Unnatural self- sacrifice

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 506-546

  Blumberg, I M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950180275     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2004.58.4.506     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, ed. James R. Kincaid (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 137
2. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 222
3. See also [George Eliot], "The Natural History of German Life" (rev. of Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and Land und Leute, by W. H. Riehl), Westminster Review, 66 (1856), 51-79
4. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 65
5. See Smith, "Of the Pleasure of Mutual Sympathy," in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 14-15
6. A good early example of such a response is Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971)
7. see particularly Margaret Adams, "The Compassion Trap," pp. 401-16
8. In The Gifting God: A Trinitarian Ethics of Excess (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), Stephen H. Webb briefly addresses the exile of sacrificial logic from mainstream religious and humanist discourse
9. See Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972)
10. and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad-woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984)
11. John Henry Newman, "Sins of Ignorance and Weakness" (1832), in Newman, Selected Sermons, ed. Ian Ker (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 96
12. Newman, "Self-Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness" (1833), in Selected Sermons, pp. 93-94
13. The subject of sacrifice in Victorian anthropology has been well treated by Susan L. Mizruchi, whose study traces the roots of modern concepts of social science to such writers as James Frazer, Edward B. Tylor, and William Robertson Smith. See Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998)
14. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), p. 238
15. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 60
16. William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, ed. John Sutherland (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), p. 773
17. John Ruskin, Unto This Last, in The Works of John Raskin, Library Edition, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903), XVII, 39
18. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 254
19. Mizruchi's claim that narratives of sacrifice are always impelled by nostalgia is relevant here
20. Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable and Co., 1927), p. 369
21. See Walter M. Kendrick, The Novel-Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 4
22. See Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 159-88
23. See Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 159-90
24. See "Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology," Novel, 33 (1999), 93-118
25. See, for example, Nicholas Dames, "Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition," Victorian Studies, 45 (2003), 247-78
26. and Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 55-88
27. See the early reviews in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969). Many reviewers faulted Trollope for his treatment of "vulgar" subjects, though some asserted that he was able to treat vulgar subjects without himself descending into vulgarity
28. Elsie B. Michie, "Buying Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce," Victorian Studies, 44 (2001), 79
29. In locating this shift as late as she does, Michie follows a long and distinguished history of readings of The Warden that celebrate the Reverend Harding's sacrifice: see, for example, Sherman Hawkins, "Mr. Harding's Church Music," ELH, 29 (1962), 202-23
30. and Hugh L. Hennedy, "The Warden: Novel of Vocation," in his Unity in Barsetshire (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 21-36
31. In The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 92-113, James R. Kincaid argues somewhat more neutrally that Trollope makes a moral example of Mr. Harding's resignation
32. Here I am bringing an economic dimension to Christopher Herbert's excellent generic analysis of Trollope's novels as "serious modern comedy" that identifies and takes as its main theme "the neurotic estrangement from pleasure as a hallmark of modern life" (see Herbert, Trollope and Comic Pleasure [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 47)
33. See Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. David Skilton (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 3-4. Further references are to this edition and are included in the text
34. While early Greece and Phoenicia turned to human sacrifice before war and at other times of danger, Euripides's fifth-century B.C.E. plays describe Iphigenia's sacrifice in more ambiguous terms. In Iphigenia in Tauris the girl is taken by Artemis to serve her, and in Iphigenia at Aulis she is replaced by an animal at the moment of sacrifice
35. John Stuart Mill, "Utility of Religion" (published 1874), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson, et al., 33 vols. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965-91), X, 423
36. Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure" (1933), rpt. in his Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, et al. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 119
37. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 87
38. Simmel goes on to claim that the value of the product created by sacrifice is defined by "an elaborate complex of feelings which are always in a process of flux, adjustment and change": "Quite independent of this is the question as to where the object received derives its value; whether it is perhaps the result of the sacrifice offered, so that the balance between gain and cost is established a posteriori by the sacrifice. ... Once the value has been established - no matter how - there is a psychological necessity to regard it as being of equal value with the sacrifice" (Philosophy of Money, p. 87)
39. John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 23
40. Colin Grant reapplies the term "hedonic paradox" to describe this problem: "any pleasure we experience is our own pleasure" (Altruism and Christian Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001], p. 77)
41. The literature on the Jephthah and Iphigenia stories is extensive and constitutes a subject in its own right. For a history of the Iphigenia tradition in early modern English theater and the work of Christian theologians seeking to distinguish Christian and pagan notions of sacrifice, see Debra Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994)
42. On the Jephthah story and its readings throughout Christian history, see John L. Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 100-178
43. David Friedrich Strauss, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Mathilde Blind (London: Asher and Co., 1874), p. 31
44. This argument was clearly important, since Strauss, for instance, attacks it and argues that the idea of the sacrifice of Christ's fleshly self marks not a refinement but a regression from animal sacrifices back to human (see The Old Faith and the New, p. 29)
45. John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in The Works of John Raskin, VIII, 32-33
46. Readings of Jephthah's daughter can be divided into the "survivalist" interpretations, which argue that the daughter's life was preserved, and the "sacrificialist," which argue that her life was lost. The survivalist version I mention above was first suggested in the early thirteenth century. The story of Jephthah's daughter has generated a great deal of feminist criticism in the last thirty years. Tikva Frymer-Kensky provides a good introduction to the biblical and historical context in her Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), pp. 102-17
47. and Phyllis Trible offers a reading that has been foundational for feminist critics in her Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 93-116
48. Trollope's ironic presentation is ever-sensitive to the pleasure of self-dramatizing, of self-defining by raising the stakes of common life and responding to them in "heroic" or "romantic" sacrificial fashion. For an invaluable analysis of Trollope's aesthetic and moral disparagement of romance in favor of realism, see Kendrick, The Novel-Machine, pp. 62-82
49. Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 68
50. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, trans. Kenneth Cavander (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 67, l. 1416-17; p. 72, l. 1552-55
51. See Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, p. 172
52. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? ed. Andrew Swarbrick, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), II, 198
53. [Anon.], rev. of The Warden, by Anthony Trollope, Athenaeum, 27 January 1855, p. 107
54. [Anon.], rev. of The Warden, by Anthony Trollope, Eclectic Review, n.s. 9 (1855), 360
55. See, for example, Geoffrey Harvey, introduction to Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. Harvey (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 13
56. Hawkins, "Mr. Harding's Church Music," pp. 202-14
57. and Thomas A. Langford, "Trollope's Satire in The Warden," Studies in the Novel, 19 (1987), 435-47. Langford explains away the problem of sacrifice through a narrowly generic treatment of the novel
58. Paul Lyons, "The Morality of Irony and Unreliable Narrative in Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers," South Atfantic Review, 54, no. 1 (1989), 50
59. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 669. Further references appear in the text
60. John Milbank, "The Midwinter Sacrifice: A Sequel to 'Can Morality Be Christian?'" Angelaki, 6, no. 2 (2001), 59, 58
61. See also Alan P. Fiske, "The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations," Psychological Review, 99 (1992), 689-723