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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
Language, as well as the law, emerges as a central theme in Trollope's sixth novel, Orley Farm. In fact, the law, which rests its case on the skilled use of rhetoric, is perhaps the perfect subject for the novelist preoccupied with the subtleties of language and the ways in which it may reveal and conceal the truth. Having considered legal quandaries in his novels, ranging from The Warde (1855) to The Way We Live Now (1875), Trollope focuses much of the action of Orley Farm (1862) upon the dramatic unfolding of the question of Lady Mason's legitimate involvement in the drawing up of a codicil to her husband's will. Th codicil cedes the ownership of the farm to her son Lucius, and at the opening o the novel Trollope sets forth the history of a legal battle that is about to be resurrected. Sir Joseph Mason intends to leave Orley Farm to his son by a previous marriage, rather than transfer the property to Lucius, his son by his second wife, Lady Mason. When Lucius does inherit Orley Farm a court hearing is assembled to determine the details of the drawing up of Sir Mason's will and it codicil. And although the hearing results in the exoneration of Lady Mason, the verbal sparring of the lawyers engaged in the debate signals the importance of rhetoric as a subtext in the novel.
In working out the specifics of legal verbiage and strategy throughout the nove Trollope extends his consideration of rhetoric to include strategies of dialogu in general. The language of law and love; the everyday commerce of deception an confession become central preoccupations in Orley Farm. While neither concern i new to Trollope, it is as if the author senses the perfect marriage of themes i a novel where love's stratagems and the law's unveiling of motive meet on the common ground of words: the art of telling the truth. Lady Mason's ostensible crime, forging the codicil to the will, allows Trollope to pursue his overridin concern with written and spoken truth. Along with his major exploration of Lady Mason's possible deceit, before both the law and her son, Trollope shows how truth-telling raises ethical dilemmas in the private arena. Felix Graham conceals his intentions regarding his love for Madeline Staveley from his new friends. The lawyer Furnival's private conversations with Lady Mason suggest th escalation of a possible affair between the two in the eyes of his wife. Misunderstandings and failures of communication form major impediments to the truth. And Trollope makes his consideration of this problem especially overt in Orley Farm. One situation after another confronts both character and reader wit problems of interpretation and the question of proper speech.
Recent criticism, including linguistic analysis of Trollope's fiction, acknowledges Trollope's fascination with language's potential to convey exact shades of intention. In an article on the first Palliser novel, Can You Forgive Her?, a novel that Trollope completed not long after the writing of Orley Farm, Juliet McMaster illustrates Trollope's sophisticated insinuation of the problem of language as a theme throughout the text:
The force of language is a constant concern at many levels of the novel, and words, and what is said, or written are all very much part of the subject matter, and under discussion by the characters as well as by the narrator. Alice's "word," [in reference to Alice Vavasor's marriage plans] considering ho many times she gives it, is of major import in the plot, and she indulges in much agonizing speculation of the kind: "Could she permit it to be said of her ... that three times she would go back from her word?(1)
The idea of characters defining themselves through their speech, and the largel dramatic mode of Trollope's novels, with their brilliant passages of scene-forwarding dialogue, bring the author's preoccupation with words to the forefront. And Orley Farm maintains a sustained focus on the legal arena that gives Trollope the perfect outlet for examining issues of rhetoric, both in the public sphere of truth-telling before the Bar, and in the often related private drama of drawing-room confrontations.
The primary confrontation of the novel occurs behind the scenes as a prelude to the novel's focus on the Orley Farm case. Trollope allows the reader to sympathize with Lady Mason in the drama of her fight against the injustice of Joseph Mason's disinheritance of Lucius. Lady Mason struggles against a denial carefully coded in the initial legal wording of the will. For Yeats, "Words alone are certain good"; for Trollope they determine fate. The fate of both Lad Mason and Lucius will hang upon the words that are set down in the codicil:
The body of the will was in the handwriting of the widow, as was also the codicil. It was stated by her at the trial [the first hearing] that the words were dictated to her by Usbech [Sir Joseph's attorney] in her husbands's hearing, and that the document was then signed by her husband in the presence o them both, and also in the presence of two other persons, a young man employed by her husband as a clerk, and by a servant maid?(2)
The circumstances surrounding the completion of this document suggest immediate problems of verification. At the time of the composition of the document Jonathan Usbech has gout and has lost the use of his hand. Sir Joseph's intentions must be conveyed circuitously. He, presumably, must dictate his word to his lawyer who then dictates these terms to the wife, and it is her hand tha transcribes the words that convey the legacy of Orley Farm to her son Lucius.
The ability to defend or contest the legal validity of these words becomes a byzantinely abstruse proposition relying in part upon eyewitness testimony, faith in the subjective interpretation of intentions and the vagaries of memory Because Trollope in the opening chapters of the novel informs the reader that Lady Mason and her husband have differed about the question of his leaving the farm to Lucius, the author establishes the inherent temptation that Lady Mason faces in translating the words of the codicil to paper. Mason's elder son, Joseph, maintains that a verbal promise from his father insured his inheritance of the property. Lady Mason, however, claims that knowing her husband's reluctance to leave the farm to Lucius, she forfeited part of her own estate in order to persuade him to add the codicil. And Trollope's focus on the physical composition of the making of the will is suggestive because the reader is force to consider the ambiguities that might arise in translating spoken intentions t written instructions. As if to highlight the unfortunate failure of understanding between Lady Mason and her husband, Trollope contrasts their manipulation of words and intention with the gentlemanly standard of honor embodied in Lady Mason's aristocratic neighbor, Sir Peregrine Orme. Sir Peregrine is a man devoid of skepticism in his social intercourse with his peers. Trollope identifies Orme's code of honor with his title, and the code reflects Trollope's idealization of the gentry and the standards of the past. O Sir Peregrine he states, "The word of a man or of a woman was to him always credible, until full proof had come home to him that it was utterly...
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