‘The Metonymy of Dress in Anthony
Trollope’s Novels’
Margaret Markwick, University of
Exeter
In defining metonymy, David Lodge offers “a
figure in which the name of an attribute or adjunct is substituted for that of
the thing meant”. This paper will examine Trollope’s use of this trope to
extend his thesis of masculinity, which I explored in New Men in Trollope’s Novels[1].
Though Dickens and Disraeli
fought manfully against the trend, in mid-Victorian Britain, men’s clothing was
predominantly dark, and commonly black. In Miss
Mackenzie, Samuel Rubb, in trade, aspires to the hand of the decidedly genteel
Margaret Mackenzie. His slender hopes are doomed when he escorts her one
evening wearing yellow gloves. Primrose gloves as part of evening dress had
been fashionable 30 years earlier; Robb’s gloves are not only out-of-date, they
are a garish yellow. As Trollope warms to his theme, the gloves come to
symbolise all the factors which destroy Robb’s standing and make him a laughing
stock.
Phineas Finn is a young
politician of fashion. To go to Loughlinter he wears knickerbockers (just
“in”), a velvet hacking jacket and a Scotch hat with a feather. In his trial
for the murder of Mr Bonteen, the critical qualities of his new light-grey
silk-lined coat become shorthand for Phineas’ character, in contrast with the
old-fashioned dark grey greatcoat, the “wraprascal” worn by the actual
murderer. Textile imagery is explored at length and in a passage of remarkable
vestimentary encryption, Trollope constructs a poetics of dress.
2a:
Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124
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