The case for Rebekah
This brings us back to the story of Rebekah. Jacob and Esau are twins, and nothing but the accident of birth-order, the “natural lottery,” determines that Esau should inherit the double portion.
From Rebekah’s point of view, and Jacob’s, the law of succession is irrational and perhaps even unjust: it has nothing to do with personal merit, for God Himself has told Rebekah otherwise (Gen. 25:23). Exactly the same thing is true in Orley Farm, of course. Trollope presents us with a story in which the law of succession rewards vice over virtue. Joseph Mason, who inherits everything under Sir Joseph’s will, is a spiteful, vengeful, baleful, self-righteous prig, and his pathologically tight- fisted wife is the most repulsive character in the book. No characters in Orley Farm receive a more pitiless treatment from Trollope. Trollope hurls in our face the question: Why do they deserve Orley Farm, and not the estimable Lady Mason and her flawed but essentially decent son? Only because it was Sir Joseph’s will to disinherit Lucius, and the laws of England allow him to work his will and disinherit his infant son, “the brat” (OF II.275). Trollope lays it on so thick that he practically compels us to consider that in this case the law is unjust. Lady Mason calls her forgery of the codicil “justice,” and even Mrs. Orme agrees that Lady Mason’s motive was to remedy “injustice.”[595] Furnival’s clerk Crabwitz states a more agnostic view that I suspect comes close to Trollope’s own: “Who can say what is the justice or the injustice of anything after twenty years of possession?” (OF II.249)For a Jew steeped in the Biblical tales, the subversion of the natural lottery and the law that creates it cannot be regarded as unequivocal wrongdoing. It may instead be divinely ordained, divinely approved wrongdoing, the working-out of a destiny that is higher than the caprice of the natural lottery.
There is nothing just about assigning life-chances on the basis of something as arbitrary as which of the twins emerged first from Rebekah’s womb.[596]A Jew, I think, cannot help regarding the crimes of Rebekah as, at least in one way, rightful acts, justified acts, acts that were supposed to be done. And a Jewish reader of Orley Farm will scarcely share Shaffer’s censorious response to Lady Mason. We do not see her as unequivocally guilty, and we certainly do not see her as repulsive. Lady Mason is Rebekah, and Rebekah is our foremother - resourceful, quick-witted, strong-willed, fiercely protective, unimpressed by the law when the law works injustice. She is a prototypical Jewish mother, ambitious for her child, and - for all we know - elected by God as the instrument of divine destiny. What is the law other than the instrument by which Sir Joseph Mason and his namesake in Groby Park can horde property for the mean-spirited? Why shouldn’t Rebekah break it? In Lady Mason’s time, no less than Rebekah’s, the law gave a woman no legal power over her husband’s right to bequeath family property as he saw fit, whether justly or unjustly. To do justice in a man’s world, Lady Mason, like Rebekah, has no alternative but to defeat the law. By presenting us with Lady Mason - a woman of enormous depth and energy, hemmed on all sides by a legal and social order that denies women the power to act - and pitting her against the detestable Mason menfolk, Trollope raises the opposition of justice and law in a distinctly feminist form: women’s justice against men’s law. He raises the opposition, but he declines to resolve it, leaving Lady Mason broken and defeated at the end of the novel, but no less admirable than when we first meet her.
Thus, when Shaffer begins by saying, “Orley Farm is the story of a guilty woman,” I think he forecloses an issue that Trollope took pains to leave open. Lady Mason has suffered from qualms of guilt, and there is no doubt that she broke the law.
But law-breaking may not be real guilt, and although Shaffer says that Lady Mason is not just legally guilty but really guilty,48 it seems to me that Trollope places that question squarely before us without presuming to answer it.would prevent the accumulation of large estates because they would be subdivided in every generation. This would make the formation of landed aristocracy impossible. Aristocratic conservatism demands that large estates be kept intact intergenerationally, even at the cost of fairness among the brothers: equality among the brothers is a small sacrifice to gain the salutary inequality among the classes! In societies where the eldest brother customarily assumes the maintenance of his younger siblings, in return for their allegiance, this arrangement would be stable. Once that custom breaks down, the result is that propertyless younger brothers are forced to make their way in the world. This they did by entering the military, or the professions, or the clergy, or the ranks of commerce - or, as in the case ofLucius Mason, by emigrating. The result was a social process in which many sons of the landed gentry abandoned their deeply conservative, static world for the dynamic world of modernity and capitalism. As agrarian society gave way to industrial society, the rule of primogeniture thus created the seeds of its own destruction. Orley Farm is set at a time in English history when this self-immolation of the aristocracy is well under way.
48 On Being a Christian and a Lawyer, supra note 2, at 57.
Now we can see why Shaffer’s plot summary of Orley Farm is defective. He focuses on Lady Mason’s crime, but not on Sir Joseph’s will and its distributive consequences, nor on the de minimis nature of the injury Lady Mason inflicted on Joseph Mason, nor on the way the law masks and protects moral inequities. Omitting these things, he omits as well Lady Mason’s belief that in committing her crime she was doing justice - and he omits the materials Trollope offers us that might lead us to agree.
I sometimes wonder whether Shaffer’s conviction that Lady Mason is really guilty derives from his conviction that property and its inheritance are not things to be trifled with (a conviction that he has occasionally expressed in his writings).[597] I also wonder whether his view has changed over the years, as Shaffer has become more explicitly radical. Recently, he has written,
The most significant countercultural witness for Christians is the moral example of an imprudent itinerant rabbi named Jesus who got himself killed by the government. Consider three radical understandings of Christian moral example left to them by this rabbi... There is, first, an economic reading that subverts all forms of business and of property ownership in favor not of equality, but of distribution to the economic underclass.[598]
This is Shaffer at his point of greatest affinity to the Biblical prophets - not only to Jesus, but also to the Hebrew prophets who denounced the oppression of the poor at the hands of those sharing the outlook of Joseph Mason and his wife. It contains no reverence for property, and Shaffer considers reverence for property (like reverence for the legal system and for the state) a form of idol-worship.
Even more to the point is Shaffer’s 1996 reflection on the story of Rebekah. After first noting that Rebekah is a good person, chosen by God, a source of merit for all Israel, and a prophet, he reflects on the lie she told Isaac to win his blessing for Jacob:
The meaning of Rebekah’s lie is the meaning to be found in her life and mission, and that had to do with her life of devotion to her family - all generations of it - a family of families - and to protecting her family both from a harmful person and the harmful rule of law that placed too much power in a first-born son and made irrevocable a father’s ill-considered testamentary gesture.[599]
Here, Rabbi Shaffer reads Rebekah’s story as a Jew reads it. Shaffer vindicates Rebekah’s lie. But, as we ponder his vindication, we might find ourselves reflecting on what an apt description it is, in most respects, of Lady Mason as well.[600]