Anthony Trollope's: An Eye for an Eye

Anthony Trollope's: An Eye for an Eye

Anthony Trollope's intense commitment to drawing for his readers a picture of the world as it actually is, to creating a fictional reality in which they "might recognise human beings like to themselves" (Autobiography 145), can obscure the depth and sincerity of his concern with the moral dilemmas confronting the characters he has so painstakingly rendered lifelike. But as the startlingly candid passage quoted above from the Autobiography reveals, Trollope's purposes in his fiction are not merely descriptive, but normative as well; he sets out both to show us "the way we live now" and to direct our attention to questions that are in the broadest sense ethical: how ought we to live? His unflagging desire to "please," however, and his firm belief in the primacy of characterization among the novelist's tasks render the extraction of his "system of ethics" from his novels a delicate and difficult task: his characters are, ineluctably, individuals and unlike those populating the works of more overtly "philosophical" novelists, cannot often be taken as unproblematic representatives of an abstract quality larger than themselves. Trollope's "system" is to be an ethics of everyday life, one that takes as its province situations irreducible to arid formulae.

Close examination of the late novel An Eye for an Eye illustrates both the nuanced, even protean, subtlety of Trollopean ethics and the ways in which his moral code is complicated by the gender, class, and national dimensions of the life he portrays so vividly. The novel, in its remarkably evenhanded treatment of the agonizing choice facing a young English aristocrat who seduces and impregnates an Irish girl of disreputable provenance, displays a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of the manner in which larger social and historical forces impinge on the decisions we make as supposedly free moral agents. The story dramatizes the tension between two approaches to moral problems: on one hand, there is what we might call an ethics of particulars, represented by Scroope Manor and the older members of the Neville family, an insistence that questions of right and wrong can only be justly resolved by reference to the social position of the moral agent and to the organic structure of the society in which he or she is enmeshed. On the other hand, there are the claims of a universalizing ethical praxis in which each individual must be viewed as an end in himself or herself, regardless of circumstance.