Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Priscilla Walton begins her study of Trollope’s political novels with
an observation that, even as the works of the popular 19th-century
novelist have been increasingly marginalized by critics and academics,
the novels themselves have been enjoying a renewed popularity among the
general public. She attributes this “Trollopean renaissance” to the
political topicality of his works, and particularly to modern readers’
recognition of ideological structures within the novels that serve to
disenfranchise women, and that have modern echoes in current
antifeminist backlash. She employs this observation as a springboard
into an analysis of the Palliser novels that seeks to show how Trollope,
while writing to affirm and legitimize the patriarchal desire and
masculinist discourse that supported the Victorian power structure,
covertly (and perhaps even unconsciously) revealed the strategies
through which women were objectified and marginalized in society.

Walton, through her use of feminist psychoanalytic theory, engages both
Trollope’s fiction and Victorian culture in general in contemporary
poststructuralist discourse, demonstrating how Jacques Lacan’s
writings, although problematic, are best suited to provide an
explanation of the power dynamic inherent in patriarchal hierarchy, with
its need to place the privileged subject at its centre and to
marginalize and objectify the ex-centric, or Other, in order to maintain
its illusion of control. She argues that Trollope, himself an
“ex-centric” who yearned for inclusion in the privileged centre,
wrote from the distinctive perspective of one who had closely observed
the workings of power, and knew both the limitations and the strengths
of the system. Thus, while his writings do not overtly critique the
ruling order, and in fact attempt to support it, nonetheless they reveal
the dependence of the patriarchy upon women’s willingness to be
objectified in order to perpetuate the hierarchy.

Walton’s study, while opening a new perspective on both Trollope and
the Victorian age, does not attempt to extend its argument beyond a
consideration of what the treatment of women within the six Palliser
novels reveals about past strategies in the disenfranchisement of women.
However, she does suggest that Trollope’s exposure of the limitations
of patriarchal discourse and desire opens the way for further discussion
in the realms of cultural critique and feminist politics.