Transgression in Trollope: Dishonesty and the Antibourgeois Elite

Trollope was long ago enshrined as supreme literary embodiment of middle-class stodginess. He has been called, variously, the apotheosis of normality; last unalienated English novelist; and Victorian writer most at ease with mechanisms of power and wealth. Mario Praz scorned him as quintessential novelist, finding him to be the most typical representative ... of Biedermeier spirit. David Skilton disdained his general conformity to everyday, middle-class ideals. Recently, D. A. Miller has added his voice to this already swollen chorus, claiming (somewhat superciliously) that Trollope is in cahoots with police-that is, that he is a purveyor of middle-class disciplinary norms.' It may seem strange, then, to talk about transgression in Trollope, except perhaps in a very special sense-the sense in which transgression is a fundamental part of nineteenth-century middle-class culture itself. For that culture depended in crucial ways on an affirmative staging of desires or behavior that had also been defined as illicit-a dynamic that is either ignored or trivialized by smug condemnations of Trollope's one-dimensionality. In Trollope, and in middle-class culture generally, there is an energetic antibourgeois principle, dedicated to reappropriation of transgressive experience, that is as closely related to way cultural authority is formulated as are strict bourgeois moral standards that transgression appears to violate. We tend to overlook role of transgression in middle-class culture, and to concede that culture's ascetic standards too readily, partly because of its marked revulsion from immoral license of both popular and aristocratic culture. Whenever we do encounter violations of moral standards by bourgeois writers, we are quick to isolate them as rare, forward-thinking, unilateral challenges to social order, if we do not trivialize them as nonserious exceptions that only confirm norm.2 But all cultures, not just capitalistic or puritanical ones, tend to draw their symbolic conceptions of desire from their own cultural margins. In overemphasizing role of moral norms, which do, obviously, play a special role in middle-