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

Anthony Trollopes He Knew He Was functionAnthony Trollopes He Knew He Was Right is unique among the prolific writers novels in having as its title a complete declarative sentence. Such a title stands as a sort of challenge to the reader it invites us, as we make our way through the novels densely detailed presentation of lived humans, to consider the relation between that reality and the proposition put forward in the title sentence. What does it mean to ass ever soate that Louis Trevelyan knew he was office? Even if we are unconvinced by J. Hillis moth millers argument that a long multi-plotted novel like He Knew He Was Right, with all its wealth and particularity of character, incident, realistic detail, may be an exploration of a single complex word (Miller 77), Trollopes survival of the fittest of title inevitably throws us back, as we attempt to make brain of the events narrated under that title, on questions of clean epistemology that is, it compels reflection on how we know what is right and on the extent to which we can be secure in that knowledge. obligate to read the narrative as, among other things, a meditation on subtile and on rightness, we can perceive that Trollopes concern here is with the mode in which his characters come to possess certainty in their moral judgments, with the handle by which they acquire the disposition towards what is right that we can label virtue. Who would ever think of run intoing to live out of an English novel? an plastered Caroline Spalding asks her zealously romantic sister, a credulous devotee of the genre. We cogency 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 more or less 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 also mani fests a infantryman interest in the ways in which moral agents can supervene upon such false certainty with the sort of just and balanced good vision that Trevelyan so conspicuously lacks. As we will see, this concern with moral education is displayed most directly in the novels substitute narrative threads, in which both Jemima Stanbury and her niece Dorothy attain an empathetic subtlety of perceptual experience and a depth of understanding of others that are absent in their motive selves, as depicted at the opening of the novel.