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Article Excerpt
Cathrine O. Frank Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux
Phineas Redux (1874), the fourth of Anthony Trollope's "political" novels, depicts several unions between parties who remain formally tied to one another although they have no affective bond. Two failing marriages are dissolved, but actual divorce is never mooted. Debate over disestablishment of the Anglican Church opens the novel, but formal interest in the separation of church and state is supplanted by a murder trial and barely resurrected. And in the breach between these parties stands Phineas Finn, the novel's Catholic, Irish hero. This paper argues that the novel's early focus on unsuccessful marriages voices parallel albeit unspoken concerns about "Home" Rule and England's increasingly tenuous union with Ireland. More broadly, it suggests that through Phineas's trial initially political questions of church versus state authority governing the legitimacy of these unions are transformed into personal ones of conscience and feeling. This internalization of the political becomes an aspect of character formation that raises the questions of how law transforms national politics into personal conviction and how literature uses law to develop its characters.
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Phineas Redux (1874), the fourth of Anthony Trollope's "political" novels, depicts several unions between parties who remain formally tied to one another although they have no affective bond. Two failing marriages are dissolved (one by death, another through revelation of bigamy), but actual divorce is never mooted. Debate over disestablishment of the Anglican Church opens the novel, but formal interest in the separation of church and state is supplanted by a murder trial and barely resurrected. And in the breach between these parties stands Phineas Finn, the novel's Catholic, Irish hero. This paper argues, that the novel's early focus on unsuccessful marriages voices parallels albeit unspoken concerns about "Home" Rule and England's increasingly tenuous union with Ireland. More broadly, it suggests that through Phineas's trial initially political questions of church versus state authority governing the legitimacy of these unions are transformed into personal ones of conscience and feeling. This internalization of the political becomes an aspect of character formation that raises the questions of how law transforms national politics into personal conviction and how literature uses law to develop its characters.
1. The "House" That Is Not a Home: "Home Rule" as Domestic Issue
Phineas Redux is a novel obsessed with the law. This claim can (and has) been made for the Victorian novel in general (Cunningham 2002, 89, 91), but a perusal of the continuing story of Phineas Finn reveals an almost bewil dering array of legal and related issues. (1) Election bribery, libel and slander, marriage and bigamy, murder and the ensuing trial--with its own catalog of lawyer's oratory, examination of witnesses, long tracts on the adequacy of circumstantial evidence and instructions to the jury--add to the novel's interest in the appropriate jurisdiction of church and state.
Trollope wrote Phineas Redux between 1870-71, just two years after Gladstone's Liberal government had successfully ushered through an act to disestablish the Irish Church, and after Trollope himself had run for parliament on a platform built largely on that issue (Robbins 1951, 313). A firm believer in the Anglican faith and general supporter of its official relationship with government, Trollope was nevertheless wary of the one's encroaching on the other's territory and, in the case of Ireland, supported disestablishment and disendowment. (2) "Gross injustice" and "absurd uselessness" characterize the Irish Church, he declared in his campaign speech at Beverley (Tingay 1950, 27), later calling it a "monstrous anomaly" that essentially absorbed state monies "intended for the extension of religion and amelioration of the people" and used them for "purposes which are not national, and which don't benefit the people" (32). (3)
This platform is the same that Phineas Finn runs on at the beginning of Phineas Redux albeit transferred in the novel to disestablishment of the Anglican, rather than Irish, Church. (4) Finn's Roman Catholicism (hence his, wrongly, assumed antipathy to the Protestant Church) has given his conservative opponents a means of attack: they must preserve the Establishment if they are to protect the state from popery and its associated Fenianism. A bit of electoral doggerel published against Trollope in Beverley's conservative paper had given voters the following "tip":
Oh! Do not elect him, 'twould be such a pity,
For really with work he is getting quite thin;
Just fancy him stuck on a Draining Committee,
Or bored like his own Mr Phineas Finn!
Say no to him sweetly without any fighting,
And leave not the Tories you have in the lurch:
Friend Anthony Trollope is wanted for writing
And not, sirs, for wronging poor Pat and the Church! (qtd. in Tingay 1950, 29) (5)
Unlike his creator, Finn is not suspected of "wronging poor Pat"; based on his previous stint as an MP (recounted five years earlier in Phineas Finn), the fear is rather that the petty jobs of government won't keep him from furthering Irish independence. And while, in accord with liberal party principles, he does support the eventual dissolution of the bond between church and state, he reluctantly takes up the cause in Tankerville specifically for tactical reasons--he has to answer the charges and won't gain traction on any other grounds. (6) (Similarly, when the conservatives conservatives come out for disestablishment later in the novel, Finn will have to modify his campaign promises in keeping with his party's oppositional line.) Approached from this angle, dis-establishment is a doubly political issue: it serves the short-term goal of gaining a liberal majority in parliament and addresses the long-term question of whether that parliament shall have more influence than the church over matters once considered sacred ground.
But just what was the church's proper domain and what the state's? The spread of Roman Catholicism, disestablishment of the Irish Church, and possible disestablishment of the Anglican Church were political issues that highlighted the overlap between spiritual and secular interests, but as matters of state funding and as governmental relationships, they tended to belong more to the Crown than the Mitre (Trollope 1983, 1.43). In contrast were the social--and moral--issues of "everyday life" that the church had long claimed as its own, among them education, disposal of the dead, and divorce. (7)
Lord Cranworth's Divorce and Matrimonial Causes bill offers one of the most vivid examples of the contentious relationship between the church and state and the latter's increasing intervention in the moral, indeed, sacred foundations of English society--the home, the family, and the married couple at its center. With the bill's passage into law in 1857, a new civil Divorce Court was established in London; new definitions of and grounds for legal separation were established--a combination of adultery, cruelty, and desertion being the chief ones--and divorced parties were enabled to remarry. Opponents of the act might be glad that the Divorce Court's London location and high legal fees both kept divorce out of most people's reach. (8) That was hardly the point, however, when state reforms could dissolve religious ties and create such difference of opinion within the church that they seemed to weaken its position further (Durey 2002).
This is where disestablishment and divorce connect: just as Phineas Finn takes an ambivalent position on the political relationship of church and state--urging disestablishment then cautioning delay--, the novel makes him a key figure in two failing marriages, thereby implicating him in the social dimension of the church-state alliance as well. Some plot summary will be useful here. There are two triangulated relationships in the novel: one between Phineas, Lady Laura, and her husband Kennedy and another between Mr. Bonteen, Lizzie Eustace, and her husband, the Rev. Emilius. Just as Phineas intercedes with Kennedy on behalf of Lady Laura, Bonteen harbors Lizzie while he searches for proof of bigamy against Emilius. Kennedy tries to shoot Phineas, and Bonteen is bludgeoned to death, as it happens, by Emilius. But because Phineas and Bonteen are political enemies and publicly quarrel on the night of his murder, Phineas is suspected. The structure of these relationships has implications for the structure of the plot: 1) these married couples live apart from one another; 2) the wives want these separations, but don't seek formal, legal help; 3) both marriages ultimately end but with out recourse to actual divorce, and 4) Finn is directly involved in one and connected to the other: to Bonteen as a helper of women and to Emilius as an accused murderer of men. (9)
Given Finn and Bonteen's similar interventions in other people's marriages (and the Kennedy/Finn scandal that impedes Finn's career [Lyons 1983, xviii]), one might think the novel was interested in domesticity rather than politics, but the conflict between these two politicians highlights the overlap between domesticity and domestic politics, marriage and Home Rule, in England's relationship to Ireland. Where Kennedy complains that Phineas is the cause of his wife's desertion, Bonteen's vitriol against Finn nearly always emphasizes his Irish-ness and imputes an Irish separatist agenda to him; both cite him as the source and agent of dissent in their unions. This accusation, like those made against Phineas on the Tankerville hustings, is ironic, however; although one might suspect him of urging all sorts of separations--church from state, man from wife, England from Ireland--the last is the only one he never advocates (coming out against it, in fact, in The Prime Minister). Rather, it is Bonteen's rhetoric itself that calls forth this image of Phineas as the rebellious Irishman, an image from which Finn has worked to distance himself in order better to assimilate into the House of Commons. Jane Dougherty has noted that "the House" functions as an emblem of both the domestic sphere and the "apotheosis of the civil and national sphere into which post-Union Irishmen cannot quite be assimilated" (2004, 136), much as a wife, she continues, cannot be fully assimilated into the public, civil world of the husband (134) (10).
The Act of Union between England and Ireland was formed after the rebellions of 1798 as "a means of subduing Ireland" and was immediately viewed as a marriage because, as Dougherty argues, it so closely resembled "the classic marriage contract" (2004, 134). As early as 1812, novelist Maria Edgeworth depicted the Union as the marriage of an Irish bride to her English husband, and popular rhetoric throughout the century continued to describe the Union in this vein (Lonergan 2004, 156).Trollope employs it in the earlier novel Phineas Finn (1869) as well, reasoning that
[i]f it was incumbent on England to force upon Ireland the maintenance of the Union for her own sake, because England could not afford independence so close against her own ribs, it was at any rate necessary to England's character that the bride thus bound in a compulsory wedlock should be endowed with all the best privilages that a wife can enjoy. (Trollope 1982, 2-180)
In the first novel, Phineas's national character dictates how he appears as an individual in the novel. The Irishman Finn is thus understood to be the Irish bride adjusting to her new role; he must subdue any "cantankerous, red-hot, semi-Fenian" impulses he might have and espouse only those views, particularly on "tenant right and the Irish Church" that the liberal party itself holds (Trollope 1982, 1.6). Not surprisingly, the transition is not altogether smooth, but the narrator reassures readers that "Between husband and wife a warm word now and then matters but little, if there be a thoroughly good understanding at bottom." "But let there be that good...
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