Gender, Inheritance and Sweat in Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry (1879).

This essay explores Anthony Trollope's engagement with excess sweat as a metaphor encoding a complicated nexus of cultural attitudes towards class, gender, and inheritance in Victorian fiction. Discussing Cousin Henry, a lesser-known text written towards the end of Trollope's career, I posit that scholarly readings of Trollope's concerns with inheritance laws can be further complicated by closely examining the function of sweat as a somatic signifier. Through close readings of the primary text, I consider the function of sweat as both a potent physical symbol and a narrative device destabilizing Victorian understandings of gender and class in relation to inheritance law. Cousin Henry questions the extent to which free will and individual character can ever be fully self-determined in a society so dependent on legal and bureaucratic frameworks to produce and endorse identity. Trollope explores, in 1879, the crucial role of the threateningly abject body in undermining restrictive systems of regulation and control, anticipating work by authors of the Victorian fin-de-siècle in ways that have yet to be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]