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

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, violent erotomania.
He Knew He Was Right, the most detailed and extended portrait of male monomania in the Victorian
canon, describes courtship in a mere two pages, swiftly skipping to events two years after marriage,
contrary to Ian 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 which Trollope repeatedly associates with his declining masculinity. Here Trollope joins a
contemporary cultural discourse which associated manliness with good health, physically and mentally,
perceiving mental distress as weakness in masculinity. Trollope demonstrates the failure of attempts to
impose the male will, and the inevitable failure of attempts to force it, particularly when based on
jealous passion. Having demanded that Emily not receive Colonel Osborne at home, Louis soon notes
that ‘so far he had hardly gained much by the enforced obedience of his wife.’ 1 Louis is acutely aware
that his behaviour actually threatens his status as a gentleman and as a man, and he berates himself for
it: ‘He had meant to have acted in a high-minded, honest, manly manner; but circumstances had been
so untoward with him, that on looking at his own conduct, it seemed to him to have been mean, and
almost false and cowardly.’ 2 After Osborne’s first few visits to his wife, Trevelyan struggles with his
irrationality:
1 Ibid., p. 54.
‘Though he believed himself to be a man very firm of purpose, his mind had oscillated
2 He Knew He Was Right, p. 55.