"The Way We Live Now" and the Lexicon of Death

Reading through The Way We Live Now, I was struck by the prevalence of imagery relating to dismemberment, suicide, and domestic abuse. In this post I will attempt to account for this textual pattern.

First, Marie Melmotte repeatedly uses images of dismemberment in order to legitimate her devotion to Felix. For instance, early in the narrative we learn that Mr. Melmotte is going to force Marie to marry Lord Nidderdale. However, Marie resists, saying, “‘It’s no good, papa. I won’t do it. If you chop me to pieces, I won’t do it’” (222). This specific phrase—“if you chop me to pieces”—is reiterated almost constantly (for instance, pages 309, 381, 436, 438, and elsewhere). In all of these cases, Marie measures her intimacy by the yardstick of dismemberment. In other words, the discursive index most meaningful to a young heiress is bodily annihilation. When Lord Nidderdale renews his attempt at courting Marie, she thinks, “if he had only made love at first as he had attempted to do it now, she thought that she would have submitted herself to be cut to pieces for him” (438). In this case, Marie’s consciousness affirms her willingness to undergo bodily sacrifice for the sake of her husband. 

This emphasis on disarticulation is important. With the rise of capitalism and speculation, reality itself becomes segmented into a series of ongoing circulations and transactions, promises and deals. In a sense, any organic quality accorded to reality is obliterated. In its place is a new paradigm by which every decision that one makes comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. Perception and agency become fragmented. If capital can be accumulated, a decision is made. If capital might be lost, a decision is postponed or evaded. This fragmentation caused by economic relations comes to pervade social relations, especially intimacy. Bodily dismemberment, then, reflects pervasiveness of capitalism. Indeed, it fragments all material conditions, even individual bodies. Or, at the very least, Trollope points to the ways in which capitalism constitutes its own lexicon: Marie can only express her intimacy by using a language that entails consuming one body for the sake of solidifying another.

Trollope critiques the effects of capitalism through other characters, too. After Sir Felix loses the money he intends to save for his transatlantic voyage, the narrator states that Felix “had heard of suicide. If ever it could be well that a man should cut his own throat, surely the time had come for him now” (393). In this instance, it is apparent that capitalist greed reconfigures life into the most basic of terms: life and death. Felix’s desire to gamble is portrayed as an internalized compulsion: he cannot resist trying to increase his capital, no matter what the material circumstances are that surround him. When speculation fails, however, capitalism drives the subject to the brink of suicide: without capital, life itself is figured as meaningless and vapid, and the subject is forced to contemplate whether or not taking his/her life is the last expression of agency available. In the wider context of the Victorian period, it is apparent that the burgeoning rise of modernity thrusts human beings into a very bifurcated mode of living: either get money and live, or lose money and die.

Trollope also highlights Mrs. Hurtle’s victimization from domestic violence and abuse. While at Lowestoft, Mrs. Hurtle conveys to Paul her personal history while living in the U.S. While she relates a number of violent events that stir up sympathy in the reader, her entreaties to Paul are ultimately unsuccessful. Her inability to secure Paul’s affection leads her to conclude that, because she can imaginatively smell the “reek of the gunpowder” from the time she was forced to shoot a man in Oregon, “it would have been better for her to have turned the muzzle against her own bosom” (363). Like Marie, Mrs. Hurtle measures her level of devotion to a man in terms of bodily destruction. In Mrs. Hurtle’s case, this is all the more tragic because she has suffered from domestic violence and abuse, and been forced to “fight cruelty, and fight falsehood, and fight fraud and treachery,” to the point that she tells her ex-husband she is willing to die before letting him enter her room (359). Mrs. Hurtle’s narrative of suffering is a product of capitalism intersecting with intimacy: when money and property are put first, physical intimacy is lost and the desire to maintain bodily security is jettisoned.

Through these three characters, Trollope highlights how capitalism gives rise to a lexicon of death. This new language indicates that people measure the value of their bodies in relation to an index of death. For all of the characters, it seems as if they are perched precariously on the line dividing life and death, willing to kill themselves in order to make a final statement about their position in life. Out of the three characters, I find Mrs. Hurtle most compelling, because her diction shirks any notion of submission or obsequious femininity, and instead neutralizes domestic abuse and violence by articulating a proto-feminist sense of agency and autonomy.