Domestic Manners of the Americans

Fanny Trollope did not originally travel to America for the purpose of writing a book. Rather, her aims were to observe Fanny Wright’s Nashoba Commune and to improve her family’s finances by helping her husband in his building project in Cincinnati. For her, Nashoba represented an ideal of America as a potential utopia of freedom and wellbeing, while the American West (Midwest in current-day terms) represented fertile ground for new cultural ventures that could bring the family much-needed revenue. Thus, Trollope came to America to fulfill idealistic hopes and dreams for her and her family.

Unfortunately, both Nashoba and the Cincinnati Bazaar failed miserably, leaving Trollope strongly disillusioned about the young country. Moreover, complicating Trollope’s criticism of Americans for their uncouth manners, eyewitnesses to Trollope’s stay in Cincinnati later claimed that she was excluded from the city’s higher society because of her own perceived lack of manners and refinement.

In framing her narrative, Trollope artfully conceals much of this background from the reader, only revealing as much as strictly necessary for credibility. For example, she says little about the Bazaar or her husband’s connections with it, stating only that she has gone to Cincinnati to wait for his arrival from England. Likewise, her relationship with Wright is not discussed in detail, and her traveling companion Hervieu is given only two brief mentions. In real life, rumors spread about the nature of Trollope and Hervieu’s relationship, although scholars believe they were merely friends.

By means of this careful framing, Trollope is able to forestall numerous criticisms: that she had unrealistic expectations about America going in; that her opinions of America have been colored by her personal misfortune; and that her own social background did not match her aristocratic ideals, thus barring her from observing more refined elements of American society. Instead, the book is presented as an honest and impartial observation of American life by an outsider.

In the Preface, Trollope emphasizes that the book will be focused on social customs rather than government or politics, although she implies that the two are necessarily related. Indeed, she asserts that the book serves as a warning about the dangers of democracy, thus effectively inserting it into the ongoing debate in British Parliament about the Reform Bill that sought to introduce democratic reforms. Trollope shows that she wants to have influence in the political future of her country.

Along these same lines, in Chapter 5, Trollope will tie the focus on the more intimate features of society to her identity as a female writer; for her, while political affairs pertain to men, “all that constitutes the external of society may be entrusted to us [women]” (40).

Trollope enters America from an unusual vantage point: the Mississippi region, rather than the East Coast that was the entry point for most tourists and immigrants. This point of view allows her to depict scenes that would have been unfamiliar and exotic to most of her readers. The Gulf Coast is a quasi-tropical area with hurricanes, palm trees, and alligators. In New Orleans, Trollope describes a city stratified along class lines based on race, with African Americans at the bottom, the descendants of French settlers at the top, and people of mixed race in the middle.

Racial issues will play a key role in the book, with Trollope standing strongly against the practice of slavery in the Southern US. Indeed, Wright’s plan to educate African Americans (and thus allow them to enter society on an equal footing with whites) was one of the motives that drew the idealistic Trollope to America.

However, the harsh and unsanitary conditions at Nashoba prove too much for Trollope and she (along with Wright) give up the project. Throughout the book, Trollope’s attitudes will show a tension between idealism and a more realistic desire for comfort and convenience.