Remember when I wrote about Anthony Trollope’s description of male characters who take responsibility for the emotional health of their marriages?
I have a much more recent example of this phenomenon in the novel titled Nothing But The Truth by a San Francisco author John Lescroart. The book was published in the late 1990s, but a man’s role in the emotional well-being of his marriage that it describes is much closer to Anthony Trollope’s than to anything we can see today.
Dismas Hardy, the main character of the novel, discovers that his wife Frannie has gotten herself entangled with another man, which ultimately lands her in jail and places their marriage at a great risk. Without pouting at the ditzy blockhead that the wife is, Hardy proceeds to remedy the situation. He takes responsibility for having allowed the situation to get this far and not staying in control of the emotional environment of the family. There is no question for him of not saving the marriage. Hardy acts with the same dignity and seriousness as Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser and proceeds to undo the damage to his marriage. Throughout all that, the wife keeps acting like a surly toddler, but none of her acting out manages to shake Hardy’s resolution to save the family.
This is not something we see depicted any longer. I could list books and TV shows for hours where the wife is the adult and the husband is an emotional teenager in need of her constant correction. We forget that for the longest time and until quite recently, it was not like that at all. The idea that men have to be managed emotionally by their women is something we invented fifteen minutes ago and have made true simply by virtue of repetition.
Clarissa's Blog 
“The idea that men have to be managed emotionally by their women is something we invented fifteen minutes ago and have made true simply by virtue of repetition.”
LOL, c’mon Kid, who is this we — the wishful feelings of some western women augmented by Madison Avenue advertising, the pairing of creative storytelling with motivational research ;-D
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Oooh! I just finished reading Can You Forgive Her! Yes! This is not a theme I’ve ever seen in another book, and it’s… so surprising. And refreshing. And it’s not like Trollope doesn’t have plenty of other sorts of men in his books. It’s part of what makes him so brilliant– the huge variety of richly-portrayed characters. I’ve read so many where there are… two, maybe three types of people played against each other for contrast, and that’s it. Smart people and average people. Virtuous people and wicked people. Petty shallow people vs. people with deeper thoughts. And then there are Trollope novels. Whole other universe.
Anyway, CYFH was a great read. 800 pages and can’t tell until the resolution if these ladies are going to stupidly throw away their lives or not. They would have, in a modern story, because they wouldn’t have had any of the family and loyal friends and connections to put the brakes on their own self-destructive impulses.
What’s weird is that in a contemporary novel where a woman is *saved* from her bad decisions, that’s 100% going to be by a romantic hero, but when a woman engages in the same kind of thing and is married, the husband never gets to *be* the romantic hero. Why is that?
ethyl
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LOL, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” — it never ends, stories of women having to choose between a Steady Eddy and a Bad Boy ;-D
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I’m so glad you liked it!! It’s one of my favorite novels ever. Trollope was amazing at creating characters. The plot is not even important when the characters are so rich and fascinating.
It is my mission to lead as many people as possible to Trollop. He is one of the greatest gems of Victorian literature, yet he is not nearly as widely known as he deserves to be.
The things that Trollope writes about tend still to be extremely important. But as important as they are, one doesn’t often find them in literature, and that’s a real shame. An excellent, excellent author.
Please, everybody, let’s read more Trollope.
Also, there was a mystery novel by Ruth Rendell where a wife suspected her husband of all sorts of nasty things, but then it turned out that he couldn’t have been bad because he was a great fan of Trollope’s novels. I forget the title right now, but it was so cute.
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I had previously read heaps of Victorian novels, and soured on the whole genre as being… littered with predictable tropes (virtuous consumptive martyr etc) and on the whole kind of gooey and sentimental. Trollope doesn’t do any of that, and it’s wonderfully refreshing: everything great about Victorian novels without any of the sad angels dying of tuberculosis or weird melodrama.
I’m now baffled why we were all sold on Dickens, Gaskell, Alcott, and that lot as the apex fiction of the period. I feel cheated.
ethyl
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