The 'green-eyed monster': jealousy and erotic monomania in He ...

2 The ‘green-eyed monster’
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Victorian fiction, presenting monomania fuelled rather than cured by marriage..
Following the feminist tradition, the failed-marriage plot is widely understood as concerned ‘primarily with the matter of
female agency: it tends to revolve around a wife leaving her husband.’ 9 However, this view is predicated on the assumption
that only female agency is restricted and problematized by nineteenth-century marriage laws. I suggest that Trollope frame
the failed-marriage plot primarily as a man’s plot. James Eli Adams has explained the critical shying away from masculinity
studies: it ‘has been resisted by those concerned that dwelling on the complexities and burdens of masculine identity would
serve to obscure, and thereby to reinforce, the brute realities of male domination against which feminist analyses were and
are in the first place directed.’ 10 It also risks falling into what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a ‘vast national wash of
masculine self-pity.’ 11 By examining pathological male desire, inherently exacerbating female repression, this paper begins
to redress gender imbalances in studies of Victorian psychology, illuminating instances of male domination, while resisting
the assumption that women were the only ‘victims’ of restricted agency in socio-psychological terms.
Trollope’s writing is deeply rooted in nineteenth-century psychological theory, 12 most notably Jean-Étienne Esquirol’s
term ‘monomania’, a newly-identified form of insanity. 13 This mania only showed itself when the patient thought or spoke
about one particular subject: an idée fixe. 14 Esquirol’s conceptualisation of erotic monomania or ‘erotomania’ explains that
‘ardent affections’, becoming extreme, cause monomaniacal symptoms. 15 Later definitions described the violent symptoms
shown in Galsworthy’s account. John Quackenbos, for instance, writing a few months after Galsworthy, noted that
erotomania, literally ‘raving love,’ may remain in the imagination, but may be ‘grossly sensual’, perverted and quite
repulsive. 16
Jealousy as a forerunner of madness was explored previously in novels such as Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1866).
Ellen Wood’s sensation novel, St. Martin’s Eve (1866) discussed the theme occurring in a female character. The Spectator
reviewed Wood’s novel, complaining that madness was trivialised, being used as a mere plot device, and that the author
lacked ‘the power to create Othello, or the art to paint, as Thackeray or Trollope might have done, the morbid passion in its
naturalistic nineteenth-century dress.’ 17 P. D. Edwards suggested that this review, together with Eliza Lynn Linton’s Sowing
the Wind from 1867 may have inspired Trollope’s to write He Knew He Was Right. 18 In Trollope’s protagonist the illness
takes an Esquirolian melancholic, relatively chaste form, while Galsworthy’s protagonist, presented in this paper as his
literary successor, displays highly sexualised erotomania.
He Knew He Was Right, the most detailed and extended portrait of male monomania in the Victorian canon, describes
courtship in two pages, swiftly skipping to events two years after their marriage, contrary to Watt’s generalisation.
Suspecting incorrectly that his wife is conducting an affair with her aging godfather, Colonel Osborne, Louis Trevelyan
gradually becomes mad with jealousy: a deterioration Trollope repeatedly associates with masculinity. Here Trollope joins a
contemporary cultural discourse which associated manliness with good health, physically and mentally, perceiving mental
distress as weakness in masculinity. After Osborne’s first few visits to his wife, Trevelyan struggles with his irrationality:
‘Though he believed himself to be a man very firm of purpose, his mind had oscillated backwards and forwards… by some
feeling which pervaded him in reference to this man… his powers of mind and body were paralysed.’ 19 At the novel’s
opening his agency was maximised, having ‘all the world before him where to choose’… a very pearl among men,’ 20 in
stark contrast to the melancholic hermit, hiding from his wife near Siena a few months later. Trevelyan develops the
symptoms of erotomania described by Esquirol, appearing dejected and pale.’ 21 Trollope’s diagnosis is explicit: Trevelyan is
‘mono-maniacal’ 22 and, ‘in truth, mad on the subject of his wife’s alleged infidelity.’ 23 At Trevelyan’s death bed, his doctor
observes that ‘his patient’s thoughts had been forced to dwell on one subject’, becoming ‘distorted, untrue, jaundiced…
mono-maniacal,’ 24 before the narrator announces that ‘At last the maniac was dead.’ 25
Trollope’s letters reveal that during the writing of He Knew He Was Right he was in communication with psychologists,
collecting material for his fictional case study. Furthermore, there is evidence that this channel of influence was reciprocal
in nature, with doctors reading the novel as pseudo-authentic history of monomania. Trollope wrote to one physician, ‘I am
gratified by the attention which your scientific analysis shews that you have given to the character of the unfortunate man