The Status of Women in Anthony Trollope's Science Fiction

Although we are now well past the seventh decade of the 20^th Century, there may still be some instruction in reflecting on the long-range predictions about the 1980s made by a leading light of English letters. Everybody knows George Orwell’s pessimistic vision 35 years in advance of 1984. Anthony Trollope’s 1880 imaginings a century into the future are familiar to at best a thousandth as many. Trollope was, however, a widely published and sometimes celebrated literary figure. There are more than twenty pages of mostly Trollope works on Amazon.

Trollope gave wonderful descriptions of the lives of Church of England preceptors, deans, archdeacons and bishops, of dukes, lords and ladies, of parliamentarians, heiresses, and fox hunters. He was certainly not following the path blazed by Jules Verne, and did not much influence H.G. Wells. Yet Trollope did write one novel that could be included on a Verne-Wells sort of list: The Fixed Period. Published in England, Germany, and the United States in 1882, its next printing followed 99 years later, perhaps not entirely by coincidence. It is ranked 9,637,496^th in Amazon popularity. 

Inevitably, with his temporal advantage, Orwell gets the technology of the 80’s much more nearly right than does Trollope. Two way televisions, Orwell’s telescreens, were not in fact in much use in the real world 1984, but then Trollope predicted nothing remotely like radio or television. Communication required wires, or the ocean, in the case of the, not further described “water telegraph.” Horses and horse drawn vehicles were still the chief means of road travel in Trollope’s Britainnula of 1980, although there were also moderately fast bicycles and a few small steam carriages. 

What is striking about Trollope’s 1980, however, is how little social and political conditions have altered since 1880. So far as the reader can tell, the structure and functioning of British political institutions have changed scarcely at all in a century. Slavery, although in rapid collapse during Trollope’s own lifetime, has not entirely disappeared from the world scene. A single reference to “communism” carries the implication that it was an aberration of a former colony or two. What Trollope might have intended by “communism” is not very clear, although the “Communist Manifesto” could be found in English in the London of the 1870’s, and someone as well read as Trollope might have known of what subsequently came to be known as the “First International.” 

These errant predictions, however, pale in comparison to his depiction of the status of women in 1980 in that Britainnula that he described as perhaps the most intelligent, educated, and advanced country on Earth. Women were not represented in Britainnula’s legislature or executive, apparently had no vote, and led no significant business. The great pivot in a woman’s life in 1980, as it was in all the novels Trollope set in his own time, was the marriage proposal: its preparation, encouragement or discouragement, and acceptance or rejection (rejection being often only a preliminary to acceptance). 

What makes this surprising is that, as a number of critics have shown, there are some identifiably feminist strains in the Trollope corpus. Some of his heroines were very capable indeed, the “Oil of Lebanon” heiress Martha Dunstable is the prime example, apparently able to oversee a substantial business while seeing through the hypocrisies of fashionable society. Many other Trollope women are morally excellent, and capable in their way, but terribly adverse to asserting themselves or from making waves. In contrast several have a powerful, usually baleful, impact wrought by their crafty manipulation of men. Whatever their capabilities and assertiveness, a clear majority of Trollope’s female characters, at least female characters of the first or second rank in ink, were acutely aware of the injustice, if not the stupidity, of the role assigned to women in Victoria’s England. A cynically worldly wise tertiary female character in Barchester Towers: "you know what freedom a man claims for himself, what slavery he would exact from his wife if he could! And you know also how wives generally obey. Marriage means tyranny on one side and deceit on the other." The more moderate complaint that men, but not women, get to go out in the world and do things appears in one form or another in nearly every Trollope novel.

So why don’t the women of Britainnula (or Britain) get to vote in 1980?  Here is what I think Trollope would reply:

I set out in The Fixed Period to write not-a-love-story. It was to be an idea novel. The idea was the planned, humane, termination of life before the descent into unproductive and miserable old age. I don’t in the end endorse this proposal, but I wanted my protagonist to highlight the good arguments in its favor, while letting the development of the story show that the idea in the real world would encounter insuperable conflicts with human nature. Because I wanted the book to be so focused, I intentionally left other features of the social, moral, and religious landscape pretty much unchanged. I was writing, after all, for 1882.

Still, if I had wanted to opine or was forced to do so, I should say that women ought not be involved in politics. Most women, I think, have neither an aptitude nor an inclination for it. Experiments in this direction would, I think, run afoul of human nature in much the same way as did Birtainnula’s fixed period.

If you are in a generous mood, you might accept my Trollpe’s first paragraph, and reject the second. Wasn’t Trollope too insightful to descend into this Victorian cant? Perhaps you can adduce the opposite of my second paragraph from the Trollope corpus. I would not wholly discount the possibility. My own current take, however, is that Trollope rose only a very modest distance above the prevailing view of women of his time. He thought that it was, should be, and would remain very much a man’s world.  

Like most readers of Trollope who are not writing a dissertation on him, I had, at the time I wrote the above, not read Kept in the Dark, a novel written just after The Fixed Period, and which was appearing in serial form when he died. It may well be Trollope's worst novel. It also brings out his worst anti-feminism. 

The second most villainous villain of the piece is Miss Antifiorla, a false friend of the protagonist, Cecilia. She is ideologically opposed to marriage, or any other significant linkage with a man, until she nearly snags a member of the nobility. When she is jilted, she heads off to America to be a feminist lecturer. We can be sure that much of her lectures whatever their motivation, would make very good sense. I am more and more confident that Trollope would not have agreed.
 
Cecilia was perfectly happy with her husband's role as lord of the relationship until he separated from her for her failing to have told him of a prior engagement to the most villainous of the villains, whom she jilted once she got an intimation of his true character. (The  drawn out saga of all the little circumstances that kept her from telling her husband of this engagement makes the book tiresome.) Finally, to no one's surprise, there is a reconciliation. She apologizes. Days later, he insists on asking for her pardon for sending her away. She will not let him. "No, George, no, don't say so. There has been no mistake. A man should own nothing." ("Own" in the sense of  "admit error.")