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

Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right is unique among the prolific writer’s 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 novel’s densely detailed presentation of lived reality, to consider the relation between that reality and the proposition put forward in the title sentence. What does it mean to say that Louis Trevelyan â€Å"knew he was right†? Even if we are unconvinced by J. Hillis Miller’s argument that â€Å"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), Trollope’s choice of title inevitably throws us back, as we attempt to make sense of the events narrated under that title, on questions of moral epistemology; that is, it compels reflection on ho w we know what is right and on the extent to which we can be secure in that knowledge. Obliged to read the narrative as, among other things, a meditation on â€Å"knowing† and on â€Å"rightness,† we can perceive that Trollope’s concern here is with the manner in which his characters come to possess certainty in their moral judgments, with the process by which they acquire the disposition towards what is â€Å"right† that we can label â€Å"virtue.† â€Å"Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?† an irritated Caroline Spalding asks her zealously romantic sister, a credulous devotee of the genre. We might 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 novel’s most 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 manifests a subsidiary interest in the ways in which moral agents can replace such false certainty with the sort of just and balanced ethical vision that Trevelyan so conspicuously lacks. As we will see, this concern with moral education is displayed most directly in the novel’s secondary narrative threads, in which both Jemima Stanbury and her niece Dorothy attain an empathetic subtlety of perception and a depth of understanding of others that are absent in their former selves, as depicted at the opening of the novel.