Classics Club #5: Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator

When Anthony Trollope’s mother discovered that nobody was going to help her support her numerous family, she came up with a great scheme. She started traveling to the US and writing travel books that ridiculed the Americans. Colonizers love hearing how crappy the lives of their former colonies are after they win independence, so Mrs. Trollope’s books sold well.

When Anthony Trollope became a famous writer, he decided to atone for his mother’s sin of writing about a British person traveling in the US and feeling stunned by the American barbarity. He wrote The American Senator, a novel about an American traveling in England and criticizing the barbarity of many of the British institutions (the fox hunt, the rigidity of the class system, the House of the Lords, the sale of priesthoods in the C of E, etc.) I really identified with the American senator, Mr. Gotobed. And, believe it or not, it wasn’t his wonderful last name that endeared him to me. The American is so earnest, sincere and eager to improve the universe that he reminded me of me. With a complete lack of regard for social conventions, the senator goes on and on diligently explaining to people how completely messed up their lives are. Seriously, folks, Mr. Gotobed, c’est moi!

The rest is under the fold.

Even though the novel is named after him, the American senator is a secondary character in the book. The main thrust of the novel is profoundly feminist. Trollope shows how tragic the reality of women from “good families” (meaning middle-class and aristocratic) was in mid-XIXth century England. All they are good for is to get married. There is absolutely no other area that might require their talents and energy than snagging a husband. The novel portrays in heartbreaking detail how an entire family bullies a miserable young woman into marrying a man she doesn’t desire. Unless you’ve experienced this yourself, I don’t think you can imagine what it feels like to be a young girl who discovers that her family is so indifferent to her happiness as to push her into a marriage she doesn’t want.

One of the female protagonists of the novel manages to preserve the belief that only she has the right to decide what to do with her life. Another female character, however, interiorizes the idea that her only goal in life should be exchanging her body and freedom for a wedding vow. This is an even more tragic case because here we see a woman who doesn’t even struggle against this vision of herself as essentially worthless, a burden that needs to be handed over as soon as possible to some jerk who does her the huge favor of marrying her.

Trollope is great at creating complex stories with multiple plot lines and keeping all of these complex twists of the plot under control. This is better than any mystery novel, no matter how fascinating. The American Senator is a psychological thriller of incredible value. I enjoyed the novel so much that now I’m hugely tempted to download the entire Palliser Chronicles by Trollope and just read this huge 5,000 pages long collection. But my sense of guilt is going to eat me alive for indulging in this way. Is it normal to feel so guilty about reading Trollope for pleasure?