Written 1860 (19 - 29 July)
Serialized 1861 (5, 12, 19 January), The London Review as
"The Banks of the Jordan", Rejected by Cornhill
Published in a book 1863 (February),
Tales of All Countries: Second Series, Chapman and Hall
January 11, 1998
Re: "Short Stories:" A Ride Across Palestine & Mrs General Talboys
I'd like to suggest both the above stories are _risque_; as I have only gotten half-way through the second, I'll leave it for someone else to comment on, but would like to say they seem to me a pair.
Robert warned us to be careful in talking about "Palestine" lest we offend, and, according to Sutherland, both the above stories offended the periodical audience, though in the notes what is mentioned is the apparent scepticism of the first story. I don't see scepticism in it, but rather a robust appreciation of the real. Trollope is saying he does not need to leave his belief in the realm of the mystic and magical; his belief is reinforced by seeing the real place, sordid, uncertain, and yet beautiful in a strange way. I thought the description of the place was again very well done. I wondered about this bathing in the Jordan. Is there some custom or religious belief which says people who go to the Jordan ought to bathe in it? This is not a rhetorical question.
Still what Robert was talking about was probably not the religious motifs of the story (of which there are a number--as Trollope differentiates Christians, and talks of the Islamic and other visitors to Palestine); I assume he was talking about the curious sex.
Now I want to tell the story of what happened the first time I taught this story a couple of years ago. I had begun to discuss Trollope's use of the narrator as a central device in the story, when a female student raised her hand after our short talk was over (in this class I made each student give a 5-10 minute talk, one to a text and we had had a talk on this story), and with a puzzled look at our speaker who had presented the story as about "the stifled independent woman", she said she read the story as one which presented homosexual love in a disguised form. The girl who had given the talk had read the story as one of a young woman fleeing one man who has control over who, who disguises herself as a man to try to gain some freedom of movement; the young woman is then picked up by another man, who is sexually attracted to her because he instinctively feels she is a woman despite her disguise, and the denouement is a comeuppance for the narrator in more ways than one. Still the girl giving the talk did not focus on the narrator as the interesting person in the story, but the young woman disguised as a young man.
Well, several students then said, yes, I read it as homosexual, especially the part about Mr Smith having a problem he was going to tell Mr Jones about, but didn't have the courage. The problem was going to be a revelation of gayness. My students awaited a coming out of the closet. I would like to say the first time I read this story this never entered my mind. Still I took it in and together the class went over this story from this point of view. I now think Trollope does play upon the sexual ambiguity of gender.
To sum up the evidence: Trollope has a limited 1st person narrator who never tells us his name but tells us to call him Mr Jones. Jones meets one Mr Smith to whom he is intensely drawn, partly, as we are told in repeated hints, because Mr Smith seems effeminate. Now there are many hints in the story which can lead the reader to surmize Smith is a woman: Smith will not bathe naked with Jones in the Jordan; Smith sleeps apart from Jones; Smith's hands are feminine; Smith is "feminine" in manners, soft and quiet; Smith's hand on Jones's forehead is feminine; Smith takes Jones's head in "his" lap; Smith tires easily and needs help off his horse.
My way of reading this is that Trollope is writing a risqué story of heterosexual intimacy outside marriage. I see the story as emphatically also about the narrator--and possibly about an adventure based on one of Trollope's own while he travelled without his wife, Rose. For example, Jones offers to help Smith with the "galled skin" between his/her legs from the hard saddle; he wants to rub her sore places with brandy-- there is much made of this business of rubbing. Jones goes to bathe naked in front of Smith (who does turn away or stand off a bit); Jones wonders why Smith sleeps apart and wishes he wouldn't; one evening Jones lies in Smith's lap lingeringly; it is then he tells us he is falling in love with Smith. Now at the opening of the adventure together Smith asks Jones if he is married; Jones says no; at the end Jones must tell the truth and he feels very guilty. I see the final line about Jones's "blindness" as about more than Smith's deceiving Jones (which is how Jones means the line); it is also about how he deceived her--and is untruthful with himself about his own motives.
Sutherland says that this daring heterosexual intimacy, together with the realistic presentation of Palestine--and as in the previous stories we have read Trollope tells us we cannot know for sure whether what the Bible says occurred in a given place occurred in the way it is written down--shocked Trollope's first readers and made the story hard to place. I had read the story as partially autobiographic: some of Trollope's stories reflect real incidents that happened to him; he travelled alone, and like Jones occasionally lied and found himself deeper in than he realized (such a story is "Journey to Panama"); perhaps Trollope hurt himself or his companion by a lie. At the end of his _Autobiography_ Trollope tells us he has not told of us of his inner life, with a specific reference to how attractive he finds women. I saw it--as I still do--and as the girl student who gave the talk in my class that day, a story of a young woman wants to escape an obdurate uncle and see a bit of the world, and finds she cannot escape her sex easily because of the way the world is organized, because of her own background, and because she half falls in love with Jones herself. I'm not sure it is really about the stifling of an independent women, but certainly that can easily be read as in the story without forcing any details.
But my students saw in Smith's telling Jones he/she had a problem he/she would tell Jones about eventually a story of homo- or bisexuality. And they saw in Jones's attraction to Smith a depiction of homosexual love, and to be sure one can read it this way until the revelation of Smith as Julia Weston. There is certainly cross-dressing here. Again I don't think one needs to read any details into the story to see it as delving both homosexual and heterosexual impulses.
At any rate whatever "take" one has, this story certainly puts paid to the notion that Victorians did not write about sex in a sophisticated manner. It also challenges the notion that Victorians couldn't think about sex in a subtle manner because they were so censured from a young age. Finally, it suggests that by no means did they believe that sex between two middle class adults could only occur inside marriage.
Apart from all this what I like about the story is its creation of a mood. It is a strange mood, ambiguous, filled with hints of all sorts, sensual and otherwise, and is only matched in this vein by "A Journey to Panama." Too bad Trollope covered the tracks of his private existence so very well.
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 11:05:26 -0500 (EST) At 11:07 PM 1/11/98, Ellen wrote:
My way of reading this is that Trollope is writing a risqué story of
heterosexual intimacy outside marriage. I see the story as emphatically
also about the narrator--and possibly about an adventure based on
one of Trollope's own while he travelled without his wife, Rose." When I read "A Ride Across Palestine," I read the story as a closet
homoerotic fantasy, because the notion that the narrator could spend as much
time as he did in fairly intimate circumstances with a woman disguised as a
man without realizing that she was a woman was unrealistic at best. I was
convinced that the disguise aspect was merely a smokescreen. I didn't even
think of Ellen's point that the disguise story was designed to hide an
adulterous heterosexual relationship, but now I suspect that she is right.
That makes the narrator's telling Mr. Smith that he wasn't married
understandable. Why would he try to hide the fact that he is married from a
male stranger? His ostensible reason is flimsy at best. Furthermore the
slightly concealed love affair makes Miss Weston's and her uncle's anger
toward the narrator reasonable. When John Lennon was asked about the song
Norwegian Wood, he said that he was trying to write about an affair without
his wife knowing about it. I doubt if Cynthia Lennon was fooled for a
second. I also doubt if Trollope put one over on his wife either.
I can't help wondering how
Trollope would have reacted to such forthright female independence. The
narrator of "A Ride Across Palestine," with his attraction to female
helplessness, would have been appalled, but Trollope is ironic about the
narrator. Since I probably like the narrator less than Trollope does, I
find it impossible to decide how harshly Trollope wants us to judge him. It
does seem to me that Trollope has serious reservations about the young man.
From: Jo Ann Citron I think this story is an unholy mess and that Trollope never decided what
it was going to be about. I have a hard time thinking of it as a
homoerotic fantasy, since the narrator's feelings for Smith are hardly
disguised. Trollope seems to want the reader to figure out fairly early on
that Smith is a woman -- I realized it the first time that the narrator
used words like "wife" and "mother" in connection with Smith's behavior,
and then realized that there were several obvious clues prior to that. Not
really very subtle.
In terms of gender, I found this to be a story that tries to erase women,
first disguising the only woman in the foreground as a man, then
eliminating the existence of the narrator's wife and family, and finally --
and most importantly -- refusing to engage with the woman's story. This is
what I disliked most about the narrator and the tale (and Trollope, for
writing it this way). What I really want to hear about in all of this is
the woman. Who is she? What has happened to her? Why has she fled from
her uncle? What has he done to her? Is there a forced marriage in the
offing, or what? What fate will she suffer. The narrator doesn't tell us
and isn't interested. The only thing he cares about is that he has been
embarrassed and placed in an awkward position. He confesses to enough
feeling for this woman that he would be uncomfortable if his wife were to
have a window into his mind; yet he doesn't raise a finger to help or to
protect her. Doesn't show the least curiosity about her circumstances.
Thinks only of himself. I ask myself, "what is the point of the tale?"
And the only answer I can supply is that Trollope is playing a little
mystery/puzzle game with the reader. Or that he is self-consciously
working inside a tradition of stories in which gender is obscured by dress
-- one thinks immediately of Collins' NO NAME (1862). Of course, this
story pre-dates Collins' by 2 years.
In his intro to the OUP edition, Sutherland calls the story "a powerful
performance" though acknowledging that it is "marred" by the "theatrical"
entrance of the uncle at the end. That hardly solves the aesthetic. For
good or ill, the appearance of the uncle is what defines the tale.
Here's an interesting exercise for the list: Eliminate the scene with the
uncle and pretend that the story is unfinished. Pretend that the story was
unfinished at Trollope's death and that he got Smith and Jones as far as
the quay where they are waiting to sail in the morning. Now, ask yourself,
"What is this story about?" I eagerly look forward to listmembers' posts
in response. Really. I'm serious about this.
Jo Ann Citron Re: "A Ride to Palestine" and The Unreliable Narrator in Trollope's Short Stories
I have an answer to Jo Ann's question, "What is the story about?"
though I can only answer it if I am allowed to keep Trollope's
frame for his story: it is about the narrato. Jo Ann may
want to know about the Mr Smith aka Julia Weston, but the
story does not "work" this way. As I suggested I think the
way to read this story is as emphatically about the
narrator and as a displaced reflection of a love affair Trollope
almost had or had with another woman; I incline to the almost
had for this actual situation of this story is a near love
affair--and this is repeated in "Journey to Panama".
But how do we make sense of the story as a story, as
a work of art and not a fragment broken off from a man's
autobiography disguised? Well first I would refer to James
Kincaid's book on Trollope where he argues a central factor
in the complex moods, psychological depths, and popularity
of Trollope's novels may be found in his many different uses
of the narrator throughout his novels: as with Fielding and
Thackeray, it is this presence in the stories which we
enjoy; it is he who guides, cajoles, amuses, and points
the ironies for us. In his short stories, Trollope takes
this further: he plays with an unreliable narrator
who cannot only not see the events that are occurring
in front of him (which anyone with half a brain and
alert to the most obvious hints would), but remains
blind to his own lack of understanding of the
emotions of the people around him, and most
importantly, of his own moral failings. The stories
are small playgrounds or toys for Trollope: in them he can
play with technique as well as present risqué material.
This I take it is the point of "John Bull on the Guadilquavir".
Pomfret is good-natured and well-meaning, but as a young
man he was an ass. In this story we have the older Pomfret
tell the story from the point of view of the younger and
from present time. I think the story does not succeed
because in order to keep the irony up, the narrator is
not allowed to see inside his own mistakes so the
older man cannot tell us the man he and Johnson humiliate
is a count until much later; he cannot analyze himself
when young or the comedy is lost. This makes us
read the older man as still dense, and we are then
hard put to believe Maria could be happy with this
man now though it's clear we are to see that the
young Maria saw further into the heart of the the
insensitive foolishly romantic clown to find some
solid gold therein. This story could not be told from Maria's
point of view; its moral pattern would be lost.
Another story which uses point of view in a comic and
ironic way if "The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box";
if told from another point of view the story would not
exist. The puzzle is in the mind of the narrator.
To turn to "A Ride Across Palestine." As an exercise
retell the story from Mr Smith or Julia Weston's point
of view and we have another story. We have in fact
the story Jo Ann wishes Trollope had written, and the
story my student who gave the talk inferred from the
narrator by unconsciously transposing the perspective
and concentrating on Miss Weston. But that is not the
central story Trollope wanted to tell. It is the periferal
story, the one on the margines. The point of using
an ironic perspective (a naive narrator or one who
gets things wrong) is this allows the writer to tell more
than one story at a time. There is the story we
infer from the sidelines of the narrator's eye, and
there is the narrator's story which we see better
than the narrator. In this case Trollope is
quietly is coming to terms with his own experience
of a near liaison--or a dream he had of
one, hard to say--his blindness, his guilt,
his queasiness about his behavior. He is also presenting
some highly sensual material about how he was physically
drawn to the flesh of this woman-man, and the only way
he could do this is to present her in disguise.
Trollope also instinctively went for the piquant in this story.
The whole experience is slightly disturbing. Here is
Trollope or his narrator in the land in which the whole
story of Christianity is said to have occurred. And what
is it? a beggar-ridden bleak spot to go to which one
must pay a tariff. The Jordan is a mud puddle. We
get odd jokes using Bible phrases: "Moab is my wash-pot
and over Edom will I cast out my shoe!" Trollope insists
that seeing "the places and putting my hands upon the
spots" as they really are makes his "associations and
veneration" stronger by rivetting these to actual
experience and memory, but he does not deny they
also "dispel and associations and veneration of one's
childhood" (p 195). I would also take the opening
apparently careless reference to Christ as a deliberate
reference to the narrator's and Trollope's own
experience in this story:
It seems hard to call Mr Smith "the Devil," but this
is a story of how the narrator was tempted and was
in spirit and almost in the flesh unfaithful to his wife.
Another interesting aspect of the narrators in Trollope's
short stories is how he tells us to call the narrator
a certain name without affirming that is the narrator's
name. Why? Because he wants the ambiguity,
to hint the narrator is also a version of himself.
The question remains whether the story is also about
bisexuality or homosexuality. John Mize says this
leapt to mind:
A large number of students in 2 classes of 22 a piece
read the story in the above way two years ago. Jo Ann
says she wasn't fooled for a minute; from the beginning
she knew we had a woman dressed as a man. I have
to admit the first time I read this story the ending came
as a surprize. I'm afraid I didn't put the clues together
until the man said: "I have to charge you... with
eloping with my niece..." (p. 204). But then the first
time I read Emma I didn't guess Frank Churchill and
Jane Fairfax were secret lovers until Jane Austen placed
me in Knightley's mind and I watched them play with
alphabets.
Well how did others fare? Did you guess it was a woman
from the start? Did you see this as a homo- or bisexual
paradigm? Were you as much in the dark as the narrator?
Ellen Moody
From: Jo Ann Citron I don't agree with Ellen Moody that the way to read "A Ride to Palestine"
is as the thinly disguised story of an affair that Trollope himself either
had or fantasized about. Whether the story can stand on its own must
depend on factors apart from whatever autobiographical elements it may
contain. Otherwise it becomes a source for biographical information, not
literature. Moreover, the autobiographical aspects of the tale remain
wholly speculative and therefore insufficient to supply the foundation for
solid critical argument.
Sutherland's introduction to the OUP edition emphasizes that Trollope
encountered difficulties with his editors over the risque nature of some of
his situations. It's clear from The Vicar of Bullhampton that Trollope
could have gone farther than he did, and would have done had public opinion
permitted. With this in mind, it's possible to argue that perhaps Trollope
felt that the foreign setting allowed him more latitude to explore behavior
that would be unacceptable among upstanding English folk and that "A Ride
to Palestine" dresses up otherwise unthinkable behavior with clear sexual
overtones. Wish fulfillment no doubt; but certainly not necessarily
Trollope's own.
Ellen misunderstands my comments when she describes the story I wanted
Trollope to tell for I'm not at all sure what that story would be. As a
reader, I can say that I was more interested in Miss Weston than Trollope
seems to have been. I agree with Ellen that Trollope is interested in the
narrator and that the story must, ultimately, be his. But I'm still no
closer to knowing what that is. Were the narrator's story clearer, I might
be less interested in Miss Weston.
I also agree with Ellen that the story is filled with fascinating religious
(for lack of a more precise word) stuff about the Holy Land and that the
tale offers a serious and significant interrogation of contemporary
practices, if not beliefs. But I reiterate my initial critical judgment
that the story is a mess. For this very rich material about the Holy Land
never becomes the focal point of the tale, which allows itself to become
distracted over the gender disguise issue. And I continue to feel that the
uncle's entrance is the single most jarring note.
Imagine for a moment that the uncle never returns to the quay and that all
that silly melodrama at the end is blue-penciled out. And imagine an
ending that has the woman revealing her identity to the narrator, briefly
describing her motivation, and getting on the boat alone, leaving the
narrator to follow when he might. The narrator must then *engage* with his
experience (instead of engaging pointlessly with the uncle). With such an
ending the tale becomes more emphatically about the narrator -- the
direction Ellen sees the tale taking.
Yes, my criticisms and suggestions about the story change it. But not
because I want Trollope to write MY story. I just want him to do a better
job with his. Trollope was a great novelist but he was not a great writer
of short stories. He could have used a good editor.
To: trollope-l@teleport.com Bart says his copy of this "strange story" has no "explanation" so he
assumes "the experts don't know what was Trollope's intent." I would
say first no "expert" can know the author's deepest intents; often
the author doesn't know these. But, out of curiosity, I went to
look at the group of biographers I own to see what if anything
they had to say about this story. Interesting, just about every
book had a page or more on it. This is unusual; often a Trollope
story gets one or two sentences. Several of them (Super, Hall,
Hennessey and Mullen) devote their pages to the outrage the
original readers of this and "Mrs General Talboys" felt. There
were apparently many letters to the editor. One man wrote he
destroyed the supplement and could not imagine how the editor
had permitted such stories which bore witness to "such a morbid
imagination" and "low tone of morals" to be printed in a magazine
meant for his wife and children too.
However, a different tack is taken by Glendinning and Sutherland.
Sutherland takes the view I suggested: the gaps, curiosities,
displacements are probably rooted in Trollope's autobiography.
Again and again in Sutherland's volume he says the stories are
highly autobiographical; in some cases Sutherland hunts up
the analogy in Trollope's life; in this case Trollope left no trace
of what happened except the story. Glendinnning talks about
Trollope's sensual imagination. She spends a couple of pages
quoting Trollope's descriptions of women, especially, interestingly,
one in The Bertrams which is one of those novels into which
Trollope put some of his experiences in travelling.
In none of my published sources (books and books of essays) did
I find the slightest mention of homosexuality or bisexuality
or any idea that Trollope meant to or did present the amibiguity
of gender (which, by-the-bye, is a phrase I got from one of
my students).
Bart, that's what the "experts" have to offer by way of
explanation.
Later tonight I'll try to say something about the "coarse"
and "indelicate" (so the readers called it, according to
Hall, Super, Hennessey and Mullen) "Mrs General Talboys."
Ellen
To Trollope-L
January 13, 1998
Re: "Short Story:" A Ride Across Palestine
This is to say that when I said this story may be explained
in part as a mirror of Trollope's autobiography that was
not to denigrate it. I like it. I think it fascinating,
rich, full, curious. I brought in the autobiography
here as I did to explain some of the power and
force of the Gilmore figure in The Vicar of Bullhampton. I find
autobiography to be the most illuminating way to
explain a writer's work; it takes us to its roots of
his memory and imagination in his experience
of life. I think Trollope's short stories are often
more interesting in some ways than many of
his novels, and if you don't have a preconceiv
ed
idea of what a short story should -- and some
of us since Katherine Mansfield's period do -- I
find them very artful. A number are very
great (e.g., "Malachi's Cove," "Aaron Trowe,"
"Returning Home," "The Spotted Dog,"
"The Panjandrum," "Why Frau Frohman
Raised her Prices," "Thompson Hall.").
They allowed Trollope to get out of the
straitjacket of Victorian prudery.
We do have a have a beautifully touching one
(which disobeys no tabooes and is
often anthologized) coming up for next week:
"The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne."
Ellen Moody
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 10:21:56 -0500 (EST) At 10:44 AM 1/12/98 -0500, Bart wrote:
That's the scene that initially convinced me that Trollope was writing about
homosexual attraction. I was sure from almost the first that Smith was a
woman, because the narrator kept going on and on about how feminine Smith
was, how attracted he was to Smith, and he even said that he loved the young
man. If, under these circumstances, Smith had turned out to be a man, the
story would have been an almost explicitly homosexual story, and as such
would have been a scandal. I thought the woman disguised as a man was a fig
leaf designed to save the story from being burned by the public executioner.
The story was written a long time before The City and the Pillar, and Vidal
was blacklisted for years in the U.S. for writing that novel. With the
exception of Walt Whitman and Marlowe's Edward II wanting to frolic with his
Gaveston, I can't think of anything in English written before the 20th
century as explicitly homosexual as Ride Across Palestine would have been if
Smith had been a man. While reading the story I also thought of Charles
Doughty riding around Arabia in disguise so he could visit the Islamic holy
cities which were barred to infidels, so the disguise aspect seemed to fit.
Now I agree with Ellen that Trollope was writing about a real or an imagined
heterosexual love affair. I don't think it matters whether Trollope had the
affair or merely wanted to do so. After all as Jimmy Carter said, "If you
have lust in your heart, it doesn't matter what you do with your loins."
Re: Short Story: "A Ride Across Palestine": Just for Fun
I agree with John and Bart that the scene
where the narrator finds his head in the lap of Mr Smith is
striking. I had found equally striking all the talk about the
saddle bothering Mr Smith and his/her need for a rubdown,
but certainly both trains of thought point either to what
Mr Smith doesn't have or does in his/her lap and between
his/her legs as his/her thighs hold the saddle.
But partly to be difficult, and mostly just for fun, I want
to respond with two poems by John Wilmot, Earl
of Rochester (1647-80) to John Mize's comment:
First "Song:
Love a woman? You're an ass!" by Wilmot, Earl
of Rochester
Love a woman? You're an ass! Let the porter and the groom Farewell, woman! I intend Then give me health,wealth, mirth, and wine, And not to be omitted is the antepenultimate
heroic stanza of his "The Disabled Debauchee:"
Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot, These were published; this was the Restoration (1660-1700)
period in which Aphra Behn wrote some less
frank lesbian and ribald heterosexual
lesbian poetry, one on a night in which
her swain came too soon (very funny but too
long to quote and with no stanza that can
make its point all by itself :) ), and
another as follows:
"Song," The Muses Mercury, "To Mr. J.H.":
Amyntas led me to a Grove, Down there we satt upon the Moss, His Charming Eyes no Aid requir'd Ellen Moody
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 21:46:23 +0000 The postings about this story concentrated on the sexuality rather
than on the racial aspects, and I found them interesting.
As a heterosexual male myself, I tend to believe it is almost
inconceivable that I would ever consider going to sleep in another man's lap - at
least, another heterosexual man's lap that is. It therefore seems likely to
me that Trollope must have intended us to believe one of two possibile
explanations for what happened.
One is that all the hints about the soft feminine appearance indicated
one or both characters knew that one was actually a woman, and there was
some form of hidden flirting going on, which one or both might later be able
to ignore or deny if need be.
The other is a homosexual encounter which explains the denial of
marriage and the subsequent actions. We may not necessarily be talking about an
openly homosexual attraction. especially in Trollope's time but he may
be reliving an encounter as a young man and working out some form of
residual guilt remaining as a result.
I should also mention that the cross dressing was not immediately
apparent to me either - I guessed a few pages before the end, but not earlier
than that.
Robert J Wright Kensington, London W87PB England I thought I'd end this thread with the posting I wrote on this story
three years earlier (September 21, 1995), the original one about my
students' astonishing (to me at the time) response to this story:
Re: Learning From One's Students
They saw you learn from your students, well
today I did. Everyone will recall among
Anthony Trollope's short stories,
the curious mood piece "A Ride Across
Palestine" (also known as "The Banks of
the Jordan). I assigned this together with
"John Bull on the Guadalquivir" partly
to address the question of Trollope's
"ugly" attitude towards Arabs (as in
my class it was called in "An Unprotected
Female"), and partly to begin to discuss
Trollope's use of the narrator as a central
device, presence, & many other things in
his stories. Well, in my second class I
hardly got to the talk about point of
view and uses of irony and emotional
resonance. Someone raised her hand
after our short talk was over, and with
a puzzled look at our speaker, said she
read the story as one which presents homosexual
love in a disguised form. The speaker (a girl)
had focused her talk on "the stifled independent
woman" (very happy to and to compare
it to Trollope's treatment of "An Unprotected
Female"). The speaker had immediately
surmized the story was one of a woman
disguised as a man picked up by another
man who is sexually attracted to her as
a woman through the disguise, and that
was that.
Well, several students then said, yes, I read
it as homosexual, especially the part about
Mr Smith having a problem he was going
to tell Mr Jones about, but didn't have the
courage. The problem was going to be
a revelation of gayness. A coming out
of the closet was awaited by my students.
I got up and we went over this story from
this point of view. I must say it does play
upon the sexual ambiguity of gender. And
it's not just a story of cross-dressing.
To remind everyone, in this piece
Trollope has a limited 1st person narrator
who never tells us his name but tells us to call
him Mr Jones; Jones meets one Mr Smith to whom
he is intensely drawn. There are many hints
in the story which can lead the reader to surmize
Smith is a woman: Smith will not bathe naked
with Jones in the Jordan; Smith sleeps apart
from Jones; Smith's hands are feminine; Smith
is "feminine" in manners, soft and quiet; Jones
is amazed at his liking this "feminine" man; Smith
tires easily and needs help off his horse;
but it's not clear that all readers
would see this, and I confess that on my first
reading I only got it slightly before the uncle
showed up. Those that do catch
the hints or read it the second time after
the revelation that Smith is a woman (as I did) should see
a great deal of daring heterosexual intimacy. Jones offers
to help Smith with the "galled skin" between his/her
legs from the hard saddle; there is talk of rubbing
him/her; Jones goes to bathe naked in front
of Smith (who does turn away or stand off
a bit); Jones wonders why Smith sleeps apart
and wishes he wouldn't; one evening
Jones lies in Smith's lap lingeringly; it is then
he tells us he is falling in love with Smith; Jones
tells Smith he is not married when he is.
Sutherland says that this daring heterosexual
intimacy, together with the realistic presentation
of Palestine--and Trollope
as in previous stories tells the reader we cannot
know for sure whether what was said to have
occurred exactly here exactly did in the way believed
(in other stories he in fact talks of how people want
to delude themselves and guides oblige)--shocked
Trollope's first readers and made the story hard
to place. I had read the story as partially autobiographic;
other of Trollope's stories reflect real incidents that
happened to him; he travelled alone (without his
wife) and perhaps like Jones occasionally lied
and found himself deeper in than he realized,
and hurt himself or his companion by his
prevarication and whatever resulted from
said prevarication. Who knows quite what
Trollope's inner life was all the time; he says at
the end of his Autobiography he has not
told us, and tells us of his attraction to women.
I saw it, as my young female speaker did, as a story of the
stifling of independent women; the young woman
wants to escape an obdurate uncle and see
a bit of the world.
But my students saw in Smith's telling
Jones he/she had a problem he/she would tell Jones
eventually a coming revelation of homosexuality,
and they saw in Jones's attraction to Smith homosexuality.
And they persisted in this and began to talk of transvestism
and prejudice against transvestites and so on.
Now this may tell us more about the culture and public
discourse of 1995 than about Trollope, but I don't
know. When I reread the story in the light of my
students' response, I saw that the story was even
more ambiguous than I had previously thought.
It is androgynous, and maybe they're right;
it is delving both homosexual/erotic and
heterosexual/erotic impulses. But maybe not.
I'm really not sure at all. And among other
things I was asked and was not sure of
an answer for, was, "Would Victorians
have talked of this sort of thing openly had
they seen it? or understood it? I said yes
to the latter and I'm not sure to the former,
but maybe openly only in the privacy of
a bedroom.
Sender: mizej@mailbox.clarke.public.lib.ga.us
From: John Mize
Subject: Short Stories: "A Ride Across Palestine" & "Mrs
General Talboys"
Sender: owner-trollope-l@teleport.com
"Well, several students then said, yes, I read it as homosexual, especially
the part about Mr Smith having a problem he was going to tell Mr Jones
about, but didn't have the courage. The problem was going to be
a revelation of gayness...
Subject: Short Stores: "A Ride Across Palestine" -- A Challenge
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 13:57:24 -0500
jacitron@msn.com
"At any rate I dislike solitude, and especially
travelling solitude, and was, therefore, rather sad at
heart... thinking over my proposed wanderings for
the next few days. Early on the following morning I intended
to start, of course, on horseback, for the Dead Sea,
ithe banks of Jordan, Jericho, and those mountains
of wilderness through which it is supposed that our
Savior wandered forty days when the Devil tempted
him" (p 178).
"When I read 'A Ride Across Palestine', I read
the story as a closet homoerotic fantasy, because the
notion that the narrator could spend as much time as
he did in fairly intimate circumstances with a woman
disguised as a man without realizing that she was a
woman was unrealistic at best. I was convinced that
the disguise aspect was merely a smokescreen."
To: 'Ellen Moody'
Subject: "A Ride to Palestine" and The Unreliable Narrator in Trollope's Short Stories
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 15:55:18 -0500
From: Ellen Moody
Subject: Short Stories: "A Ride Across Palestine"
Sender: owner-trollope-l@teleport.com
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
From: John Mize
Subject: Short Story: "A Ride Aross Palestine'
"In the end, Smith was quite flustered. One reason of course is that
he traveled for a week with a young woman thinking his companion was a
man. But also, could Smith's embarrassment be that he found himself
growing attracted to a man? After all, he fell happily asleep with
his head in the lap of a 'man.'"
"With the exception of Walt Whitman and
Marlowe's Edward II wanting to frolic with his
Gaveston, I can't think of anything in English written
before the 20th century as explicitly homosexual
as Ride Across Palestine would have been if
Smith had been a man"
.
'Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness
The silliest part of God's creation.
Thigns designed for dirty slaves
Druge in fair Aurelia's womb
To get supplies fo rage and graves.
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.
And, if busy love entrenches,
There's a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches" (ca Sept 1680,
The Complete Poem, ed Veith, p 51)
When each the well-looked linkboy strove t'enjoy,
And the best kiss was the deciding lot
Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy
(ca Sept 1680, Vieth 117).
Where all the Trees did shade us;
The Sun it self, though it had Strove,
It could not have betray'd us:
The Place secur'd from humane Eyes,
No other fear allows,
But when the Winds that gently rise,
Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs.
And did begin to play
A Thousand Amorous Tricks, to pass
The heat of all the day.
A many Kisses he did give:
And I return'd the same
Which made me willing to receive
That which I dare not name.
To tell their softning Tale:
On her that was already fir'd,
'Twas Easy to prevaile.
He did but Kiss and Clasp me round,
Whilst those his thoughts Exprest:
And lay'd me gently on the ground:
Ah who can guess the rest?
(1707 first published, to be
found in many modern miscellanies,
and in Janet Todd's recent complete
and selected Aphra Behn volumes)
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
From: Robert Wright
Subject: Short Stories - "A Ride Across Palestine:" Racial Aspects
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~wright
Home
Contact Ellen Moody.
Pagemaster: Jim
Moody.
Page Last Updated 11 January 2003