Men in Trust: Parallels between Mr. Partenza and Andrew Bevel

 The parallels between Ida Partenza’s father, Mr. Partenza and Andrew Bevel brought to light the domineering role of men created by Hernan Diaz in Trust. This conclusion was formed thanks to Ida Partenza’s tendency to see herself in the character, Helen (248), who is Vanner’s rendition of Mildred Bevel. And using the “bluster and pride” (270) borrowed from her father, she created a version of Bevel using her father.

First, before any proof of distinct parallels between the two characters are dissected, Mr. Partenza and Andrew Bevel should be judged separately with the purpose of understanding their roles in the story. Beginning with Bevel’s role in Trust, Diaz creates an apathetic and wealthy protagonist for the readers. Harold Vanner describes Bevel through Benjamin’s character as a man who from past to present had only “just one substantial difference between his former self and who he had become” (124), which seems to only paint Bevel’s character as tasteless. Alternatively, Bevel had seen in himself an identity superior to the government and common-folk as he critiques those who try to gain control of the economy, yet victimizes himself as one of those “legitimate investors” (181). Ida Partenza supports this in her account of the man who had convinced “me [her] of his superiority” (283). On the other hand, Mr. Partenza lives frugally with the “little money” he would make as a hand typesetter. His character could be juxtaposed with Bevel for being an anarchist who, unlike the self-assured financialist, was jealous of those similar to him that “achieved… prominence” (206). The differences between Bevel and Partenza couldn’t be more obvious. One was a white American financialist who had been rich since birth, the other was an Italian anarchist “caught between the country he had left and resented and the land that had taken him in without fully accepting him” (209). Nevertheless, their similarities as Diaz scripts men in Trust, couldn’t have been more prominent.

Both Bevel and Partenza embrace their opinions about their role in the world, which paint Diaz’s self-depiction of men in Trust. Ida Partenza compares Bevel’s statement that his job “is about being right”(266) to the same force of personality she faced at home with her father who believed he was “supposed to be right” (273) in their everyday interactions. Additionally, Bevel and Partenza critique the world’s compliance to a fiction: Partenza believing money is fiction and that “finance capital is the fiction of a fiction” (216) while Bevel grows angry that Vanner’s novel about his life has a  “stronger presence in the real world” (237) than the truth.

Diaz’s representation of men as conservatives in the light of women is also seen through Bevel and Partenza’s treatment of women in Trust. Ida Partenza notes that her father had “never done any household chores” (230) seen it that it is traditionally a woman’s role to do so, and although she knew he loved her mother, he’d never cleared her mother’s belonging after her death not because of his “inability to ‘let go’” (231), but because it had “never occurred to him to clean them out”. In the alternative, Andrew Bevel declares in his auto-biography that women should not be involved in the affairs of financialists. Primarily when highlighting the rise of women investors from 1.5 to 40 percent in a decade, Bevel stated, “could there have been a clearer indicator of the disaster to come” (182)? Bevel is often shadowed as a man diminishing of women and Ida Partenza remarks he had diminished his wife to be “just like the wives in the autobiographies of the Great Men” (300) and as such, “put her in her place”. Ida Partenza compares Bevel to Vanner, a writer who she believed had also put a woman “in her place”, and Diaz presented a likeness in men in his novel when he reveals Ida Partenza’s father disapproved of her secretarial position. Mr. Partenza believed that the occupation was “another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men” (210), acknowledging the imbalance between genders in the workforce, but ultimately doing the same as the other two men, putting his daughter, Ida, in her place.