Trilby (1894) is a gothic horror novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time, perhaps the second best selling novel of the Fin de siècle period after Bram Stoker's Dracula. Trilby is set in the 1850s in an idyllic bohemian Paris. Though it features the hijinks of three lovable English artists — especially the delicate genius Little Billee — its most memorable character is Svengali, a Jewish rogue, a masterful musician, and an irresistible hypnotist.
Trilby O'Ferrall, the novel's heroine, is a magnificent half-Irish girl working in Paris as an artists' model and laundress; all the men in the novel are in love with her. The relation between Trilby and Svengali forms only a small portion of the novel, which is mainly an evocation of a milieu, but it is a crucial one.
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Plot summary
Trilby is literally tone-deaf: "Svengali would test her ear, as he called it, and strike the C in the middle and then the F just above, and ask which was the highest; and she would declare they were both exactly the same."
Even so, Svengali hypnotizes her and transforms her into a great diva, la Svengali. Under his spell, Trilby becomes a talented singer, performing always in an amnesiac trance. At a performance in London, Svengali is stricken with a heart attack and is unable to induce the trance. Trilby is unable to sing in tune and is subjected to "laughter, hoots, hisses, cat-calls, cock-crows." Not having been hypnotized, she is completely baffled and though she can remember living and traveling with Svengali, she cannot remember anything of her singing career.
Reception
The novel was adapted into a long-running play starring Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Svengali. That play was so popular that it was travestied, including as A Model Trilby; or, A Day or Two After Du Maurier, by Charles H. E. Brookfield and William Yardley, with music by Meyer Lutz, at the Opera Comique, produced by the retired Nellie Farren.[1] John Barrymore played the title role in the Warner Brothers release Svengali (1931). A musical adaptation by Frank Wildhorn, entitled Svengali, was staged twice in 1991.
Trilby inspired Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) and introduced the phrase "in the altogether" (meaning "completely unclothed") to the English language, as well as indirectly inspiring the name of the Trilby hat, originally worn on stage by a character in the play.
The novel contained a thinly veiled portrait, in the character of the pompous and eccentric "idle apprentice" Joe Sibley, of painter James McNeill Whistler. Whistler threatened to sue for libel unless the character was removed and Du Maurier apologized. The writing was revised, and no public apology was made.
A fandom developed around the Trilby story character, which was criticized in Belsham's Essays.
The Trilby story was parodied in Mighty Mouse cartoons in the 1940s that featured Pearl Pureheart and Oil Can Harry.
An inside look at Trilby and Henry James's friendship with Du Maurier (Kiki) can be found in David Lodge's novel Author, Author (2004).
Notes
- ^ The Times, 18 November 1895, p. 3
References
- Davison, Neil R. "'The Jew' as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, "Trilby," and Dreyfus." Jewish Social Studies 8 (Winter-Spring 2002): 73-111. Accessed through JStor on 4 September 2009.
- McNaught, W. "George du Maurier and Trilby." The Musical Times 81 (November 1940): 435-438. Accessed through JStor on 4 September 2009.
- Taylor, Jonathan. "The Music Master and 'the Jew' in Victorian Writing: Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot and George Du Maurier." In The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2004.
- Weliver, Phyllis. "Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby." In The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2004.
- Weliver, Phyllis. Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2000.
External links
- Trilby at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
- Trilby at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
- Article about Trilby on Mount Holyoke College's "Bohemianism and Counterculture" site.
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