Different countries: A study of unrequited love in the novels of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy

This study analyzes the uses to which three Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy, put unrequited love in their fiction. Particularly in a culture, such as that of Victorian England, in which requited love is generally supposed to culminate in marriage, the unrequited lover--whose passion is never returned, not now, not eventually, not ever, and is not supplanted by a requited love for someone else--becomes a figure destined to exist outside the traditional domestic circle. Because unrequited love can represent an alternative to the world associated with that circle, it becomes an important theme in nineteenth-century fiction, for including representations of it in their books enabled writers to challenge the domestic realism, marital ideology, and what George Eliot calls in her introduction to Silas Marner (1861) the "remedial influence of pure, natural relations" that shape the mainstream tradition of Victorian fiction.;To a certain extent, Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy all accept the popular vision of marriage as a union between disciplined hearts whose complementary spirits enable them to achieve not only membership within the community but also authentic selfhood. Nevertheless, each writer is at the same time suspicious of this ideal seeks a means of expressing its limitations. Through presentations of unrequited love, Dickens offers a dark and powerful contrast to the normative vision of love as a crucial component of self-realization; Trollope questions the traditional comic values of moderation, prudence, and constancy; and Hardy suggests that the sexes are antagonistic instead of complementary and that love is an expression of individual imagination instead of a desire for union. Insofar as popular writers articulate the contours of a collective sensibility, novelists' varying treatments of the unrequited lover from the 1830s to the 1890s reveal an ever-increasing disillusionment with dominant ideologies and literary conventions. Taken together, the novels of Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy span the entire Victorian period and thus reveal some of these changes in attitude.