes quite far in answering the question I raised in my post regarding the reason why certain characters are dictated by capitalist ideology and others are not. If money gives one socio-political power, which it obviously does, then the desire for it may be animated by a deeper desire for power. But your post raises another important question about the meaning of survival in the society of The Way We Live Now. Since the society revolves around a Darwinian struggle for wealth, the individuals living in it have very little choice but to engage in this struggle. To understand the repercussions for not doing so, it suffices to consider the narrator’s description of Roger Carbury and his estate: “Now the Carburys had never had anything but land. Suffolk has not been rnade rich and great either by coal or iron. No great town had sprung up on the confines of the Carbury property. No eldest son had gone into trade or risen high in a profession so as to add to the Carhury wealth. No great heiress had been married. There had been no ruin, — no misfortune. But in the days of which we write the Squire of Carbury Hall had become a poor man simply through the wealth of others (Chapter 6, pp. 47-48). It is clear that in the world Trollope sketches in The Way We Live Now, one’s success and happiness do not simply depend on the measure of one’s wealth but are also defined by it.
Excellent post, excellent comment. The link to Gatsby is convincing. I'd be interested in hearing what others think about Gaskell vs. Trollope as chroniclers of capitalism.
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