The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)

by Brontë, Anne

  11. who can run fastest and farthest down the headlong road: this vivid charge to perdition bears clear allusion to Matthew 7:13, ‘for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction’, with conscious or unconscious analogy in the author’s mind to Joseph’s colourful account in Wuthering Heights of Heathcliff’s urging Hindley ‘dahn t’Broad road, while he flees afore tuh oppen t’ pikes’ (Ch. 10).

  12. the place prepared for the devil and his angels: Matthew 25: 41.

  13. recall him to the path of virtue: cf. Richardson’s Clarissa, Introduction, p. xiii above.

  CHAPTER 18

  1. to spare the partridges: partridge-shooting was prohibited from 1 February to 1 September under the Game Reform Act of 1831. Gentlemen were permitted to ‘devastate the moors’, in Emily Brontë’s scathing phrase (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 18), within limits that conserved the stock. Pheasants were conserved from I February to 1 October and grouse from 10 December to 12 August (named ‘the glorious twelfth’ amongst the slaughtering fraternity). Branwell Brontë was proud of his hunting prowess which is exhibited in a now lost picture entitled ‘The Gun Group’. Emily Brontë too was a crack shot but regarded this ‘manly’ sport with contempt as a sign of human damage (see her Brussels essay, ‘Le Chat’, translated S. Davies, Emily Bronte: Heretic (Women’s Press, 1994), pp. 248–9). In Agnes Grey Anne Brontë equates hunting men with the morally lowest of the low in the figure of the brutal Uncle Robson who encourages Tom in his sadism to the baby birds, leaning on his gun and commending the boy’s depravity as ‘spunk’ (Ch. 5).

  2. at work: on genteel sewing or embroidery.

  3. chariot: small enclosed carriage with a coach box: the passengers sit facing the horses.

  4. barouche: four-wheeled carriage with folding top for four passengers and a driver.

  5. phaeton: light four-wheeled open carriage driven by owner. The different carriages suit their owners’ temperaments and values rather as modern cars display pretensions: Huntingdon’s fast phaeton may be thought of as the early nineteenth-century equivalent of a sports car.

  6. like the postscripts of their letters: proverbial. Compare Agnes Grey, Ch. 22: ‘I had enquiries to make, and, like the substances of a lady’s postscript, the most important must come last.’

  7. put his arm round my neck and kiss me: Huntingdon’s manipulations of Helen’s person show disrespect for her dignity which, by the standards of the day, constituted not just exploitation but a calculated attempt to compromise her. He derives his chief pleasure from the struggles of the victim of this orchestrated harassment. At this stage it is not clear whether the cocksure ‘sportsman’ is doing much more than seeking to make a ‘kill’.

  8. too deeply absorbed in each other to notice her: Jane Eyre also uses Jane’s paintings to disclose her deepest fears and desires, in the visionary water-colours of Ch. 13. Helen’s allegorical picture seems to resemble Anne Brontë’s own style of painting symbolic scenes of conventionally pretty girls with significant trees, e.g., ‘What you please’ of 1840 (Chitham, Life, plate 10).

  9. a very Hebe: daughter of Zeus and Hera, goddess of youth and cupbearer to the gods on Mount Olympus. Personification of nubile freshness.

  10. Let me have its bowels then: the coarse suggestiveness of this penetration and evisceration of Helen’s innermost privacy (represented by the personal pictures) gestures forward to Huntingdon’s rape-like assault on her diary and the vandalizing of her painting equipment in Ch. 40.

  11. ivory paper: artist’s heavy paper with fine glossed surface.

  12. stained with the blood of his prey: this repellent image implies his exploitation of the human as well as the animal prey he hunts.

  13. Oh, why can’t I hate him?: recalls Richardson’s Pamela: ‘What is the matter, that, with all his ill usage of me, I cannot hate him?’ (ed. P. Sabor (Penguin, 1980), p. 218). Anne Brontë is exploring a masochistic aspect of female psychology which cleaves to its abuser, thus reinforcing the abusive behaviour.

  CHAPTER 19

  1. Farewell to thee!: this ‘song’, with its emphasis on ‘sunny’ brightness, is a personal lyric composed by Anne Brontë, possibly related to the poetry she wrote to William Weightman who died in 1842 (see Poems, pp. 16–17, 171–2). Chitham believes, however, that ‘there is no question of the beloved’s death: ‘“Contempt” and “coldness” are given as the cause of the estrangement’. However, the source of the contempt and coldness is indeterminate, and, despite the hope expressed by the last stanza, the lyric has a distinctly elegiac tone. It seems to me possible that the lyric may have been adapted from a personal poem to fit the circumstances of the novel, and not impossible that it may have been written especially for the novel.

  2. mortal language: like Shorter, Chitham prints ‘language’, which is certainly preferable to ‘languish’ used as a noun, glossed by the OED as ‘a tender look or glance’, and accepted by both Rosengarten and Hargreaves. However, the rational Anne Brontë did not go in for ‘languishes’: and ‘language’ fits indisputably with ‘mortal’, in designating the heavenly character of the lost brightness. The sense depends on the fact that there exists an (unavailable) immortal language – an immortal ‘languish’ is inconceivable.

  3. I would sacrifice my body and soul: the Faustian theme of glib bargains with the immortal soul, which is nothing more than a name to Huntingdon, tolls out in dark farce.

  4. tired nature’s sweet restorer: a circumlocution derived from the first line of Edward Young’s ‘The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality’ (1742): ‘Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy Sleep!’

  VOLUME II

  CHAPTER 20

  1. a man of ‘decided piety’: the phrase which temporarily sticks in Huntingdon’s throat derives from Virgil’s Aeneid, 1. 151: ‘vir pietate gravis’ (a man confirmed in piety).

  2. a brand plucked from the burning: Zechariah 3:2, Amos 4:11. The phrase has a long history in relation to Dissent and Methodism as a symbol of salvation, frequently used by Wesley concerning his ‘providential’ escape from the fire at Epworth Rectory in his youth. Huntingdon’s comic fantasies playfully reconstruct Helen’s aunt as a religious zealot of the sort the Brontë children themselves enjoyed caricaturing (see Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Clarendon Press, 1975)). It seems to have been a standing joke with Branwell Brontë (see Introduction, p. xxvi).

  3. a ’sweet preacher… a ‘dear, delightful, heavenly-minded man: not identified.

  4. I don’t think he cares enough about me: a telling comment, which deepens our understanding of Helen’s psychology. Because of her aunt’s sterling influence, her background has left Helen principled, thoughtful and independent-spirited but, because of her uncle’s laxness and her father’s abdication of care, her self-esteem is complicated by a neediness which attaches her fatally to Huntingdon.

  5. a little lower than the angels: Psalms 8:5, Hebrews 2:7, 9.

  6. his wife shall undo what his mother did!: the cry of hubris for whose blind arrogance Helen will have to pay in the tragic knowledge not only of failure but also a sensation of being herself contaminated. See Ch. 30, n. 2, Ch. 34, n 1; and Richardson’s Clarissa, quoted in the Introduction, p. xiii.

  7. What fellowship hath light with darkness; or he that believeth with an infidel?: Anne Brontë conflates 2 Corinthians 6:14 and y. Paul goes on to say that ‘ye are the temple of the living God’ (16): the reference is a reminder of the sexual bond of marriage which turns man and wife into ‘one flesh’ – a pollution, in Helen’s strict aunt’s view, of the ‘temple’ of the godly by the ungodly.

  8. If be hear not them, neither will he hear though one rose from the dead: adapted from the end of the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:31, a key biblical text for Wildfell Hall. See n. 10 below and Ch. 49, n. 2.

  9. The wicked shall be turned into hell… forget God: from Psalms 9:17.

  10. When you see yourselves parte
d for ever: taking up the parable of Dives and Lazarus, in which the pauper is taken into bliss in Abraham’s bosom and the rich man who had rejected his claim to charity is excluded. Dives cries from hell, ‘send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue’ (Luke 16:24) but his plea is denied.

  11. cast into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fire: Aunt Maxwell now turns apocalyptic in quoting Revelation 20:10, conflated with Luke 3:17.

  12. Not for ever: this phrase is the important pivot upon which turns Anne Brontë’s version of the Brontë antagonism to the Christian vision of eternal hell as the punishment of sinners. Whereas Emily Brontë denied the goodness of God in the light of his punitive morality, Anne Brontë denied the eternity of hell as inconsistent with a loving Father ‘even the wicked shall at last / Be fitted for the skies’ (‘A Word to the Calvinists’, 37–8). In an early religious crisis, she had consulted a Moravian minister, Revd James la Trobe, who had consoled her with his church’s emphasis on divine Grace; latterly she corresponded with Dr David Thom, the leader of the sect of Beroen Universalists, who believed in universal salvation. See Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality (Macmillan, 1977 edn.), p. 35, 56–62.

  13. only till he has paid to the uttermost farthing: Matthew 5:26

  14. If any man’s work… so as by fire: 1 Corinthians 3:15.

  15. is able to subdue… all men to be saved: conflates Philippians 3:21 with 1 Timothy 2:4.

  16. will in the fulness of time… things in heaven: conflates Ephesians 1:10, Hebrews 2:9, Colossians 1:20.

  17. might signify either ‘endless’ or ‘long-enduring’: Hargreaves identifies this as New Testament Greek alwvios, Old Testament examples of which might be interpreted as ‘lasting for a long time’ but which, when used in relation to God, signifies a literal eternity (Ch. 20, n. 10). Anne Brontë here lays bare her own excruciated struggle to secure a face-saving formula for God, as well as the proudly Protestant self-assurance with which she plunges into a theological and philosophical debate for which she is not formally qualified, given her ignorance of Greek and Hebrew. The speech is not quite in character for Helen, who is never shown as a deep student or thinker.

  18. a glorious thought to cherish in one’s own heart: here Helen confronts the difficulty that had struck Anne Brontë that the fear of hell-fire acts as a deterrent, and that to withdraw it may remove a social and spiritual control. Helen therefore compromises by advancing her doctrine as essentially a private rather than public article of faith.

  19. ludicrous, if it bad not been too provoking: Huntingdon’s pantomime seems to be a close representation of Branwell Brontë’s travesty of church behaviour, e.g., his novel fragment, And The Weary Are At Rest (1845) records his irreverent view of Wesleyanism.

  20. a caricature of the preacher: in Wuthering Heights, Cathy defaces her pious books with ‘an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph’ (Ch. 3) and rebellious marginalia. She and Heathcliff hurl their tracts ‘into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book’. What in Wutbering Heights is presented with detached amusement and sympathy is condemned in Wildfell Hall but not without transmitting a certain amusement to the reader.

  21. it’s love that rules the roast: this form of the expression was current from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (OED). See Byron’s letter of 1820 to Mr Murray, reminiscing about the male clubs at Cambridge: ‘while he [William Bankes] stayed, he ruled the roast – or rather the roasting – and was father of all mischiefs’ (Moore’s Byron, p. 97).

  CHAPTER 21

  1. all the Sir Herberts and Valentines: Helen dismisses the fabricated ideal knights of courtly romance, e.g., in the French medieval romance Valentine and Orson.

  2. all for love or the world well lost: title of John Dryden’s play of 1678, which had passed into common usage as a romantic formula.

  CHAPTER 22

  1. amused: in the archaic sense of’beguiled, deluded’ (OED).

  2. blackleg: swindlers at gambling (OED).

  3. bedlamites: lunatics (from ‘Bedlam’, or Bethlehem Hospital, the first English lunatic asylum).

  4. felo-de-se: suicide.

  5. the poor devil, with a ghastly smile: Anne Brontë constantly salvages casual phrases such as ‘poor devil’ from the colourless neutrality into which common usage has trodden them, and awakens our consciousness of their original meanings. Lowborough is indeed in a ‘hell’ more appalling than a mere ‘gambling hell’. His smile is ‘ghastly’ (from ‘ghostly’) because he is playing away his soul: he has diminished to the spectre of himself.

  6. home – that is, to our club: another piercing irony. As ministering demon, Huntingdon leads his ‘noble’ fellow deeper into the den of degradation and despair, by feeding Lowborough’s thirst with alcohol. The club may be reminiscent of the infamous Hell-fire Club at Medmenham Abbey, described in Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal: or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65). Another source may be Moore’s Byron, whose accounts of Regency club antics had enlivened the Brontës’ childhood: e.g., ‘We were a company of some seven or eight, and used to sit up late in our friars’ dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning around the house in our conventual garments… The harmony of these our symposia was somewhat interrupted… by Matthew’s threatening to throw Hobhouse out of a window, in consequence of I know not what commerce of jokes’. Nearer home, Anne Brontë had witnessed the orgies of Branwell and his cronies, with their self-dramatizing ‘hellfire’ camaraderie. In the Lowborough inset story she focuses on the poignancy of what may be spiritually lost when control and self-esteem are forfeited: he is essentially a Byronic figure, with the Calvinist dread which Byron saw as having darkened his childhood.

  7. because you’re a peer: hereditary peers were immune from arrest for debt, though their property could be confiscated.

  8. What can’t be cured must be endured: proverbial.

  9. Then, they were demons themselves: Helen brings to the surface of attention the movement from buried metaphor (‘demons of drink… as black as the demon of play’) to literal morality drama. The mutually reinforcing behaviour of male bondings is emphasized: the group polices its individuals (here, the disaffected Lowborough) when it feels its narcissistic code threatened. Anne Brontë shows the infantile character of debauch, with its machismo dependent on a mass act of sucking on the equivalent of babies’ bottles.

  10. Stop poor sinner, stop and think: perhaps composed by Anne Brontë herself in emulation of Methodist or Baptist admonitory hymns – possibly a ‘temperance’ hymn.

  11. providentially: the narcissistic Huntingdon presents his crowning glory as a parody of the biblical ‘helmet of salvation’ (Ephesians 6:17), with authorial irony on the word ‘providentially’ which equates him with the ‘elect’.

  12. a skeleton at a feast: proverbial, after the Ancient Egyptian tradition of the memento mori at a feast Lowborough as a memento mort disturbs the group’s capacity to surrender to its customary mindless mirth: there follows a discussion of club rules so as to protect the group against this intrusion of reality.

  13. glided in, like the ghost in Macbeth: Shakespeare, Macbeth III. iv. Lowborough’s very mode of locomotion appears sinister to the fraternity, since, like Banquo’s ghost, he disrupts the complacency of the feast by threatening to arouse guilt and unease.

  14. a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation!: Hebrews 10:27. Inga-Stina Ewbank’s suggested emendation of ‘for’ to ‘forth’ is not accurate (Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists (Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 73): but the fact that Anne Brontë’s language can present difficulties to the modern reader points up the roots of her English in the Authorized Version of the Bible, i.e., in early seventeenth-century usage.

  15. followed by a rather severe brain fever: the Lowborough episode allows Anne Brontë to plot the downward curve
of drug-abuse, which is not an aspect of Huntingdon’s psychology. She illustrates the manic-depressive fluctuations of the combination of opium and alcohol, which she had observed at close quarters, together with the physical breakdown such a combination can entail.

  16. I tenderly brought him back to the fold: Huntingdon viciously parodies the solicitude of the Good Shepherd who restored the one sheep that was lost, in the parable (‘he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray’ (Matthew 18:13)). The shepherd stands for Christ’s love of the human soul.

  17. a little wine for his stomach’s sake:I Timothy 5:23.

  18. media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours: ‘the middle way’ (Latin); ‘neither never nor always’ (French).

  19. castaway: one of the most emotive words in Anne Brontë’s vocabulary, this word represented the predicament of the reprobated soul, God’s reject, in Calvinist theology. In her poem, ‘To Cowper’, Anne Brontë answers the famous last verse of the eighteenth-century poet’s ‘The Cast-Away’ (‘… we perish’d, each alone, / But I, beneath a rougher sea / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he’ (64–6)) with her own self-doubt ‘Yet should thy darkest fears be true, / If Heaven be so severe / That such a soul as thine is lost, / O! how shall I appear?’ (41–4). The 1850 version of her beautiful ‘Prayer’ reads ‘Unless Thou hasten to relieve, / Thy suppliant is a castaway’ (8–9). Fear of reprobation haunts Nancy Brown in Agnes Grey: she too fears to be abandoned (Ch. 11). The younger Cathy in Wutbering Heights mocks the Calvinistic Joseph by calling him ‘reprobate! you are a castaway’ (Ch. 2).