Introduction

To succeed as humorists, authors must belabor human flaws, attack the most flagrant of human failings, distort reality, and at the same time, entertain their audience.  Because wit deliberately conveys insults and scorn, laughter thrives on rational intellect, and the didactic satirist always aims at social reform, Victorian literary critics supposed that satire was not suitable literary production for women; like the masculine scientific, economic and political spheres, add to that the travel narrative, all were relegated to men.  Respectable women were not logical, let alone desirable if opinionated, didactic, and aggressive.  Whether one considers Frances Trollope an anomaly or argues that the critical model is biased,[1] the narrative stands today.  In her own time and presently,[2] even Americans give nod to the truth of her observations.  Notwithstanding the concept of truth, which needs to be examined more closely here, one can say that Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans breaks from hegemonic Victorian codes governing gendered conduct and succeeds in both spheres.  I do not suggest that Trollope ignores Victorian conventions of gender; respectability is an important commodity in her social class.  Rather, I raise questions regarding authorial identity and truth where Trollope claims unconventional authority, to show that this work employs satirical rhetoric to encourage anti-populist political attitudes in British culture.  Furthermore, this is a feminine ploy to overcome animosity and resistance to her forays into the masculine domain.  

Truth and consequences

Trollope’s work is unique in that the persona she creates to report the voyage is most complex.  Arriving in New Orleans without credentials, letters of introduction, or adequate funding, she is at once a daring woman traveler and a stranger at risk.  She faces gender restrictions in life that predetermine some of the censorship that she faces as a narrator.[3]  Trollope addresses readers in Chapter XXVIII with a passage that deceptively appears autobiographical; she is reviewing her notes, presumably with an eye toward publishing them.  She scrutinizes text that requires a “strict self examination” and challenges “scrupulously . . . every expression of disapprobation” (229).  She edits what she will include or exclude by determining if it may be thought “ill-natured.” 

The result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things that had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true , might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received. (ibid.)

Trollope obviously weighs her words against their reception in the market place and censors any personal invective, relying on the satirist’s position, criticizing the “general” and impersonal “impressions.”  Although this passage makes truth claims, it closely resembles narrators’ claims in many eighteenth century satires.  The satirist’s persona focuses on reality and swears that it is the truth.  That feature above all is what makes satire entertaining.  However, the passage can be read from feminist perspectives that illuminate the word “ill-natured,” to show Trollope in the act of self-censorship because she must abide by gender roles.  I do not argue the point in this paper but focus on how Trollope’s travel narrative -- a blockbuster in its time – contains numerous examples of satirical rhetoric:  exaggeration, ridicule, parody, burlesque, and double entendre.[4] 

Though examples of satirical rhetoric are not continuous in Domestic Manners of the Americans because they fluctuate as the narrator’s identity shifts, they are nevertheless plentiful.  It might aid the argument here to explicate a sample of these.  In the first and second chapters of the work, Trollope seems to be orienting the reader to satire by alluding to satirists the ilk of Dante and Jonathan Swift, who is famous for his acid repartee.  She prompts the reader to read the passages that follow in kind.  For example, viewing the human industry to build levees at New Orleans, she cites Swift’s mock heroic “Nature must give way to art” to describe the embankments that protect New Orleans from the Mississippi floods.  Then she adds “yet, she [nature] was looking so mighty, and so unsubdued all the time, that I could not help fancying she would some day take the matter into her own hands again, and if so, farewell to New Orleans” (11).  The nonchalance of this passing comment is part of the satirist’s toolset; gone, she writes.  For a contemporary reader, the recent tragedy in New Orleans’ makes the belittling “farewell” pungent, perhaps as much as Swift’s proposal to sell Irish infants to the British for meat.  Alluding again to Swift, she disclaims satirical attack at the moment that she launches it.  She writes of the carpet in the gentleman’s quarters on the steamboat Belvedere, “I will not, I may not describe its condition; indeed, it requires the pen of a Swift to do it justice,” but ends with her declaration that she “would infinitely prefer sharing the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs to the being confined to its cabin” (18).

In a prime sample of burlesque, the author depicts travel by stagecoach as anything but modern or pleasurable using a mock heroic style and her referent Milton.  The occupants had “in the phrase of Milton, to ‘inhabit lax’ this exalted abode, and accordingly, we were for some miles tossed about like a few potatoes in a wheel-barrow” (Trollope 145)  Here she is employing extreme opposites to describe the journey; homely images such as “potatoes” and “wheelbarrow” contrast with elevated mock heroic descriptions of their vehicle as an “exalted abode.”  Likewise, she exaggerates using terms such as “leisure” to describe the natural occurrence of looking out the window of a conveyance and the two unforgettably outrageous nouns to describe jostling: “concussion” and “dislocation” (ibid.). 

One last specimen of Trollope’s satirical rhetoric attacks American reading habits, building the American literary dunce from a pastiche of people she may have known and news articles she may have copied verbatim.  It is truth, yes, but told “slant” as Emily Dickenson would say.  She neatly summarizes the social class of those she satirizes, “from the successful merchant, which is the highest, to the domestic serving man, which is the lowest” (73).  The ranking here is distorted to exploit British fears of the rise of a merchant middle class in Britain.  She follows with a backhanded compliment that they are all too busy to read anything but a newspaper.  Humorously, the merchant reads an untitled poem by an unknown poet or a “garbled extract from Moore’s Life of Byron . . . while he holds out his hand for an invoice.”  The merchant emphatically does not read Byron nor will a poem have more meaning than figures on an invoice.  Though the lawyer may be scrupulous about the facts from his briefs, he will read that a British gothic novelist’s work is superior to Scott’s historical novels, and the reader can guess the play on the word “valuable” means the opposite.  Most humorously, she lends the image of an auctioneer who “bustles to his tub, or his tribune, to support his pretensions to polite learning,” who presumably only has time to read when he is bathing or in church.  Moreover, the auctioneer’s “polite learning” will be nonsense, “glancing his quick eye over the columns, and reading that ‘Miss Mitford’s descriptions are indescribable’” (73). 

Aside from such examples from the travel narrative, biographers lend support to the idea that Trollope employs satire in Domestic Manners.  Pamela Neville-Sington traces Trollope’s first idea of writing a travel narrative to letters written to her son Tom and friend Mary Russell Mitford in 1828.  She has only just arrived in Cincinnati.  To Tom she writes, “I amuse myself by making notes, and hope some day to manufacture them into a volume.  This is a remote corner of the world, and but seldom visited” (156).  To Mitford, a writer, she confides that the people in Cincinnati are “so very queer, so very unlike any other thing in heaven above or earth below” that she does not have to skill to describe them.  “I can look, and I can laugh, but the power of describing is not given to above half a dozen in a century” (ibid.)  The rhetoric that she uses to describe the future work about “queer” and laughable people mixes ridicule, if not satire, into the product that she is planning. 

By June 1828, Trollope sends a rough draft to New York, asking a good friend to forward the narrative to a publisher.  When no sale is forthcoming, she abandons the manuscript until she has exhausted all of her other attempts at making a living in Cincinnati; she again takes it up in spring of 1830.  It is clear from letters to Mitford that Trollope is impressed with Basil Hall’s Travels in North America, which appeared in 1829.  What excites her is the book’s success; she is already claiming Hall as a model (and later will make him her mentor).  She writes to Mitford, his book “has put the Union in a blaze from one end to the other.  I never on any occasion heard so general an expression of contempt and detestation as that which follows his name” (158).  Her intent is to seek the same fame.

  By the time she is reviewing her work in Stonington, where she makes the truth claim that was noted on page 4, she has organized the work in two volumes, and knows that the “book would not be flattering to the Americans” (ibid.).  To Mitford, she writes that she is only recording what she has seen and has “only omitted what I thought it invidious and ill-natured to mention --- never any thing that could be admired and approved” (ibid.).  Given Trollope’s personality, at least the assessment given in biographies that she is good-humored, it would not seem a stretch to imagine that she was emulating writers who seek to amuse and entertain, not those that flatter and conceal.  She was modeling her work not after humorists but after those who attack with moral purposes. 

However, though her models are male, her product is distinctly feminine.  Preceding from the thesis that Trollope uses satirical rhetoric in order to tell the truth about America, one must consider the definition of what constitutes satire.  Critical consensus defines it:

As an attack, the object of which is derived from the cultural context of the satirist and the form of which depends on aesthetic choice.  It is much of the time assumed that the attack has an ethical base or structure . . . .  a political document with both political and aesthetic value . . . an attack on vice within society as the satirist points out hypocrisy and the unethical conduct she sees to be in need of exposure. (Fellows 6)

In satire, realism and truth claims (that which need to be exposed) are both present.  One other property of satire that is important to mention for the discussion here is that it must be “written specifically for an audience, with the type of audience determining the type of satire . . . . the satirist speaks to a specific audience using specific references for specific reasons of attack.” (16)  This important feature of Trollope’s work, that it is written for a conservative British audience at a time when populism threatens the British Parliament, accounts for both its popular reception in Britain and its notoriety in the United States. 

The intended audience regarding political concerns was a British audience facing suffrage reform in the working class.  In such a scheme, Trollope is impersonally using the “queer” Americans -- just as Swift might have used Lilliputians or Yahoos -- to allegorize her political points.  If the narrative affects an American character that has verisemblance for today, it is because satire targets the fault (for examples, hypocrisy and false pride) and not the persons.  Hypocrisy is universal; it will never disappear from human populations and can be found anywhere on earth.  Satire will always seem true because it exposes a common ailment in a specific population, thus logically revealing hypocrisy locally and generically at once. 

Jacksonian Americans react to Domestic Manners of the Americans, however, because the nation is undergoing transition from a Republic to a Democracy; Trollope attacks the nation’s best hopes and dreams.  What is more, she is roasting

the American character as it is most profoundly shaped by these ideals in order to reach her target audience in Great Britain.         

The United States purchased the Louisiana possessions from France only twenty-five years before Trollope’s party lands at the Mississippi delta; they boat north through the recently acquired formerly French lands.  In fact, vast land that stretches west of the Mississippi is still open territory, not states (see Map 1).  American optimism is as immense as the expanded boundaries and new territories.[5]  However, Trollope sees only American false pride, inflated egos, and hypocritical behavior, all easy targets for the satirist.  The route Miss Wright and Mrs. Trollope follow would be comparable to reaching Peru by way of the Amazon River and Jungle.  However, their destination is not the United States per se; it is Nashoba, Tennessee, Fanny Wright’s plantation and utopian experiment in emancipating slaves.  It must be mentioned here that the Trollope party traveled through slave states; in an 1830 census, statistics show that fifty percent of the populations on both sides of the river are slaves (see Map 2).  Before arriving at Nashoba, Trollope is alive to slavery’s presence in New Orleans, not to mention in Britain.  Slavery was still legal in the British West Indies and she is an abolitionist.  When Trollope attacks the hypocrisy of Americans “at home” where “you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves,” she brings to British attention changes that need to be made at home in Britain.  When she criticizes Americans “lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties” she has in mind no doubt colonial policies of Great Britain in 1830 (168).

For British natives who visited America, traveling by steamboat along its rivers, the mode of locomotion was more than uncouth and uncomfortable; it was dangerous.  While navigating rivers could shorten a trip by some weeks, and the steamboats were relatively inexpensive, the “average life-span of a steamboat was less than five years . . . . . explosions, mid-river collisions, and groundings on sandbars were daily risks to be endured, . . . .  accidents were frequent and often resulted in a horrendous loss of life” (Simmons 24).  However, they were preferable to land travel, as may be seen by Trollope’s descriptions.     

Masked narrators

Travel narratives all have in common narrators that have shifting identities.  Trollope’s narrative is no exception to this rule; she arrives in America as a mother and leaves it as a writer.  However, the identity is more complex because she is overlaying the travel narrative with satirical rhetoric.  Narrators in satire are inevitably masks; they may or may not signify the author’s point of view on a particular matter.  Instead, the mask is based on the conventional morality of the audience to which the satire is addressed.  What is more, unlike the shifting identity of the travel narrator, this narrative mask is fixed and immutable.  This complexity is apparent in Domestic Manners of the Americans in that the narrative weaves back and forth between at least two if not three identities.   I divide the identities into two main groups: one is the autobiographical set of narrators and the other is the stranger, or masked narrator. 

In the first case, it is apparent that Trollope reveals very little of what is occurring in her personal life.  She tenders rudiments of information when she gives the names and ages of her children and when she speaks of her other companions, Miss Wright and Mr. Hervieu (9, 17).  Other information related to the purpose of travel, that she is fleeing from an abusive marriage and debts, or that she and Miss Wright are both immigrating to America in order to develop careers are hidden from the reader but not the biographer.[6]  Despite the omission of this knowledge, the reader may trace the author’s desire to the de-facto narrator of the work who provides the eye and the journey’s chronicle.  An example of this occurs at landfall in Chapter I.  Readers may divine the difference in a sightseer’s and an immigrant’s experience by comparing two narratives.  Dickens is excited when he arrives in the United States; after a miserable journey on board the ship, he gives us the sightseer’s view of landfall.

How I remained on deck, staring about me until we came alongside the dock, and how, though I had had as many eyes as Argus, I should have had them all wide open, and all employed on new objects – are topics which I will not prolong this chapter to discuss.” (Dickens 31)  

While Trollope also describes sighting land, she extends the visual to the imaginative, revealing a distinctively different relationship to her destination.  The repetition of the word “new” in her account, which qualifies both destination and traveler, progresses rhetorically from “land” to “continent” to “world” to “arrived European.”  Although Trollope never mentions her reason for the journey – it is beyond the scope of the text – she reveals more than reports it.

On first touching the soil of a new land, of a new continent, of a new world, it is impossible not to feel considerable excitement and deep interest in almost every object that meets us.  New Orleans presents very little that can gratify the eye of taste, but nevertheless there is much of novelty and interest for a newly arrived European. (12)

The passage conveys more than a travelers understanding of a landscape; it expresses a widening horizon and unlimited opportunities for the imagining immigrant.

In the second case of the biographical narrator, the travel narrator sometimes writes as a single traveler, using the first person pronoun “I” and sometimes as a spokesperson for the group, using the third person plural pronoun “we.”  Generally, these are employed alternately to express a personal opinion or to report an activity.  Christopher Mulvey writes that both Washington Irving and Fanny Trollope crossed the Atlantic for financial reasons, but "both ventures ended in bankruptcy."  However, their travel narratives

Breathed not a word that might betray the gentility of their authors.  Both writers presented a picture of men, manners, and society as they would have them to be and a picture of themselves as they would have others believe them to be.  To do so, they both adopted a social voice that presumed equality with a gentlemanly reader. (5-6)

It is this urbane narrator who gives us the ethnographical detail, translating what she sees, rightly or wrongly,[7] to the British point of view.

  The satirical narrator also uses the first person pronoun to express opinions but emphasizes strong opinions, generally well reasoned but disagreeable.  The satirical narrator richly embosses passages with rhetorical devices: contrast, exaggeration, hyperbole and the like.  Readers are conscious of the differences exhibited when either the travel narrator or the masked narrator ventures to express opinions.  For example, the travel narrator may explain her views regarding the same topic as the satirical narrator.  However, consider “I left England with feelings so strongly opposed to slavery, that it was not without pain I witnessed its effects around me,” (15) and contrast that with, “Of all the prejudices I have ever witnessed, this appears to me the most violent, and the most inveterate” (16).  In the former example, the narrator relates the facts of her sentiments; in the second example, the satirical narrator exaggerates her truth claim with the hyperbolic word “most” and takes on a scolding, shaming tone.  The attitudinal shift is strongly pronounced; it announces each satirical riff, thereby whetting the reader’s appreciation. 

The narrative becomes highly entertaining when Trollope encounters a satirist in Chapter XVII.  The masked narrator begins a contest that ends in roasting women satirists who fail at their duties, that is, fail to provide the moral ballast that inspires satirical truth telling.  In this case, Trollope meets aboard ship the fickle satirist who switches her loyalty from Jackson to Clay when Jackson doesn’t reimburse her for invective produced to “flay” his rival Adams.  Clearly, this “Thespian” is not criticizing generic human failings in the service of morality, but is ranting against one or the other’s person for political and remunerative purposes.  Humorously, Trollope’s satirical masked narration quotes from the actress’ work to expose this fault.  Assuring the reader that the actress has murdered the English language, Trollope cites a couplet from the epigraph to a pamphlet purchased for twenty-five cents: “‘Your popularity’s on the decline:/You had your triumph! Now I’ll have mine,” adding that the lines are “a favorable specimen of the verses that follow” (143).

Summary

Travel narratives bridge both time and space; however, in the Transatlantic narrations, time becomes more prominent.  Americans travel backward in time and the British come to the United States seeking their futures.  For Frances Trollope, who travels to the United States to embrace a new future there, the return to England permeates Domestic Manners of the Americans even more than the start of the journey.  Radical in leaving England, she returns to entertain British conservatives.  Holding up the warped mirror of the former colonies to the British government, she invites their laughter and disdain while pointing to their own threatened future.  Employing satire, Frances Trollope breaks from the governing Victorian social codes for women and “radically extends women's domestic and moral supervision (sanctioned by conduct literature) to allow for socio-political analysis, thereby re-envisioning early-nineteenth-century women's domestic and political roles” (Frawley 8).

In this paper, I continue the discussion of transatlantic travel writing where it regards genre as a means of creating and changing authorial identity, adding to it a consideration of form so far neglected; this particular travel book is, as explained, intentional satire.  Unlike the travel writing of authors crossing the Atlantic who establish a narrative identity or character that might be traced to a reasonable extent to purpose -- tourist, traveler, adventurer or immigrant, for example -- the narrator of satire by necessity must establish the impersonal but adversarial stance. Quite in the vein of travel writing put forward by a Jonathan Swift or a Mark Twain, fiction or fact notwithstanding, authors who utilize satirical rhetoric must disguise themselves as the satyr.  That mask may be conservative or reforming, but either way, it is fixed to a view of vices. 

For women, especially Victorian authors, the mask may provide protection for “unseemly” behavior, as it did for Trollope in England.  As easily, however, the mask may slip and reveal the narrator behind it, which is precisely what happened in America.  Her chief offense is using the American character to illuminate human vices that are common to all, the British elite included.  It was natural for the Americans to retaliate with satires of their own.  This study in variant narrative modes raises questions that include both the production and reception of Trollope’s narrative. 

I leave the discussion with two quotes from Trollope’s travel narrative.  The first is narrated by the traveler and woman.

I am in no way competent to judge of the political institutions of America; and if I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a woman, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.  Such observations, if they be unworthy of much attention, are also obnoxious to little reproof; but there are points of national peculiarity of which women may judge as ably as men, -- all that constitutes the external of society may be fairly trusted to us” (40)

This equivocating narrative states that she is not competent to judge, she is shallow in her study, and her emotions distort the facts.  She follows to claim the feminine gift: she may judge externals as well as a man.  The second narrator, the satyr mask, minces no words.  “Both as a woman, and as a stranger, it might be unseemly for me to say that I do not like their government, and therefore I will not say so” (165).  The stranger also equivocates, but she makes herself understood by stating what she will not say as a woman.  

Works Cited

Cotugno, Clare. "Form and Reform: Transatlantic Dialogue,1824--1876." Dissertation. Temple University, 2001.

Dickens, Charles. "American Notes."

Fellows, Susan Glass. "But Is It Satire?  Satire in the Novels of Victorian Women Writers." Dissertation. University of California, 1995.

Frawley, Maria H., ed. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994.

Kissel, Susan S. "Frances Trollope's Insight into the American Identity in Domestic Manners of the Americans." The Midwest Quarterly 35.4 (1994): 367.

Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Mulvey, Christopher. Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of 19th Century Anglo-American Travel Literature / Christopher Mulvey. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Neville-Sington, Pamela. Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Simmons, James C. Star-Spangled Eden. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc, 2000.

Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Penguin Classics ed. London: Penguin Books, 1997.