The “Glass Case” of Anthony Trollope’s World: Reality or Microcosm

If one were to construct a literary hall of fame for 19th-century realists, Anthony Trollope would probably feature in the ranks. His works are routinely commended for their ‘reality-effect’—a mimetic transparency and focus on everyday materiality that gives readers the impression of directly corresponding with real life. Nathaniel Hawthorne famously rhapsodized that Trollope’s writing feels “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about its daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of” (Trollope 1879). In contemporary criticism, Ruth apRoberts exalts how Trollope “makes us forget the words” as we read (The Moral Trollope 22), and James R. Kincaid praises his “plain, nondescript style” for “creating the illusion of direct participation with reality” (The Novels of Anthony Trollope 47). Even Trollope himself lavished scorn upon writers whose stylistic flair interrupts the transparency of their storytelling—Benjamin Disraeli’s prose allegedly carries “the smell of hair oil” (An Autobiography 259)—and seems to cement his own vaunted credibility as a realist emblem. However, a contradiction arises when considering the array of comic, metafictional, and distancing techniques Trollope employs in Barchester Towers, which often challenge—and even break—the novel’s ‘reality effect.’ By examining this paradox at the heart of his storytelling, I hope to present a view of Trollope not as a mimetic realist, but as an author who challenges the limits of realism. Ultimately, I hope to show that Trollope communicates a poetic ethos that matches reality less through unmediated mimicry, and more through a self-conscious embrace of the arbitrary.

In Barthes’s classic essay which originated the concept ‘reality-effect,’ he meditates on the “narrative luxury” that characterizes the work of realist contemporaries such as Flaubert and concludes that “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone” becomes “the very signifier of realism” (The Rustle of Language 148). Any seemingly frivolous or wasteful detail in a scene that may not serve a clear narratological purpose is what creates this ‘reality-effect.’ Indeed, Trollope seems to match this with his seemingly superfluous attention to everyday materiality in Barchester Towers—an attention that does not necessarily serve a proleptic purpose. One example is his description of the Ullathorne Manor, of which he prefaces that “one word must be said” and proceeds to deliver, for the next four pages, what appears to be a frame-by-frame profile of the entire estate. With journalistic precision and verve, he takes it upon himself to inform us of the “three quadrangular windows with stone mullions, each window divided into a larger portion at the bottom, and a smaller portion at the top, and each portion again divided into five by perpendicular stone supporters” (171), as well as hallmarks of the house’s texture: “Strike the wall with your hand, and you will think that the stone has on it no covering, but rub it carefully, and you will find that the colour comes off upon your finger” (172-3). In the absence of meaningful symbolic reference, his lavish descriptions of the manor serve more as aesthetic luxuries than propellers of plot or moral—suggesting that Trollope indeed epitomizes Barthes’s conception of realism.

Another case advanced for Trollope’s realism is his vivid rendering of character psychology. Trollope himself tells us that the distinguished novelist “desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures” (An Autobiography 199-200). Amanda Anderson highlights “the irreducible mediation of morality by psychology” as a “fundamental narrative interest” for Trollope ("Trollope’s Modernity" 511). This awareness of the tension between morality and psychology can be identified at the onset of Barchester Towers, where Dr. Grantly’s grief for his dying father is momentarily overridden by his selfish anticipation for the vacant bishop position, after which he “sank on his knees by the bedside” and “prayed eagerly that his sins might be forgiven him” (7). It is evident in the excruciating miscommunication—or rather, the complete lack of communication—between Eleanor and Mr. Harding regarding Mr. Slope’s letter, which the latter mistakenly interpreted as evidence of a love affair between his daughter and the chaplain, to everyone’s collective distress. In actuality, Eleanor was nauseated by Mr. Slope but found it too painful and unnecessary to “dilate with her father upon what was nauseous,” while the latter, “foolish, weak, loving man, would not say one word, though one word would have cleared up everything” (228). Here it is not so much the letter driving a wedge between the two moral centers of the story, but rather their own modesty, narrowmindedness, and misguided compassion—in other words, their fallacies and habits of mind. This is the attention to psychology that lends credence to Anderson’s claim.

And yet, to exalt character psychology as Trollope’s main project is to overlook the techniques of distance that he consistently employs in portraying his characters, techniques that elevate the novel’s perspective from ‘close psychological voyeur’ to a more detached social panorama. First, it is worth noting the semi-allegorical names of the Barchester Towers cast: the proud Proudies; the spineless Mr. Quiverful; Dr. Grantley, granted luck in life. These names are just realistic enough to be plausible, but are so on-the-nose with regard to character traits that we can almost mechanistically observe Trollope’s design at work. Moreover, although we meet Dr. Grantly via an inside view, the rest of the characters are introduced as set-pieces—where psychological analysis is not absent, but rather generalized into almost diagrammatical profiles of the unique role the character occupies in the novel’s social world. Trollope describes each character, then unleashes them in the novel’s arena, where they play out as they have been described. Mrs. Proudie is “habitually authoritative to all” and “despotic” to her husband (21), a power dynamic immediately clear when the couple introduces themselves, her “in a louder tone” (29). As for Mr. Slope, “though he can stoop to fawn, and stoop low indeed, if need be, he has still within him the power to assume the tyrant;—and with the power he has certainly the wish” (24), a duplicity that is immediately obvious when he both exchanges pleasantries with and tacitly snubs the archdeacon upon first introduction (30). Bertie Stanhope is characterized as a man of “no principle, no regard for others, no self-respect, no desire to be other than a drone in the hive, if only he could, as a drone, get what honey was sufficient for him” (65). Put simply, Bertie exists in a pleasant state of inertia between principle and prejudice, a trait immediately apparent upon his introduction. In the space of one conversation, he manages to fluster the bishop by inquiring about the Jews, tear Mrs. Proudie’s lace train, and pass blame onto the rector—all while remaining entirely affable throughout. In this way Trollope showcases a mode of characterization distinct from psychological intimacy, one that observes its character from above and makes known the act of ‘setting the stage.’

Beyond introductions, of course, this intentional distance between us and the characters is sustained throughout Barchester Towers by way of comedy. Trollope’s narrator routinely pokes fun at his characters—on the topic of Dr. Grantly’s sense of humour, for example, he explains generously: “Not that Archdeacon Grantly was a dull man, but his frolic humours were of a cumbrous kind, and his wit, when he was witty, did not generally extend itself to his auditors” (157). In other words, Archdeacon Grantly was a dull man. Apart from tongue-in-cheek jabs, Trollope also swings the opposite extreme and inflates trivial situations to comic proportions through the epic simile, a memorable instance of which is Mrs. Proudie’s sofa debacle:

We know what was the wrath of Juno when her beauty was despised. We know what storms of passion even celestial minds can yield. As Juno may have looked at Paris on Mount Ida, so did Mrs. Proudie look at Ethelbert Stanhope when he pushed the leg of the sofa into her lace train. (76)

Trollope’s narrator assumes the role of a mock-epic bard, inflating Mrs. Proudie’s woes to ludicrous proportions that betray a thinly veiled judgment of her haughty self-importance. He places the tempest in the teapot, so to speak, encouraging us to revel in laughter at Mrs. Proudie’s expense—displacing us from the complexities of her ‘self’ by presenting her as a caricature. Ultimately, through comic sleights-of-hand, Trollope’s narration distances readers from the action—a technique that contravenes the mimetic realism he is often associated with.

In fact, Trollope even admits that his rendering of character may not adequately match reality:

Mrs. Proudie has not been portrayed in these pages as an agreeable or an amiable lady. There has been no intention to impress the reader much in her favour. It is ordained that all novels should have a male and a female angel, and a male and a female devil. If it be considered that this rule is obeyed in these pages, the latter character must be supposed to have fallen to the lot of Mrs. Proudie. But she was not all devil. There was a heart inside that stiff-ribbed bodice, though not, perhaps, of large dimensions, and certainly not easily accessible. (241)

Here, Trollope tells us plainly that the Mrs. Proudie presented by his narrative is different from the ‘true’ character of Mrs. Proudie—making us aware of an interlocutor between us and the ‘reality’ presented in the story. By tying in ideas of novel theory, moreover, he lays bare the process of writing the story, of constructing this fictive reality, peeling back the husk of the story to reveal the cogs and gears turning underneath. This way, he points out the limits of the novel as a medium and shatters the illusion that we are directly corresponding with reality.

This tendency towards metafiction is another hallmark of Barchester Towers, one that cannot be overlooked when examining Trollope’s relationship with realism. In fact, this stylistic feature was the bugbear of one of Trollope’s most infamous critics, Henry James, who derided Trollope for his “suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe,” and likened his narrative intrusions to “little slaps at credulity” that are “discouraging,” “inexplicable,” and “deliberately inartistic” (Partial Portraits 116). One such ‘slap’ comes immediately after the Stanhopes form the plot to marry Bertie and Eleanor Bold:

Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified. I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other. (112)

Trollope violates one of the most sacred—if unspoken—rules of popular fiction writing: keeping readers guessing about the ending. Rather than allowing the duel for Eleanor’s heart to play out organically and leaving readers in suspense, Trollope explicitly informs us that the two men, who fill so many pages with their scheming, both ultimately fail to win her hand. The ingenuity here is that such an intervention, which somewhat strips the story’s ending of its shock factor, does not detract from the reader’s engagement with the novel. It simply teaches us to invest our interest differently—not with the ultimate fates of the characters, whom he has already painted as comic and mildly ridiculous—but in the craft of the novel as a whole: its rich, thought-provoking interplay of motives, perspectives, and personalities, a quality that does not degrade when the mystery of the plot is revealed.

Apart from narrative intrusion, Trollope also confers a rich metafictional commentary via the story itself—through dialogue, plot, and character. Using Arabin as a spokesperson, for example, Trollope mounts a thinly veiled attack on the business of literary critics: “‘I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition—to thunder forth accusations against men in power; show up the worst side of everything that is produced; to pick holes in every coat…What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing?’” (159). Whether Henry James is one of the targets of this invective or not, the statement certainly indebts us to think twice before we lavish scorn on Trollope’s writing. Another example where Trollope punctures the ‘reality’ of the novel is when, in rejecting Mr. Slope’s hand, Madeline Neroni comments wryly: ‘“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel”’ (211). When the novel ends on a high note, then, with the happy union of Eleanor and Arabin, we cannot fully bring ourselves to celebrate their engagement, for we are made conscious of the marriage plot—not as a representation of real life, but a trope designed to make the book more palatable. There is an attack on form and finality present here—a grim nod to the fact that closure is typically only an invention of fiction—a wishful (and possibly commercial) attempt to foist order upon an inherently orderless reality.

If the marriage between Eleanor and Arabin is not the novel’s prevailing triumph, then, we can read Trollope’s concluding tribute to Mr. Harding to discover who he truly believes to be the novel’s center of gravity:

The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers: not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man, without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn. (424)

Where the other characters in the novel are embroiled ceaselessly in conflict—clerical, professional, romantic, social—Mr. Harding does not play the game to begin with. He not only bows out of the fight against Mr. Quiverfull for his wardenship, but also refuses the preference to become dean, despite the better material comforts either station could offer him. Given that all stories at their core are rooted in conflict, Mr. Harding’s aversion to competition ultimately implies that he has no story to tell. And we feel this—readers are much more intrigued reading about the machinations of characters like the Signora or Mr. Slope who provoke drama for a living, than about a character who simply stays passive on the sidelines. Thus, he can never be a hero in the traditional sense, nor a leader to be mythologized. It is in this not-hero, this rejection of the ‘story,’ where the locus of Trollope’s moral vision rests. He bids us to consider: are ‘plots’ helpful in reality, or might they be better limited to fiction? In reality, how might striving to embroil yourself in ‘plot’ compare to simply settling for peace? The moral vision he imparts here calls into question the nature of storytelling as a whole, prompting us to reflect on the limits of this medium as we contrive to transpose it onto reality.

In a sense, then, perhaps Nathaniel Hawthorne was right to liken Trollope’s fiction to a ‘glass case.’ But it is not the mimetic transparency of ‘glass’ that sells me on the term; it is the latter word. For, as our analysis of Barchester Towers has shown, while Trollope captures certain details and character psychology with journalistic precision, he also makes readers acutely aware of the fact that his novel is merely a model—a microcosm, a hermetically sealed ‘case’ of reality—not reality itself. Through comedy and metafictional commentary, he showcases the artifice that is authorship, makes it the object of scrutiny, and reveals the limits to which stories and plots can map onto what truly matters in life. Real life is not an English novel—it is, more often than not, arbitrary and orderless. Counterintuitively, then, one can even say that by calling attention to the arbitrary, Trollope actually renders realism more realistic.