Patient Griseldas and mild lambs: a note on Miss Mackenzie

Anthony Trollope's Miss Mackenzie lurches awkwardly from middle-aged romance to relatively mundane social satire to a badly-incorporated attack on charity bazaars to a send-up of Victorian "celebrity" culture.  That last item, though, offers an opportunity for Trollope to play some interesting games.  One of Miss Mackenzie's suitors, a most ungentlemanly evangelical clergyman named Mr. Maguire, decides to "protect" Margaret Mackenzie from the depradations (so he believes) of yet another suitor, Sir John Ball.  To that end, Maguire writes up Sir John's relationship to Margaret and her property in a series of articles, "The Lion and the Lamb," which eventually spread to London.  London society quickly adopts Maguire's nomenclature for the would-be couple.  But another name is afoot for Margaret, thanks to the narrator: Griselda.  Indeed, the narrator first links Margaret to Griselda about thirty pages before Maguire fires off his first effusion, and continues to do so with increasing frequency for the rest of the novel. 

At first glance, the joke is on Maguire.  After all, the Griselda analogy first appears in the negative: "'I have told you all now,' said she; and as she spoke, a gleam of anger flashed from her eyes, for she was not in all respects a Griselda such as she of old" (294).  This narrator enjoys an artful negative, and while Margaret has indeed been patient for much of the novel--nursing her ailing brother, putting up with various social snubs, dealing with the obnoxious Lady Ball, and so forth--she has also shown herself perfectly capable of delivering pointed barbs when upset. But more to the point, even had she been a protagonist of the doormat variety, she would hardly have been a "Griselda"; this, after all, is Victorian England, and men do not try their wives' virtue by pretending to kill their children.  The analogy is already amusingly hyperbolic, even before the narrator sardonically negates it.  Maguire, by contrast, fails to see that his "lamb" is hardly meek and mild; if she allows Sir John Ball to shear her inadvertently ill-gotten fleece, she does so out of conscience, not terminal softness.  ("Fails to see" in more ways than one: Trollope equips Maguire with a most distracting and most symbolic squint in one eye.) In fact, the reader sees almost nothing of the articles themselves, since the narrator renders them in free indirect discourse--and thus supplies the irony that Maguire himself conspicuously lacks.

The narrator reserves to himself the right to poke fun at Maguire's public reinvention of Margaret's character, even as he continues the Griselda joke for the reader's benefit.  Margaret's horrified response to Maguire's first article brings both Griselda and the lamb into close contact: "In her agony she almost resolved that she would start at once for the Cedars and profess her willingness to go before all the magistrates in London and Littlebath, and swear that her cousin was no lion and that she was no lamb.  At that moment her feelings towards the Christians and Christian Examiners of Littlebath were not the feelings of a Griselda" (325).  As Margaret will soon discover, however, once the public seizes hold of Maguire's account, it takes more strength than she presently has to assert her own narrative of events; "swear[ing]," no matter how attractive from a legal standpoint, cannot displace the kind of stories put into circulation in the papers.  In effect, Maguire's strategy for "rescuing" Margaret throws her into a different sort of lion's den: "Everybody had heard of the Lion and the Lamb, and everybody was aware that she was supposed to represent the milder of those two favourite animals" (345).  As a "celebrity" (345), Margaret finds herself swallowed by her own public image.   (Maguire himself eventually becomes both a "wasp" and, briefly, a "wolf-in-sheep's-clothing"--the former aggravating but easily swatted, the latter only temporarily dangerous.)  The narrator, meanwhile, continues to disown the Griselda analogy in the act of invoking it.  Or does he?

When Margaret confronts the ever-obnoxious Lady Ball over the question of any future marriage to Sir John, the narrator decides that Griselda is perhaps the right term after all: "And then the modern Griselda, who had been thus galvanised into vitality, stood over her aunt in a mood that was almost triumphant" (334).  Not the original Griselda, then, but a "modern" version--one who is sharply reduced for the occasion (still no threats to kill children, etc.) but also far more willing to engage in acts of open resistance as a means of asserting her right to be loyal.  And yet, the narrator's joke leaks into society discourse.  By the time that Margaret is invited to participate in the charity ball, "the Lamb was most generally known as 'Griselda' among fashionable people" (356).  Given what we see of the upper-crust set, this does not appear to be an altogether welcome development; moreover, as the distance between the narrator's and society's voices crumbles, the narrator "inadvertently" perpetuates the celebrity culture from which he previously had kept an ironic distance. 

And yet, the narrator reserves the right to keep his own "Griselda" in reserve.  When Margaret agrees to see Sir John, who has finally come to propose again, the narrator tells us that "She was no coward.  Indeed, a true Griselda can hardly be a coward" (385).  At the same time, the narrator cheerfully takes over the lion and the lamb from Mr. Maguire: Clara Mackenzie, Margaret's fairy godmother of sorts, "dispatched her maid to send the lamb to the lion" (389).  In both instances, Trollope's use of FID fails to distinguish between the narrator's voice and the character's; it isn't clear if this "Griselda" belongs to Margaret or the narrator, just as it isn't clear if the lion and lamb joke belongs to Clara or the narrator.  As it happens, Maguire will soon lose access to the Christian Examiner, and the lion and the lamb disappear permanently from the text.  The narrator effectively neuters Maguire's narrative--the lion and the lamb wind up embracing each other, after all--while substituting in its place his own lightly ironic version of the Griselda story.  By the end of the novel, the narrator simply calls Margaret "Griselda" (395) and announces that "our modern Griselda went through the ceremony with much grace" (401).  The narrator and high society achieve some consensus about which name is more appropriate, although the narrator's "modern" qualifier retains the note of delicate irony absent from society's version.  But Griselda, too, is trumped in the end by Margaret's new name, Lady Ball--the name she goes by in the novel's final paragraph.   In a sense, the narrator hands Margaret over to her husband.