Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004
 Subject: [trollope-l] Nina Balatka, Introduction: Dating, Publications, Some Ideals for Novel Writing (1)
Reply-To: trollope-l@yahoogroups.com

Although it's not my week to post, I thought I'd provide an introduction which includes some comments on the opening 3 chapters of Nina. Tracy's introduction to this novel and Linda is excellent; he provides a painstaking map of Prague and Nurembourgh which enables the reader to follow the footsteps of both sets of characters on the grid Trollope carefully imagined them walking through as the journey of the fiction moves on.

He tells you that Nina was written by Trollope after 20 years of novel-writing. It's his 15th novel and written at the height of his powers. He had two substantial travel books and a number of stories located in foreign places. The novel just before it is The Belton Estate and the one just after The Last Chronicle. Perhaps the closely repetitive confrontation scene of the hero (Crawley, Anton Trendellson or AT) in both may be partly accounted for by their close proximity in writing time as well as their place in his deep imaginative welling up of his fictions.

The Belton Estate is equally important though: Trollope was already involved with the Fortnightly Review where The Belton Estate had appeared. As I wrote in my book, Trollope on the Net:

This periodical which came out once a month and featured novels (it is famous for its inapt name) was originally begun by Trollope and George Eliot's companion, George Henry Lewes, and intendedly progressive in politics and enlightened in its attitudes towards social relationships and the new modern sciences. John Sutherland writes that the goal was to publish an English Revue des Deux Mondes. As per Trollope's strong convictions that individuals should be held accountable for what they write, its reviews were signed, and it was 'pitched at a higher level than other English journals of its class'. Of course, it lost money. One cannot say it did not publish material meant sheerly as entertainments, but it was the place where Meredith placed his work (something not easy for him to do). In the 1880s it had established itself as a leading organ of humane free-thinking (if I may be allowed the shocking term) for Victorian intellectuals. Frank Harris was one of the later Victorian editors.

The Belton Estate (and Lady Anna also first published in the Fortnightly) represent one of a few of Trollope's mid-career books (Miss Mackenzie is another) where he is consciously avoiding false romancing and glamor in favor of a sober prosaic realism, a point of view on how to produce "serious" fiction which the Fortnightly's selection was intended to vindicate. The Fortnightly was a liberal, enlightened socially conscious periodical which also produced articles on the new science, economics and important issues of the day. It did not accompany its stories with illustrations (whether to save money or be "high- mindedly" above advertising books in this way) is not clear. Shortly before Trollope's trip to Prague, he read an article by G. H. Lewes in which Lewes described Prague and challenged novelists to depict such foreign places so as to attempt to"penetrate to the deeper relation between character and its social environment."

Those who have read this week's chapters have seen how carefully Trollope has been to describe each part of the city Nina walks through and where each of the different characters lives. It matters whether the characters are in a ghetto slum (the Jewish quarter); it matter whether they are in an old broken-down poverty-striken and picturesque area of town (the Balatkas in Kleinseite); it matters whether they are in the equivalent of a "nouveau riche" part of town (New Town where the Zamenoys are). Pierre Bourdieu has written influentially (and correctly) about how important "habitas" is in forming people's characters, expectations, outlooks; that the economic and physical comfort, beauties, and stigmas and the very things people are surrounded by form them and shape their encounters with other people. Trollope has already shown this in these weeks' chapters.

You could call Nina thick ethnographic study, Bourdieu style, except that there's another important vein or stain in Nina which all introductions should bring up: it's high romance and it's written as a novella which Trollope defined as "novels which finish in less than 300 pages." I'll write separately about this.

Ellen

Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004
Subject: [trollope-l] Nina Balatka, Introduction: AT's decision to go anonymous and Robert Tracey's Preface
Reply-To: trollope-l@yahoogroups.com

People discussing Nina usually bring up pretty early in their discussion Trollope's decision to go anonymous. It was the first of a number of small novels which he published anonymously. Since his name would sell books and he is presented as writing for money more than any other reason, it's felt this behavior is somehow incompatible with a professional writer writing for money.

Tracy plunges into the issue in the second paragraph of his introduction. He goes through the usual explanation: Trollope himself said he was testing to see whether his name was selling books and wanted to challenge himself to sell books without a name; he also meant to change

"not only my manner of language, but my manner of story-telling also ... English life in them there was none. There was more of romance proper than is usual with me. And I made an attempt at local colouring ... which has not been usual with me. In all this I am confident that I was in some measure successful. In the loves, and fears, and hatreds, of both Nina and Linda, there is much that is pathetic" (from his Autobiography).

Tracy reads all this as a common ploy which many professional writers do today: if you want to write a different kind of book, one which does not fit your readers' expectations, and particularly one which may hurt their self-image connected with a certain type of reading, you publish with a pseudonym. I'll instance Suzy McKee Charnas who publishes serious feminist fantasy under Charnas, but under another name very sexy gothic fiction (most unfeminist). Doris Lessing, Agatha Christie are more famous writers who produced fiction which would not please their regular audience under another name. Trollope wanted to free himself of the Barsetshire type text and the images and values associated with it. When much of the content and style still gave him away and he was immediately "found out," and (worse yet) the books didn't sell to let's say another target audience, he "missed his object" (these are his words from his Autobiography). Stubbornly, he carried on and published anonymously a number of other novellas which were distinctly different in tone and mode (if not basic outlook, repeating deep psychological patterns and idiolect) from the prosaic semi-realistic English courtship and political novels he also carried on producing. Not all of these are romances; they include The Fixed Period. Not all of them defy his usual readership by being romantic: Dr Wortle's School is about a non-married couple. But generally speaking they are all short, "finish within 300 pages."

Trollope wrote about romance in a perceptive article on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter which ought to be better known (but isn't). In this article he defined the type as pathetic (in the old-fashioned sense of the term, producing pathos), presenting strong states of mind, melodramatic, semi-fantastic in feel, like a fairy tale. All of which I would say Hawthorne's novels are -- perhaps Trollope was irritated by Hawthorne's often quoted description of his fiction as so much roast beef.

Trollope is not often credited with real artistry, but he had it. Another element important in these books is size. He's got to tell his story in less than 300 pages and he enjoys the challenge. What he does is plunge and simplify. He follows (though he probably didn't read) what writers like James and Wharton and some French writers define as the nouvelle, a short fiction popular in the period. James wrote a number, one of them, Washington Square, very close in conception and plot-design to Harry Humblethwaite, one of Trollope's early novellas in the Nina way. Note that when Nina opens the situation is set up: Nina has already given herself to AT; AT already asserts his ownership over her; the intense tenacious quarrel over papers and money and property (recalling Miss Mackenzie) is already set up. None of this is particularly romantic; it's sordid and (if I may be allowed a contemporary term I feel is right) vulgar and coarse. We also see once again (and very common this is in Trollope) that the woman is placed in the impossible situation of giving up her autonomy to a man unconditionally at the same time as he punishes her with suspicions and distrust, partly sexually-rooted, partly having to do with his own social insecurities. She has no private space that is recognized; whatever she does, she's damned. Virtue seems to consist of enacting self-abnegation demanded by harsh mores which themselves are used to imprison and punish women on behalf of keeping males in power and their egos safe and stroked. We are already seeing poor Nina suffering.

In Nina's case this will precipitate a situation which recurs in these novellas: a slip or slide into near insanity, being cut off from other people and all perspective which can support them. Cousin Henry creates a variant on this for a male. Suicide and madness are just two probable results; these are violent stories, emotionally violent, with the comedy often revealing things about human nature prosaic realism keeps more subtle or buried and qualifies. Fear of humiliation and degradation is central to The Last Chronicle but only as people experience them through the social mores of a drawing room (or in our world an office). Such barriers are removed when we are in the world of romance and fantasy.

Trollope wanted to remove them. He also enjoyed writing in this more simplified large stroke way. A great energy and charge comes out of these fictions. Not all end unhappily: The Warden (an early political version) and The Golden Lion (downright Oedipal with father and son at one another over a young girl) are sunlit and reaffirm the better aspects of human nature under pressure.

Tracy in his introduction also goes over how Trollope could respond deeply to places very different than the English middling milieu. He stayed only briefly in Prague and Nurembourg. Tracy goes over the characters but as this will probably be much of what we'll talk about I pass over this to quote Tracy that the drama of this book and Linda is "interior:" they are "intense personal dramas of isolation" [so too is Cousin Henry]. He goes over how Trollope portrays Jews and thinks it is not as tolerant or open-minded as has been suggested. There is more alienation and the portrait of Anton is more offputting (he's cruel) than has been admitted. Tracy then goes over the specifics of Linda, particularly how religious thought can be dangerous [in this novella it plays into hatred of life and fear and envy of sex, a desire to punish a girl for erotic passion by forcing her to go to bed with an old man who is distasteful to her]. I notice Tracy uses the Rapunzel story for Linda; that is apt. Tracy ends with some parallels with Kafka.

Not Trollopian at all? I'd say this is quintessential Trollope, Trollope ripping himself open before us, to use a feminine metaphor, taking the veil off. No wonder he wanted anonymity. But those who had read him with care before were not fooled. With the important differences of length (for mode), politics (Irish), and a male central consciousness), Nina is a rewrite of The Macdermots of Ballycloran. The Macdermots ended tragically and once Trollope got confused and wrote that Nina did.

Trollope thought very highly of Nina. In his Autobiography he rates it above The Eustace Diamonds which he appears to think of as commercialized pandering formulaic fiction. He is a perverse kind of man because he was angry at the success of Eustace and how readers liked his Lizzie. Many of his readers have not agreed with him and have read him against the grain consciously and unconsciously on more issues than than this one.

Nonetheless I think were Andrew Davies to dare to make a film of this one it would be compelling and make oodles of money. It hits just about every hot button of our unhappily ugly time.

Cheers to all,
Ellen

Homesite Picture: Josef Mánes's The Dressmaker

To Trollope-l

July 18, 2004

Re: Homesite Picture: Josef Mánes's The Dressmaker

Today is the first day of our scheduled reading and discussion of Trollope's Nina Balatka and I've put up an appropriate image to start us off. It's on the cover of the recent Oxford World Classics edition of Nina and Linda introduced and edited by Robert Tracy:

We'll be putting up some other images of Prague, the Charles Bridge and its statues during the next few weeks. If I come across any more pictures appropriate to James's fiction I'll put them up. I'll alternate these with images from George Housman Thomas's illustrations for The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Ellen

To Trollope-l

Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004
Subject: [trollope-l] Marriage boundaries in Trollope
Reply-To: trollope-l@yahoogroups.com

While reading Nina Balatka it occurred to me that there are certain marriage boundaries in Trollope. For instance any British citizen who is a member of the Church of England, so far as I can recall, marries only another British member of the Church of England. However, a Roman Catholic or an American may marry a Jew. We have as our prime example Phineas Finn, who is a Catholic, and Marie Goesler. Another example is Hamilton Fisker, an American, and Marie Melmotte. Both of the ladies involved are hinted to be Jewish; so we might as well accept that they are. Thus Trollope does condone cross-cultured marriages, but they are okay as long as one participant is not a British citizen and a member of the Church of England. However, later on, in The Duke's Children nationality fades as a barrier, although I suspect the religious barrier is as strong as ever.

One other point about Nina Balatka: Mme Zamenoy, as Ellen has suggested elsewhere, is very similar to Mrs. Proudie. One very close similarity is the scene in _Nina_ where Mme. Zamenoy sits in a business meeting with her husband and Anton Trendellsohn and takes over the conversation much in the way Mrs. Proudie does when Mr. Crawley comes to visit Bishop Proudie. That scene alone should reveal the authorship of Nine Balatka no matter how much Trollope wanted his authorship kept a secret.

Sig

Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004
Subject: [trollope-l] Marriage boundaries in Trollope & Nina
Reply-To: trollope-l@yahoogroups.com

Although Trollope leaves Madame Max Goesler's own background somewhat ambiguous, the hints are continual that she is a Jewess. I believe there is a passage in one of the Palliser novels where we are given very strong hints (so to speak), where her parentage is brought out. Today I found the passage where we are told her first husband was a Bohemian Jewish man. There is much ambiguity and the portrait is changed: when we first met her we are told she is paying someone off to stay away; it's not clear whether she married him or he was just a lover she mistakenly became too publicly attached to. In Phineas Redux this remittance man is dropped and we are almost to think Madame Max is a near virgin, certainly utterly chaste since her first widowhood. Trollope changed his mind how he would use her and when he decided to figure her centrally in his novels, he "cleaned" her background up to make it acceptable to his wide readership. Much of the description of her (dark hair, olive skin [he avoid swarthy], dark eyes, thin) is intended to make us feel she is a Jewess. Unhappily for some Lady Glen will in irritated moods refer to her denigratingly as that Jewess or Jewish.

That Trollope keeps the marriage of Phineas and Madame Max offstage is part of this ambiguity. He does the same with Melmotte -- keep the man's background ambiguous. I suggest the desire for explicitness here goes against the intended grain of the text. Mullen has Madame Max as only married to a Jewish man because there is no explicit definite line in Phineas Finn. In another place though he concedes ambiguity

One of the fine things about Nina is the rounded portrait of Anton and Trollope's empathy with him and also the intermarriage. People who want to argue that Trollope was not himself anti-semitic point to Nina, Madame Max and Breghert. Alas, there is a weight of evidence preponderating on the side of anti-semitism. Still we do have AT and Marie Finn and Breghert.

I suggest that were there to be a modern film adaptation you would get this "ambiguity" turned into something definite which would speak well for Trollope.

It's interesting a central hero for Trollope with whom he empathizes is an upstart Irish Catholic and a central heroine started life out as a half-Jewish (something tells me there's a detail which makes one of her parents Jewish) sophisticated demi-monde. I'm one of those regret the changes Trollope made in this heroine as well as in Lady Glencora after CYFH?.

Ellen