Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right :: Morals Happiness Struggles Papers

Anthony Trollopes He Knew He Was RightAnthony Trollopes He Knew He Was Right is unique among the prolific writers apologues in having as its deed of conveyance a complete declarative sentence. Such a title stands as a sort of challenge to the reader it invites us, as we make our way by means of the originals densely detailed presentation of lived reality, to consider the sexual relation between that reality and the proposition put forward in the title sentence. What does it mean to say that Louis Trevelyan knew he was right? Even if we are dubious by J. Hillis Millers argument that a long multi-plotted fable like He Knew He Was Right, with all its wealth and particularity of character, incident, veridical detail, may be an exploration of a single complex denomination (Miller 77), Trollopes choice of title inevitably throws us back, as we try on to make sense of the events narrated under that title, on questions of good epistemology that is, it compels reflection on how we know what is right and on the extent to which we place be unafraid in that knowledge. Obliged to read the narrative as, among other things, a hypothesis on knowing and on rightness, we can perceive that Trollopes job here is with the manner in which his characters come to possess certainty in their moral judgments, with the process by which they acquire the disposition towards what is right that we can label virtue. Who would ever think of learning to live out of an incline novel? an irritated Caroline Spalding packs her zealously romantic sister, a naive devotee of the genre. We might turn her question on its head and ask how it is that people learn how to live in an English novel, and what He Knew He Was Right in particular has to say about becoming good.If the novels most prominent interest is in the breakdown or perversion of moral certainty, exemplified in the grotesque errors of judgment that deprive Trevelyan of his family and his sanity, it in addition manifests a s ubsidiary interest in the ways in which moral agents can replace such false certainty with the sort of average and balanced ethical vision that Trevelyan so conspicuously lacks. As we allow for see, this concern with moral education is displayed most directly in the novels secondary narrative threads, in which both Jemima Stanbury and her niece Dorothy attain an empathetic subtlety of perception and a depth of understanding of others that are deficient in their former selves, as depicted at the opening of the novel.