Trollope’s Gift-giving Community and the Gentlemen’s League

Abstract

This article will explore the meaning of the community appearing in Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset. Just as numerous critics have focuses on Trollope’s portrayal of ethical individuality, often characterized as eccentric and incomprehensible, they tend to dismiss the topic of the community in which diverse members of a Trollopian community appreciate the social aspect of communal living, trying to maintain its respectability. This article pays attention to the ways in which Trollope represents a particular cultural practice that is helpful to the establishment and management of the community system: gift-giving. In the novel, Trollope’s gifts appear in various forms and in diverse roles, and gift-giving practices are so pervasive that they can be characterized as a culture. Borrowing from Marcel Mauss and other gift theorists, this article explores gift-giving practices that promote to enact the community’s politics of inclusion and exclusion for the benefits of the dominant. Particularly, Trollope makes sure that gift-giving practices are embedded in Victorian gender ideology. While Trollope’s female characters can contribute, as actual participants, to the gift exchange dynamic of their community, their giftings are considered harm to the (male) recipients or a risk to the maintenance of a group (of men). Consequently, women’s giftings are often trivialized and they are, I would argue, considered most significant only when they create benefits and profits in social relations between men, and particularly when they help to solidify male bonding between gentlemen.