Introducing Rebekah

I have presented Shaffer’s approach to Orley Farm in what I hope is a sympathetic and accurate way. But there is much about its moral position that troubles me and much about his reading of the novel that does not ring true.

Let me return to Shaffer’s summary of Orley Farm's plot, quoted above. I want to take issue with its very first phrase, “Orley Farm is the story of a guilty woman.”²⁷ A few pages later he echoes and expands this judgment: “The guilty are repulsive. Lady Mason, as pretty and respectable as she is, comes to be repulsive to everyone in the story, even to herself.”²⁸ These ideas form the theme of a chapter in On Being a Christian and a Lawyer, entitled “The Problem of Revulsion,” which uses Orley Farm to raise the question of how lawyers should come to terms with the revulsion they feel for their guilty clients.

The trouble with Shaffer’s reading is that Lady Mason is not a repulsive figure. On the contrary, she is from start to finish the most attractive character in the novel, and I for one have no doubt that Trollope fully intended her to be. As Trollope writes at the end of the book,

I may, perhaps, be thought to owe an apology to my readers in that I have asked their sympathy for a woman who had so sinned as to have placed her beyond the general sympathy of the world at large. If so, I tender my apology, and perhaps feel that I should confess a fault. But as I have told her story that sympathy has grown upon myself till I have learned to forgive her, and to feel that I too could have regarded her as a friend (OF II.312).

The final sentence is ironic Trollopean understatement. Trollope knows full well that he has given us a great fictional heroine and made her sym­pathetic from the very first page. He lets us know it at the outset, in further ironic understatement: “Persistent novel readers...

From the moment we meet her, Trollope dwells on Lady Mason’s attrac­tions, and I think that Shaffer trivializes them when he describes her only as “pretty and respectable” (OF I.14). She is, to be sure, “tall and comely,” and her widowed life before the novel begins was “successful... prudent and well conducted” (OF I.14). But, in addition, she is “a woman of no ordinary power,” with “considerable mental faculties” (OF I.14) - and much more than that.

The quietness and repose of her manner suited her years and her position; age had given fulness to her tall form; and the habitual sadness of her countenance was in fair accordance with her condition and character. And yet she was not really sad, - at least so said those who knew her. The melancholy was in her face rather than in her character, which was full of energy, if energy may be quiet as well as assured and constant (OF I.15).

At the moment of Lady Mason’s greatest travail, Trollope describes her thus: “She was a woman who with a good cause might have dared anything. With the worst cause that a woman could well have, she had dared and endured very much” (OF II.35). And later: “There was much that was wonderful about this woman” (OF II.179).

When we first get to know her, Lady Mason has become aware that trouble is brewing, and Trollope shows her thinking her way through her problems. He makes it a pleasure for us to watch her in action, for her intelligence, her judgment of other people, and her sense of strategy are nearly infallible. (Indeed, one of the key elements of the plot - her estrangement from her son Lucius - arises because Lady Mason rightly senses that Lucius’s own judgment was too poor for her to confide in him.) She takes steps to make allies of the local gentry, Sir Peregrine Orme and his daughter-in-law Edith.

All this makes Lady Mason sound ruthlessly manipulative, but throughout the novel Trollope takes great pains to show us otherwise. She is never merely strategic; and, while she has ulterior motives for all her moves, she never uses her friends merely as means to an end. She genuinely loves them, and she never abuses their trust.^[583] In fact, the great crisis of the novel occurs when Sir Peregrine falls in love with Lady Mason and asks her to marry him. Lady Mason realizes that in order to save him from a disgraceful marriage to a woman who may well be doomed, she has to confess her crime to the hitherto unsuspecting Sir Peregrine. She does so, knowing that by doing so she is unraveling all her plans and bringing inescapable ruin on herself. Trollope’s chapter title-“Showing How Lady Mason Could Be Very Noble” - is clearly not ironic. Shaffer thinks that as the novel proceeds she “comes to be repulsive,”^[584] but I do not see it.

Trollope could easily have written a novel in which, to cover up her crime, Lady Mason had to commit new misdeeds and betrayals, and make herself - in Shaffer’s word - repulsive. But that is not the book Trollope wrote. Nothing blemishes Lady Mason except the twenty-year-old crime she com­mitted before the book begins.

Even that crime she committed for the sake of Lucius, not for herself. In one of the crucial chapters of the book, “What Rebekah Did For Her Son,” Lady Mason debates her crime with Mrs. Orme:

“What did Rebekah do, Mrs. Orme? Did she not do worse; and did it not all go well with her? Why should my boy be an Ishmael? Why should I be treated as the bondwoman, and see my little one perish of thirst in this world’s wilderness?”

“No Saviour had lived and died for the world in those days,” said Mrs. Orme.

“And no Saviour had lived and died for me,” said the wretched woman, almost shrieking in her despair (OF II.158).

Actually, Lady Mason has performed a double self-identification, as Rebekah but also as Sarah - for it was Sarah who caused her bondwoman Hagar to be driven into the wilderness with her son Ishmael.

Twice more, Trollope repeats the identification of Lady Mason with Rebekah: “She remembered Rebekah, and with the cunning of a second Rebekah she filched a world’s blessing for her baby” (OF II.311). And, more elaborately:

As Rebekah had deceived her lord and robbed Esau, the first-born, of his birthright, so had she robbed him who was as Esau to her. How often had she thought of that, while her conscience was pleading hard against her! Had it been imputed as a crime to Rebekah that she had loved her own son well, and loving him had put a crown upon his head by means of her matchless guile? Did she love Lucius, her babe, less than Rebekah had loved Jacob? And had she not striven with the old man, struggling that she might do this just thing without injustice, till in his anger he had thrust her from him. “I will not break my promise for the brat,” the old man had said; - and then she did the deed (OF II.275).

On my reading, these scenes and identifications are the keys that unlock Orley Farm. To see why, we will have to do some Biblical delving.

How the Hebrew Bible undermines primogeniture

Rebekah, remember, wants her favorite son Jacob, rather than his elder brother Esau, to get Isaac’s paternal blessing. So she tricks the blind Isaac into thinking that Jacob is really Esau, by placing kid skin on his hands and neck so that the smooth-skinned Jacob would feel like his hairy brother (Gen. 27). Jacob has already talked Esau into selling his birthright (Gen. 25:29-34), and, assisted by Rebekah’s matchless guile (to use Trollope’s words), Jacob completely supplants Esau (Gen. 27:19-37).

What attitude should a Jewish reader have toward Jacob and Rebekah - or, for that matter, toward Sarah, who drives Ishmael and Hagar into the desert, to suffer a terrible death, for all she knows, so that Ishmael’s younger half­brother Isaac can inherit the legacy of Abraham?^[585] Both are stories in which mothers defeat the law of primogeniture to capture an inheritance for their sons - precisely Lady Mason’s crime. The Torah tells both Rebekah’s and Sarah’s tales without any comment or any redeeming narrative to moralize and sugarcoat them. Yet to a Jewish reader, Rebekah, Jacob, and Sarah cannot be mere criminals. These are the patriarchs and the matriarchs, and God endorses their actions. Their story is the story of Jewish origin, the explanation of how God’s covenant and God’s Torah passed to the children of Israel. Their story is our story.

Nothing is more central to Jewish identity than the connection to history, the braiding of what I do today into the many-stranded cable of Jewish deeds and observance running unbroken back into time. Jewish ritual takes care to bind us to the Biblical stories in the most powerful and immediate way possible. At the Passover Seder, we are told to regard ourselves as though we had been personally rescued from slavery in Egypt.

The stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs stand, mythically at least, at the beginning of the cable. The centerpiece and core of every Jewish service is a silent meditation called the Eighteen Blessings (Shemoneh Esrei). It is almost 2,000 years old, and the Talmud calls it simply Tefilah, “the prayer.”^[586] The worshiper stands up, takes three steps forward - symbolically walking into the divine presence - and, bowing, begins the first blessing, the avot, the invocation of the ancestors. “Blessed are You, Hashem our God and the God of our forefathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.” The gender-egalitarian Conservative and Reform liturgies add the imahot, the invocation of the mothers -“God of Sarah, God of Rebekah, God of Rachel, and God of Leah.” Repeated three times a day by observant Jews, the avot and the imahot are the fountainheads from which all the remaining blessings and supplications in the prayer flow. Before asking anything else, we first let God know that we remember who we are and who we came from.

That makes stories of ancestral transgression problematic and complex. Of course, the stories of Rebekah and Sarah are hardly the only places where our national epic displays our ancestors as morally flawed human beings. Some readers, I suppose, are repelled by the weakness and occasional infamy of our ancestors, memorably scattered throughout the pages of the Hebrew Bible. The rabbis obviously found it troubling, and the medieval commentary lit­erature is full of interpretations explaining it away - explaining, for example, why Esau and Ishmael deserved to be disinherited.^[587] I, on the other hand, am filled with awe and admiration at a national epic that so dispassionately exhibits the founding heroes as flawed human beings, rather than infallible demigods or pillars of righteousness.

But the story of Rebekah, like that of Sarah, does more than exhibit them as flawed human beings. These stories establish that God’s covenant with the Jews came about through a series of transgressions of God’s own law. For make no mistake - the law of primogeniture, traduced by Sarah and Rebekah, is itself a Deuteronomic commandment:

If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, but the first-born is the son of the unloved one - when he wills his property to his sons, he may not treat as first-born the son of the loved one in disregard of the son of the unloved one who is older. Instead, he must accept the first-born, the son of the unloved one, and allot to him a double portion of all he possesses; since he is the first fruit of his vigor, the birthright is his due (Deut. 21:15-17).

Although the commandment discusses an unusual special case of suc­cession, it informs us that in normal cases the rule gives eldest sons a double portion as their birthright. And the commandment in the special case is itself troubling because the story of Sarah and Ishmael seems to fit it so closely and violate it so plainly.^[588] Yet God Himself ratifies Sarah’s demand for the expulsion of Ishmael. God assures Abraham that “it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you” (Gen. 21:12). It seems that God ordains and desires the transgression of the law.

But the puzzle runs even deeper than this, for the overthrow of primo­geniture and the transmission of divine favor to younger sons over elder forms one of the leitmotifs of the Hebrew Bible. Isaac inherits over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau. In addition, Joseph prevails over his older brothers, and Moses, “whom the Lord singled out, face to face,” is the younger brother of Aaron (Deut. 34:10). For that matter, as Robert Cover points out, God favors Abel over his elder brother Cain, and the human race springs from the third- born Seth.^[589] The rise of Solomon to David’s throne, like the rise of David to Saul’s, and the prophet Samuel’s to Eli’s high-priesthood, all involve a younger man defeating the birthright of an elder son.^[590] In each case the younger man is ish haruach, the one whom God has invested with the spirit. The story of Rebekah is unique among these antinomian episodes, because she alone overthrows the law through out-and-out fraud. Yet she too is chosen, and Jacob, whom God names “Israel,” is chosen by God through the instrument of Rebekah’s trickery.^[591]

On Cover’s reading, the legalism of the Bible is set within an antilegalistic story. “The biblical narratives always retained their subversive force - the memory that divine destiny is not lawful.”^[592] For it is nothing less than divine destiny that, again and again, chooses against the letter and the spirit of the law of primogeniture. Cover elaborated the point as follows:

To be an inhabitant of the biblical normative world is to understand, first, that the rule of succession can be overturned; second, that it takes a conviction of divine destiny to overturn it; and third, that divine destiny is likely to manifest itself precisely in overturning this specific rule.⁴⁰

The story of Jewish origins in the Torah is a story of overthrowing the law for the sake of something higher. If Jewishness is “about” origins, then it is “about” the subversion of law. After all, each of these leitmotif stories, each subversion of primogeniture, is a microcosm of the larger story told in the Hebrew Bible - the story of how the “younger” people, the children of Israel, came to do God’s will by dispossessing the owners of the land of Canaan of their domains. The Torah story is the story of the overthrow of primogeniture, writ large.