Bigamy and the Creole Beauty: Race Anxiety in Dr. Wortle's School (1881)

• Published in: Reforming Trollope pp. 133 - 165
• Main Author: Morse, Deborah Denenholz
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2013
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Mixed Race Woman; Ayala's Angel; Young Man; Beautiful Quadroon; Trollope's Palliser Novels; Great Bodily Exertion; Louis Trevelyan; British West Indies; John Caldigate; George Stubbs; Louisiana Creole; Framley Parsonage; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Sir John Tenniel; Jamaica Committee; Morant Bay Rebellion; Governor Eyre Controversy; Kate Field; Quadroon Ball; Jonathan Stubbs; White Creole; Creole Woman; Wortle's School
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315604305-10
• ISBN: 9781409456148; 1409456145

In the last chapter, I offered a postcolonial reading of Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1869) that focused upon the marriage of the upper-class Englishman Louis Trevelyan to a beautiful, voluptuous dark woman he meets in the fictitious Mandarin Islands, which I argue are the British West Indies. I discussed this marriage in the context of the October 1865 Jamaica or Morant Bay Rebellion and the ensuing Governor Eyre Controversy, which was not resolved in England until 1872. 1 Louis Trevelyan's obsessive will to mastery ends in his madness and death, while his dark wife Emily Rowley Trevelyan, after much suffering, inherits his wealth and gains custody of their son Louey. I read He Knew He Was Right as Trollope's commentary upon the legacy of English slavery and the English imperial-colonial regime in the West Indies. Trollope figures this critique of the Empire in relation to an examination of marriage and divorce laws in High Victorian England. 2