Fanny: A Fiction

Edmund White packs quite a bit into his three-word title.  "Fanny" refers both to novelist Fanny Trollope, the book's ostensible author, and the radical Fanny Wright, the book's equally ostensible subject.  This doubling becomes a key part of the novel, as Trollope simultaneously desires, envies, and (textually speaking) tries to kill off the far more adventurous Wright.  Alliteration aside, "fiction" carries more weight than first meets the eye.  While it bears overtones of "novel," it also suggests the original Latin sense of making--suitable both for a historical novel that radically reinvents its subject and for the problematic biography that Trollope is supposedly writing. 

That being said, it's tempting to conclude that the simple title is the most complex thing about this book.  The enthusiastic blurbs on the back cover seem more off-kilter than normal.  It's not clear, for example, why Ann Beattie thinks that this is a "post-modern historical novel whose narrator is amusingly incapable of being self-reflexive": the novel features a conventionally linear narrative, is not especially interested in epistemological issues, and, while metafictional enough, is also not especially interested in taking up questions of narrative authority, the relationship between representation and event, and the like.  And its dramatic irony seems remarkably Victorian, not remarkably postmodern. 

Still, it's not as though there's nothing to be said about the novel.  This is, above all, a book of disappointments; it's appropriate that the "manuscript" remains unfinished.  Trollope loses several children, watches her marriage disintegrate, fails in business, must relinquish her (entirely fictional) satisfying relationship with an escaped slave, and cannot hold on to Wright's affections.  Wright fails as a reformer, destroys almost every human relationship she enters into, subsides temporarily into bourgeois domesticity, and then sees her marriage die.  There are multiple utopian schemes--most notably, Robert Owen's New Harmony and Wright's Nashoba settlement--all of which collapse.  Mr. Trollope is disappointed in business, then dies before he can complete more than the first volume of his ecclesiastical encyclopedia.  The novel itself is a failed biography, since Trollope sets out to write about Wright but (rather like Esther Summerson in Bleak House) often finds herself intruding into the narrative.  As the failures heap up, the novel takes on the cast of a warning against plans, in the Middlemarch sense--that is, unproblematic fantasies about future goals.  Trollope plans a biography, but can't write it; Wright plans ideal communities and speaks of them as finished, but, as Trollope tells her, in some exasperation, "[Y]ou haven't done all that.  You wish you had.  You've told all the world that's what you've done.  But it hasn't happened" (176).  The novel consistently situates plans for the future somewhere on a continuum between the merely unrealistic to the actively inhumane.  Yet it also rejects the anti-idealism of characters like the racist Mr. MacKenzie, a man who simply inverts the utopianism of the other figures.

There's not much of an alternative to "plans"; nobody, not even Trollope, can avoid such dreams of the future.  But the novel does propose the possibility of surrendering to a moment, temporarily relinquishing thoughts of the future for the joy of an immediate and local connection: "But these fears of future damnation and the even greater fear of repelling my lover now were nothing beside the panting pleasure of--well, of pleasure" (285).  Trollope's eventual realization that she cannot continue her love affair with the escaped slave, Jupiter (Cudjo) Higgins, without putting him in mortal danger, is perhaps the novel's only example of a moral decision to relinquish a plan before it destroys another human being.  Wright, by contrast, inadvertently brutalizes the slaves she hopes to rescue, and both directly and indirectly contributes to the death of her ailing sister. 

White makes no attempt to emulate the real Frances Trollope's prose style, which is all to the good.  He imagines her as "vulgar" (her term), often cheerful, and certainly sardonic (of Robert Browning: "His conversation is like his poetry, but comprehensible" [69]).   While the resulting voice is engaging, the dramatic irony works less well.  Trollope's obtuseness about her son Henry's relationship with a French painter, Auguste Hervieu, is amusing...once or twice; as a novel-long plot device, it falls flat with a resounding thud, especially when Trollope still fails to pick up the blindingly obvious after Wright observes that the two are lovers (333).  More successful are those moments in which she finds herself suddenly alienated from her aging body--simultaneously herself and not herself--in ways that seem to be deliberate echoes from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette.  (Trollope's obsession with the rich and famous is uncannily reminiscent of Eliza Lynn Linton's The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, which must hold some sort of Victorian record for name-dropping.  I'm sure that's unintentional, though.) 

The novel is at its most metafictional when reminding us that it is "written to the moment," as it were.  Trollope reminds herself to check details or to delete material later; her daughter-in-law sometimes rewrites the text on the fly; and even the editor occasionally interjects some tart observations.  The conceit is that the text has been published unedited, leaving everything that ought to have been deleted or "improved" still standing: "Except my love for Cudjo [Destroy these pages! My sons must not see any of this and my public reputation would be permanently besmirched] wasn't moderate at all" (279).  Thus, the novel mocks the stock conventions of Victorian biography and autobiography--its hagiographical tendencies, staidness, and what not--in the grand tradition of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  The result is enjoyable, although readers may suspect that we've been there before. 

Overall, while hardly one of White's best novels, Fanny: A Fiction makes for entertaining light reading.  It's a little clunky when it gets into the "historical" in historical fiction--there are some awkward patches of exposition--but otherwise smoothly executed.  Readers who don't know anything about either Trollope or Wright may be happier than those who do, as White has blithely reinvented entire swathes of biographical fact.