Trollope's Heroes who are not Sexually and Socially Triumphant

Ellen Moody

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[This document is a note to the author's Trollope's Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work — GPL.]

See The Vicar of Bullhampton, in which the Rev. Frank Fenwick attributes the rewards offered to the apparently aloof alpha male, to the rewards it gets and his presentation of this admiration to a human instinct to desire what presents itself as unavailable, by equating a cynosure of these norms, the Rev. Henry Fitzackerley Chamberlaine to "a great Akinetos," whose "source of greatness" Trollope's narrator tells us would be "very curious to trace" (24:165-66), but which in the sexual arenas of The Belton Estate and "The Parson's Daughter at Oxney Colne," Trollope's narrators do trace as an urge to conquer or to possess that which seems invulnerable, aloof, a prize out of reach, something denied.Trollope, The Belton Estate, ed. Halperin: x particularly (Halperin's comment that the novel is about a kind of love "that depends on the perceived desirability and availability of its object") and 126-28 (a proposal scene). See also John Sutherland's comment that the male character in "The Parson's Daughter' does not "get his deserved thrashing," Early Short Stories, xviii and 239, 241-42 (narrator's comments).

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Last modified 9 August 2006