THE BERTRAMS
"For the first fortnight she did not leave the house." This sentence, in Chapter XXXVII of The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope, epitomizes the difficulty for the present day reader in understanding a Victorian novel. Things have changed a great deal since then, but surely the place of women is fundamental. Did not leave her house!
Lady Harcourt was in great distress. She had left her husband (she had virtually fled), and he had the legal right to apprehend her and force her to return to his home. Divorce was not an option for her. The action of the book takes place in 1845-1848. Only in 1857 (a year before the book was written) did the Matrimonial Causes Act give women limited access to divorce. Under this act the husband only had to prove his wife's adultery to obtain a divorce, but a woman had not only to prove her husband's having committed adultery; she also had to prove incest, bigamy, cruelty, or desertion. And so she was legally and permanently bound to a husband who owned their home. The law regarded a married couple as one person; the husband had a legal obligation to protect his wife; she was bound to obey him. Personal property brought to the marriage by the wife then belonged to the husband, even after a divorce if one could be obtained. Her income belonged completely to her husband. A man's home was his castle, and the wife was part of the deal.
One has to understand these givens in order to follow the implications of the story. The wedding of Caroline Waddington to Sir Henry Harcourt created a significant problem for the central lovers of the story, Miss Waddington and George Bertram. As the enormity of her mistake became apparent to her, Caroline (now Lady Harcourt) realized that there was no good way out. These days, she would do as a senior friend of mine, a professed atheist, said he would do if, to his surprise, he should find himself standing at the Pearly Gates after his death. "I would say, 'Gentlemen, it appears that I have made a horrible mistake.'" And then she would get a divorce and marry her true love with no questions asked. But her options were few and unattractive: She could flee abroad, as Lady Laura Standish did with her father, to escape her crazed husband, in Trollope's Phineas Finn. She could (if the husband would permit it) live openly with her lover, as did George Eliot. But just as Hollywood movies follow an apparently tacit code of audience acceptability, so Trollope was unwilling to send his central figures to Europe to live together, as Glencora Palliser had contemplated doing with her lover Burgo Fitzgerald in Can You Forgive Her? (Glencora couldn't bring herself to do this, and she learned to love her husband Plantagenet Palliser, after a certain acceptable fashion.) Lady Harcourt's husband could die of illness or injury, or someone could murder him, or he could commit suicide. Trollope was not scrupulous about revealing the outcome in advance. The reader is warned, and suicide is chosen. (This was also the means of exit and retribution for Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister and of Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now.)
Trollope did not consider himself a feminist; he professed a conservative view of society. But he was a realist who described the world as he found it. And his findings speak for themselves. The constraints placed upon women turn up again and again, in almost every novel he wrote.
Some of the action takes place in the Middle East, and this glimpse of the experience of touring there a century and a half ago provides a virtual visit to Jerusalem as it was then: a walled city with no suburbs, appearing as "a fortress of cards built craftily on a table," where one enters and suddenly realizes "that you are beyond the region of passports."
And the description of the environs provides an uncensored and not necessarily tactful view of "all the absurdity" of the "dark unfurnished gloomy cave in which the Syrian Christians worship, so dark that the eye cannot at first discover its only ornament—a small ill-made figure of the crucified Redeemer."
The author would probably be the object of a fatwah today for his description of the Moslem washerwomen as "ape-like" and the Jewish washerwomen as "glorious specimens of feminine creation."
Alexandria—"that most detestable of cities"—does not fare well. Nor do the pyramids, though they must be visited. "But let no man, and, above all, no woman, assume that the excursion will be in any way pleasurable. … And let this also be remembered, that nothing is to be gained by entering the pyramid except dirt, noise, stench, vermin, abuse, and want of air."
A twenty-first century editor might cringe at Trollope's assertion that "as a rule, a Mahomedan hates a Christian. … But in Egypt we have caused ourselves to be better respected: we thrash the Arabs and pay them, and therefore they are very glad to see us anywhere."