Essay Questions

What are the essential mechanics of plot which put the narrative trek of Barchester Towers in motion?

Bishop Grantly, longtime ecclesiastic center of Barchester County has died amid great conjecture over whether he would be succeeded in the post by his Archdeacon son. But that son proved a disappointment to the father who dashed his son’s eager ambitions with his recognition of disappointment. The result is that Dr. Proudie is appointed the new Bishop of Barchester. This familial struggles between father and son is merely the wick that lights the narrative, however. The fuel which turns things into a conflagration are related to the politics of state and the politics of the church. The government’s transition from Tory to Whigs is intricately connected to the equally opposition relationship between the high-church faction led by the Archdeacon and the broad-church power grab behind the Bishop Proudie.

Given that the conflict between Tories and Whigs and high-church and broad-church factions are driving the narrative, what main theme of can be extrapolated from this information?

As is almost always the case in the ideological sphere of the social community, the tension that lies at the heart of these oppositional pairs is that between conservative and progressive ideals. The split among Tories and Whigs in the distinctly political arena is mirrored by that between the two factions fighting for leverage and power within the church. On the one side are those who cling to tradition as a way of avoiding unpleasant change while confusing values with “the way we’ve always done things.” On the other side are those willing to recognize that concepts like value and tradition are things which are always in flux and cannot be held accountable to one generation simply because ten generations before it said it’s so. By pursuing this theme across not just the main plotline but subplots and extraneous events across the length and breadth of his story, Barchester Towers becomes a microcosm of the main plotline of human civilization: the ongoing struggle between conservative and liberal ideologies.

Given what has been learned about the mechanics of the plot driving a thematic exploration of conflicting ideologies, where would Mrs. Proudie seem to fit on along this ideological spectrum?

Although belonging to the traditionally slightly more liberal low-church faction, Mrs. Proudie attains her status as a memorable character because of the way she acts as an individual within that faction. Ironically, although standing in opposition to the more conservative anti-evangelical wing of her church, ultimately Mrs. Proudie winds up becoming the dominant symbol of all that is wrong about conservative ideals: she is autocratic, both repressive and oppressive, excessively fundamentalist in her theology and, like so many leading conservatives, ultimately the agency of her own doom.