{"id":4250,"date":"2020-11-10T10:38:31","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T15:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?p=4250"},"modified":"2020-11-10T10:38:31","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T15:38:31","slug":"mcclain-on-political-and-household-governance-in-trollopes-palliser-novels-proflmcclain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/2020\/11\/10\/mcclain-on-political-and-household-governance-in-trollopes-palliser-novels-proflmcclain\/","title":{"rendered":"McClain on Political and Household Governance in Trollope’s Palliser Novels @ProfLMcClain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linda C. McClain, Boston University School of Law, is publishing A “Woman’s Best Right” – To a Husband or the Ballot?: Political and Household Governance in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels<\/a> in volume 100 of the Boston University Law Review (2020). Here is the abstract.<\/p>\n

The year 2020 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 2018, the United Kingdom marked the one hundredth anniversary of some women securing the right to vote in parliamentary elections and the ninetieth anniversary of women securing the right to vote on the same terms as men. People observing the Nineteenth Amendment\u2019s centenary may have difficulty understanding why it required such a lengthy campaign. One influential rationale in both the United Kingdom and the United States was domestic gender ideology about men\u2019s and women\u2019s separate spheres and destinies. This ideology included the societal premise where the husband was the legal and political representative of the household and extending women\u2019s rights\u2014whether in the realm of marriage or of political life\u2014would disrupt domestic and political order. This Article argues that an illuminating window on how such gender ideology bore on the struggle for women\u2019s political rights is the mid-Victorian British author Anthony Trollope\u2019s famous political novels, the Palliser series. These novels overlap with the pioneering phase of the women\u2019s rights campaign in Britain and a key period of legislative debates over reforming marriage law. This Article looks at how the Woman Question (as mid-Victorians called it), including the question of women\u2019s political rights, featured in these novels. In his fiction and nonfiction, Trollope expressed decided views about the Woman Question, insisting that a woman\u2019s \u201cbest right\u201d was the right to a husband, rather than to the ballot or greater employment. However, the evident tension between such views and the rich portraiture of Trollope\u2019s female characters\u2014including in the Palliser series\u2014suggests an intriguing dialectic between espousing and subverting Victorian ideals about womanhood. Examining the first three novels in the series, Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, and Phineas Redux, this Article shows how they link matters of public power and political rule to private power and household rule. The novels gesture toward parliamentary debates over the Woman Question, but, by comparison with Trollope\u2019s detailed creation of parliamentary debates with real-world parallels, do not include debates over woman suffrage or the various marriage law\u2013reform bills that failed or succeeded. Even so, this Article shows that the characters in the Palliser novels are mindful of, and constrained by, the marriage law of the time, including husbandly prerogatives of household rule, wifely duties of obedience, and women\u2019s limited options for exiting a troubled marriage. Through analyzing the various marital relationships formed in these novels, as well as other familial relationships and friendships, this Article identifies how legal and social rules about gender roles shape the characters\u2019 connections to political and household power. Trollope\u2019s female characters act in a social context in which marriage is the expected \u201ccareer\u201d for women, even as some of them experience ambition for a political career or occupation other than\u2014or in addition to\u2014marriage. The novels also explore women\u2019s limited ability to exit disastrous marriages, even as they include examples of relatively egalitarian marriages that seem to transcend models of husbandly rule and wifely submission. This Article\u2019s close reading of the novels is augmented by literary criticism on Trollope and some contemporaneous writings by nineteenth-century feminists, which provide a counter to Trollope\u2019s portrayal of the feminist positions in the Palliser novels. Because Trollope believed that his novels taught important moral lessons about love, marriage, and the legal and political issues of his day, this Article also considers how Trollope\u2019s complicated stance toward the Woman Question shaped the lessons taught in the Palliser novels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Download the article from SSRN at the link.<\/p>\n\n

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Linda C. McClain, Boston University School of Law, is publishing A “Woman’s Best Right” – To a Husband or the Ballot?: Political and Household Governance in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels in volume 100 of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[575,3],"tags":[576,545,577],"class_list":["post-4250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthony-trollope","category-law-and-literature","tag-anthony-trollope","tag-law-and-literature","tag-womens-rights-in-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pasVL2-16y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4251,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250\/revisions\/4251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}