The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)
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The opening section (Chapters 1–15) reveals Gilbert Markham as first cousin to Emily Bronte’s Lockwood – an unreliable narrator, fundamentally a decent man in a novel not rich in human decency especially amongst males, but with a little of the oaf, a little of the cad. Subject to swerves of feeling, he is sometimes silly and imperceptive, often kind, generous, sympathetic, and willing to grow in spirit – that is, if such growth will turn Helen into Helen Markham. Flouncing and exploding, manipulative and irresponsible, he rises to displays of prodigious learning (‘So we talked about painting, poetry, and music, theology, geology, and philosophy…’ (p. 73)), and sinks to peevish sulks or twaddling conferences with his irritating brother Fergus. Markham’s tenderness for animals and children would have spoken eloquently for him in Anne’s book. As he falls in love with Helen, he and the community fall out of love with one another. The stranger, with her outlandish values, provokes and threatens parish norms as endorsed by the comic vicar, Reverend Millward, who regards Helen’s attempt to immunize her son against alcohol as ‘“criminal, I should say – criminal!”…“contrary to Scripture and to reason to teach a child to look with contempt and disgust upon the blessings of Providence”’ (pp. 42–3). Markham’s mother amiably but vacuously polices the community’s patriarchal values in the home, where she ensures that her elder son is nicely spoilt, fed, fussed, and endorses the scandalous rumours circulating about the stranger at Wildfell, for ‘“I always thought there was something odd about her. – You see what it is for women to affect to be different from other people”’ (p. 89). Social comedy after the manner of Jane Austen characterizes Markham’s letters but they also incorporate glimpses of another, emotionally and intellectually ampler world, as the text rises in a chapter entitled ‘A Controversy’ to the style of a novel of ideas. In a powerfully argued Miltonic debate about experience, choice and temptation, Helen contests the segregated education of male and female, with its over-protection of girls and over-exposure of boys.
The intimation of worlds beyond the insular tea-party world of innuendo and rumour recurs in the view of the sea in Chapter 7, ‘The Excursion’, which kindles the haughty and sombre Helen into ‘a smile of exalted, glad intelligence as her eye met mine’ (p. 65). Anne Brontë recaptures the magic of her own sea-visits to Scarborough which would call her back as she was dying: it was her version of the ‘oceanic feeling’ which Emily Brontë associated with the moors. After Anne’s death, Charlotte was to remember her in large vistas: ‘the distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon’.11 The woman artist at the cliff-edge who ‘plied her solitary task’ recalls Anne Brontë’s pencil-sketch of a young girl looking out to sea in valediction or welcome, towards a sun that is rising or setting. But even here the low style is held, as the callow, magnetized lover–narrator hovers round the artist, aspersing plain women, ‘grumbling’, wheedling, sulking. Later, in a spasm of jealous rage, Markham astoundingly beats her supposed lover, Lawrence, delivering ‘a powerful blow’, for which, even with the advantage of twenty years’ mature consideration, he does not know whether to claim ‘credit’ or ‘blame’. Then he leaves him for dead. Later he uncouthly apologizes. The unstable tone of this episode repelled reviewers, who felt, like E. P. Whipple in the North American Review that Markham ‘would serve as the ruffian of any other novelist’ but ‘seems to be a favourite with the author’.12 It was generally assumed that Acton and Ellis Bell were one person, ‘violent’, ‘coarse’ and ‘brutal’. Wildfell Hall fails to comprehend its twin narrators as does Wuthering Heights in its system of ‘Chinese box’ encapsulations.13Markham’s character constantly flies asunder, and whether the author or the character cannot hold him together is at times unclear. Maybe Anne felt men did not really make sense, a suspicion that has occurred to women before and since. As Charlotte Brontë wrote to Miss Wooler, ‘You ask me if I do not think men are strange beings. I do indeed – and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange.’14
Any flaw in design is not fatal. In some respects the instability vitalizes the link between the inner and major plot told by Helen’s diary and the outer domesticated realism: for the males of Wildfell Hall are unstable. Ironically, they are what men have conventionally called women: varium et mutabile semper. Branwell Brontë, himself driven by violent rages, directionless impulses, hypersensitive outbursts, wrote of his alter ego, Charles Wentworth, ‘as to fixed detail of character, he had none’.15 Markham describes himself indulgently as ‘a little bit spoiled by my mother and sister, and some other ladies of my acquaintance’ (p. 36). ‘Spoiled’ men are the tragic centre of the novel. Huntingdon is so totally spoiled that he can never grow up; Markham emerges from the narcissism that makes his judgements shallow (his preference for the silly and mean Eliza, his dismissiveness of the ‘nonentity’, plain Mary Millward). The infantile basis of the conditioned male psyche is humorously explored in the figure of Huntingdon, jealous of his own baby as a competitor for mother’s attentions (‘“That’s more, in one minute, lavished on that little senseless, thankless oyster, than you have given me these three weeks past’” (p. 242)), for Arthur is also ‘“a little selfish, senseless, sensualist”’, from cradle-days petted and privileged, and the novel asks: what if babies ruled the world?
It answers: they already do.
Reviewers, largely themselves male, naturally took exception to this depiction of males as either infantile or depraved. Sharpe’s London Magazine was shocked at the portrayal of women as ‘superior in every quality, moral and intellectual, to all the men’, who ‘appear at once coarse, brutal, and contemptibly weak, at once disgusting and ridiculous’.16 The Literary World pointed out that all that was good or attractive about Acton Bell’s male characters ‘is or might be womanish’.17 The author had searched the males of her acquaintance for signs of a higher nature: she had not found it conspicuous in a range of men from the lovable but unreliable William Weightman, to violently authoritarian men like her employer Joshua Ingham of Blake Hall, and especially Branwell and his drinking cronies. Indulged as the only boy in a family of six, Branwell was a temperamental being who would ‘drive his first through the panel of a door’ to find relief from his powerful feelings: warm-hearted and void of purpose, he drifted into the arms of the fraternity of debauch. Anne Brontë, herself an educator, analysed the lack of sense and reason amongst males as the consequence of a value-system based on the worship of machismo. ‘“By G—d he drinks like a man”’, was a compliment Lord Byron had proudly reported of himself.18 To hold your liquor was accounted then as now a sign of virility. Anne Brontë’s analysis, linking the mild case of Markham with the terminal case of Huntingdon, also bonds the debate in the opening section with the demonstration in the diary account, where the men pass round their needful alcohol like a baby’s bottle, stupefying themselves and creating mayhem for the women to clear up. At Linden-Car, the community expresses its view, through derision, that for a woman to guard and guide her son is to turn him into ‘“the veriest milksop that ever was sopped”’, ‘“you’ll spoil his spirit, and make a mere Miss Nancy of him”’ (pp. 31, 33). Helen’s diary, the testimony of experience, ironizes this prejudice, for the fraternity of the bottle is revealed as the real milksops, a gang of soaks who urge one another on to ‘“seize the bottle and suck away’” (p. 193), in a perpetual uproar, like children bereft of supervision. They remain in the equivalent of a ruffianly childhood, running amok, fighting, throwing things, cursing for effect, shamelessly baring their addled brains to public view. Huntingdon is in effect hardly literate: he unlearns the art of letter-writing and fails to compute his finances. Grimsby, who prides himself on his capacity to ‘“take three times as much as they have tonight”’, cannot tell a saucer from a cup for the purposes of pouring cream, and mistakes the sugar-basin for a slop-bowl (p. 275). All are at the stage of resourceless children requiring the stimulation of amusements, their sol
e occupations being gaming and hunting. Helen’s letters quoted in the final part of Markham’s narrative conclude the demonstration with a final terrifying proof of the construction of ‘“the veriest milksop that ever was sopped” ‘ by male upbringing and privilege, in the pathetic death of Huntingdon, utterly dependent, helpless, clinging to ‘mother’. For he has no soul to call his own.
Helen’s diary builds a case against the marriage laws of Anne Brontë’s day, in the light of this disastrous acculturation of males. Several years after the publication of Wildfell Hall, the case of Mrs Norton focused the deep injustice of the marriage laws.19 Her husband brought legal actions against her on the grounds of adultery with Lord Melbourne. When she was proved innocent, he deprived her of her children, refused her maintenance, and claimed what she had earned for herself by writing pamphlets, all of which he could legitimately do, since a married woman was feme covert, having no legal existence in her own right and hence no right to own property (being herself property), save in the form of the ‘settlements’ of statute law. As the popular summary had it, ‘Husband and wife are one person under the law, and that person is the husband’. Anne Brontë’s novel is in part a polemic against these abuses of reason and human rights. Helen has no redress against her husband’s raids on decency. She cannot obtain a divorce when his adultery with Annabella, and later with ‘Miss Myers’, the ‘governess’, is detected; though as a male and a peer, Annabella’s husband can. She has no legal right to the pen in her hand, the diary in which she writes, her paints and canvases, her pictures, or the earnings from those pictures; nor can she call her son her own, but must steal him from the house in which they belong. It is important to recognize that the tenant of Wildfell Hall lives outside the law; is an outlaw. The uncontrollable ‘baby’ has legal right of control over the self-commanding woman.
These themes extend the logic of Anne Brontë’s ‘governess’ story, Agues Grey, which examined the education of young males at the stage where they bond with other males in contempt of women. Uncle Robson applauds the sadism of young Tom, as ‘with fiendish glee’ he salivates over the pleasure of torturing and dismembering baby birds:
‘Well, you are a good un!…Damme, but the lad has some spunk in him too! Curse me, if ever I saw a nobler little scoundrel than that! He’s beyond petticoat government already: by G—, he defies mother, granny, governess, and all! Ha, ha, ha! Never mind, Tom, I’ll get you another brood tomorrow.’ (Chapter 5)
Agnes’s mercy-killing is seen as a sin against the God-given right of a human boy to mutilate a ‘soulless brute’. But who is the soulless brute: human boy or helpless animal? If Anne’s first novel taught its reader to reassess the doctrine of ‘spunk’ and to inquire what was meant by ‘nobility’ when applied to male behaviour, it also brought into relief the trampling of ‘petticoat government’ over which the male establishment straddles, gun in hand, mimed by the fledgeling male ‘with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his breeches-pockets’ in ‘an ecstasy of delight’ – a posture at once ludicrous, shameful and dismaying. Since maternal values were equated with nurture, tenderness, restraint and reason, such ‘petticoat government’ would also be Christian government. Wildfell Hall takes this analysis a step further. The males swagger with their guns. Their sports are blood-sports. In a horrifying image, the amorous Huntingdon ambles over to Annabella and Helen ‘all spattered and splashed as he was, and stained with the blood of his prey’ (p. 161). For the female of our own species is also the object of male ‘sport’ and the stain Huntingdon wears will widen to include some of Helen’s life’s blood. His ‘friend’ Hargrave soon joins the hunt for prey by subjecting Helen to a campaign of what would today be called sexual harassment. The phallic gun of the sportsmen dominates the novel (Markham too shoots game on his estate) and the shooters time their year according to the hunting calendar: ‘“Are you too busy making love…” ‘, Helen’s uncle joshes Huntingdon, ‘“to make war with the pheasants? – First of October remember!”’ (p. 185). Anne and Emily had kept a pet pheasant along with the geese in the outhouse: in her 1834 diary paper, Emily had noted: ‘I fed Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, Jasper phaesant’ [sic].20 Branwell killed pheasants and grouse on the moors and painted himself with his unarmed sisters in a now lost portrait called ‘The Gun Group’, weapon raised, dead birds displayed on the table before them. As Hargrave seeks to compromise his wife, Hattersley is outside the door, ‘busy with his ramrod and his gun’ (p. 358), ready to accompany his friends in a pheasant-kill, and shortly discharges against Helen ‘a volley of the vilest and grossest abuse’ at the thought that she is engaged in an adulterous liaison. Having rammed the charge down into the barrel of one gun, the sportsman turns in legitimized violence against his wife, whose defences are the pen, the mind, and the palette-knife of her trade turned outwards (p. 358). Yet these are potent defences, and Helen does not go the way of Lucrece and Clarissa.
The power to make this feminist statement derived from Anne Brontë’s Christian belief: she represents a development of radical Protestantism which insists on the right and duty of the individual to interpret the Scriptures for herself in the light of the Spirit’s promptings, and to make known her understanding. The Authorized Version of the Bible is warp and weft of the discourse of Wildfell Hall, both as a code of belief and behaviour and as a sacred poem, a polyphony of voices, speaking not only of the comfort and admonition of the Gospels, especially Jesus’ parables (Dives and Lazarus, the house built on sand, the sower, the talents, the grain of mustard seed) but in prophetic condemnation of social evils (the ‘vanity’ motif of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Proverbs) and the mourning voice of affliction and exile (Lamentations, Job, the Psalms). The strong-minded woman author gives the flabby-minded male narrator initially only a casual and shallow understanding of Scripture: he quotes speciously and spends his time in church ogling the beautiful stranger. Later, having read the diary and under the influence of Helen’s passionate spirituality, he will be caught up unawares into her vision of eternity, and, awed into serious appraisal of the Christian vision for the first time in his life, will be alarmed at the glaring prospect, not of hell but of heaven: ‘“But can you, Helen, contemplate with delight this prospect of losing me in a sea of glory?”’ (p. 405). The commonplace mind (and Gilbert claims to be no more than an ordinary, shabby, wanting man) is shocked and baffled by a mind like Helen’s – and her author’s – to which the Absolute is literally real. The voice of the diary is rich and deep with biblical allusion, strenuously expressing the depths of Helen’s clarifying suffering and dark enlightenment, in the aftermath of her giddy, tragic marriage-choice. Anne Brontë’s Protestant vision encompassed awareness of the depravity to which fallen people could sink, along with a refusal of the doctrine of hell, which she believed incompatible with a God of Love. Helen’s debate with her pious but untender aunt concerning the destination of the ‘reprobate’ (Chapter 20) trades conflicting biblical texts. Here Anne Brontë plays out on the page the agonizing personal conflict which in an illness of 1837 had brought to her bedside the Moravian minister, James La Trobe, to lead her to a belief in universal salvation – a conflict which occupies many of her lyric poems, with their sense of unworthiness and their yearning tenderness towards Jesus:
I cannot say my faith is strong,
I dare not hope my love is great,
But strength and love to Thee belong,
O, do not leave me desolate.
Anne’s lyric poems, which she called ‘pillars of witness’21 recorded a hope without which she felt her spirit would fail her that ‘Even the wicked shall at last / Be fitted for the skies’ (‘A Word to the Calvinists’, 37–8). It was a desperate issue, always a source of introspective conflict, to which she accorded the status of ‘hope’, never a dogmatic certainty; and Wildfell Hall articulates that conflict, not its resolution. Anne Brontë had been subject to periods of religious doubt when, like Branwell, she wondered if God existed at all; and, if he did, could
he care for her? Her austere quatrains wrestle with doubt. Branwell too had wrestled and been thrown. Then he had run away:
‘Tis something far more dread
Which haunts me in my dying bed!
I have lost – long lost – my trust in Thee!
I cannot hope that Thou wilt hear
The unrepentant sinner’s prayer!
So, whither must my spirit flee
For succour through Eternity?
(‘Harriet’ (2))
Wildfell Hall attempts to encounter the terrors which were the converse of Branwell’s self-consciously Byronic defiance of heaven. Huntingdon, more trivial and worldly than Branwell, becomes a shallow Faustus in his ending: ‘“But death will come – it is coming now – fast, fast! – and – Oh, if I could believe there was nothing after!”…“I can’t repent; I only fear.”’ (p. 445). After his death, Helen clings to her hope that her husband’s soul ‘is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that He hath made, will bless it in the end” ‘ (p. 447). It is necessary for a secular reader to appreciate that Anne Brontë took her faith with literality: if God was real, he was real not nominally, hypothetically or on Sundays, but in the here-and-now of every day, in an urgent sense. But people do not see him; the material world is mistaken for reality, while the air throngs with transparent agencies of light and the legion shadows of evil. They do not hear their own casual blasphemies blackening their tongues and turning all their speeches into self-damning ironies. The drama of the ‘diary’ narrative uncovers the eternal implications of casual deeds and conventional language, especially the language of profane love. ‘“Sweet angel, I adore you!’”, says Huntingdon, manipulating Helen with exploitative demands and familiar touching of her body; but her aunt interrupts, ‘And I left him, muttering maledictions against his evil angel’ (p. 147). Rescued from the attentions of the unappealing Mr Wilmot, she feels ‘It was like turning from some purgatorial fiend to an angel of light, come to announce that the season of torment was past’ (p. 146). But the season of torment is just beginning, and the bright-haired, beautiful young man is racing his fellow reprobates down the road to hell – and winning.