The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)

by Brontë, Anne

  20. flirting her gold-mounted whip: flicking or waving the whip. Annabella, who has the whip-hand in the relationship with the deluded Lowborough, preens her own powerfully sexual image in the mirror. She is now for the second time admired as ‘a magnificent creature’, where ‘creature’ carries the sense of the alien and animal. She lacks the susceptibilities of Lowborough and of Helen, and it is this absence of human sympathy and moral sense that places her beneath the fully human.

  21. what shall I do with the serious part of myself?: one of the most brilliant, sombre touches of apprehension, the more impressive for its placement at the end of a chapter – intimating the awareness that Helen’s intended husband has something catastrophically missing from his nature.

  CHAPTER 23

  1. Grassdale Manor: Hargreaves emends to ‘Grass-dale’ on the grounds that this is the form ‘in the vast majority of cases in the Newby edition’. This is true, but the first and second instances are given as ‘Grassdale’ and subsequently the name recurs broken between one line and the next, which I surmise gave currency to the ‘Grass-dale’ which latterly emerges. I therefore print ‘Grassdale’.

  2. to love him and to cleave to him: echoing the Marriage Service in the Book of Common Prayer.

  3. you don’t love me with all your heart: playing on Jesus’ first commandment: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ (Matthew 22:37).

  4. not one atom more of it to you than He allows: the Christian-feminist insistence on the priority of the allegiance to God over one’s husband is as forcefully expressed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: ‘I could not, in those days, see God for his creature – of whom I had made an idol’ (Ch. 24). Huntingdon is tempting Helen to commit idolatry.

  5. a sweet enthusiast: ‘enthusiast’ derives from the Greek, ‘filled with the god’: pejorative in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the sense of ‘religious fanatic’; reclaimed in the Romantic period and by Dissenters because of renewed esteem for divine inspiration. Gondal was a theatre of ‘enthusiasm’, e.g., Emily’s poem of 1839, ‘Sleep not, dream not’ addresses a child as ‘Darling enthusiast, holy child’ (11), predicting his fall from grace; Anne’s poem of 1838, ‘The North Wind’, addresses ‘a young enthusiast’, ‘wild and free’ as the mountains (12–13).

  6. organ of veneration: in phrenology, the pseudo-science which equated shape of skull with an individual’s moral, intellectual and emotional qualities, the area at the top centre of the skull was held to denote the capacity for reverence or worship.

  7. gathering where he had not strawed: Matthew 25:24 ‘Strawed’ means ‘strewed’ or ‘scattered’.

  8. who can eat… more than I?: Ecclesiastes 2:25. Huntingdon’s five-part parody discourse whacks his pious wife with a text pillaged from the book of human vanity, written reputedly by Solomon.

  9. and to be merry: Ecclesiastes 8:15.

  10. Rejoice… into judgment: Ecclesiastes 11:9.

  CHAPTER 24

  1. locked myself up in my own chamber: this gesture of angry exclusion of Helen’s husband from her bedroom as having no moral right to her person defies the law which appropriated wife to husband as sexual property. See Introduction, p. xviii.

  2. dumbfoundered: a variant of’dumbfound’ or ‘dumbfounded’ (OED).

  3. He struck it off with a smart blow: behaviour toward animals was always a litmus test of character for Anne Brontë. In Agnes Grey, the curate Mr Weston’s care for Nancy Brown’s cat (Chs. 11,12) stands in contrast to the minister Mr Hatfield’s casual brutality as he ‘kicked my poor cat right across th’ floor’ (Ch. 11) and hits the Murrays’ dog ‘a resounding thwack’ upon its skull (Ch. 14).

  4. are you going to be a good girl: the infantile male attempts to assert control by infantilizing in turn, bringing his grown-up wife into the dependent relationship custom expects. The verbal demotion of grown woman to ‘good girl’ is a mode of subjection through role-play, whose greatest literary exponent is Elizabeth von Arnim in her characterization of Everard Wemyss in Vera (1921): ‘“Now what has the little thing got into its head this time?”’; ‘“Sh-sh, now. Go to sleep again like a good little girl”…“Who’s my very own baby?”’.

  CHAPTER 25

  1. rakish: haggard, off-colour (from ‘rake’) – an ironic description from the mouth of the rake, Huntingdon.

  2. that tender, delicate bloom: ‘bloom’ was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to denote the youthful freshness and glow of a young woman’s complexion which conduces to the impression of untouched freshness and the condition of her sexual value. Anne Elliot, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), has lost hers (Ch. 1) and is judged undesirable until she recovers it.

  3. patience, ‘that first of woman’s virtues’: the traditional type of the perfect (i.e., perfectly compliant) woman was Griselda, the prodigy of patience who conformed unquestioningly to her husband’s irrational dictates, even to the extent of appearing naked in company.

  4. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: proverbial.

  5. his old governor: irreverent slang for his father.

  6. (pp. 223–4) But now… abominable club: at over 300 words in length, this meandering descriptive sentence is the longest in a novel which frequently moves into loose complex grammar of mutually subordinate clauses. Here the listless motion of the language mimes Helen’s poignant, pointless comings and goings in the locus amoenus or pastoral paradise of Grassdale, with its fertile Wordsworthian nature that does no one any good, because Huntingdon is not there to benefit from it. His ‘abominable club’ is the roaming sentence’s dead end.

  7. sweet regent of the sky: from the ballad ‘Cumnor Hall’, attributed to William Julius Mickle (1735–88).

  8. black blue vault of heaven: in William Wordsworth’s ‘A Night Piece’, the lonely traveller sees ‘The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. / There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, / Followed by multitudes of stars’ (13–15).

  9. though they sought them carefully with tears: Hebrews 12:17, referring to Esau and the defilement of sin.

  CHAPTER 26

  1. a moon to mitigate the deprivation: a possible allusion to Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion, in which Shelley’s wife is viewed as the moon and the desired lady as the sun (277–383). Shelley’s poem, known to Emily and Anne Brontë (Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë, pp. 73, 99, 133–4) attacks conjugal possessiveness.

  2. everything handsome about him: Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, IV. ii. 78.

  CHAPTER 27

  1. You are breaking your marriage vows yourself: Anne Brontë highlights the asymmetry of the marriage contract in which the woman’s undertaking to ‘love, honour and obey’ put her in a double bind if the spouse should turn out to be irresponsible.

  2. However we do praise ourselves… Than women’s are: the self-indulging and ambivalent Orsino’s speech to Viola in Twelfth Night II. iv. 31–5 is an apt precedent to be quoted by the far more mercurial, light-minded Huntingdon. Anne Brontë emphasizes the double standard of sexual fidelity current in the early nineteenth century.

  3. a curtain lecture: OED quotes Dr Johnson: ‘A reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed’, i.e., in the privacy of the curtained conjugal couch where he is at her mercy.

  CHAPTER 28

  1. He may be taken from me: Helen’s fear, in an age of high infant mortality, is not morbidly far-fetched; but its intensity reflects the need and insecurity which are Helen’s lot in life. The theme of loss of mate and child occurs in Anne Brontë’s poetry a decade before Wildfell Hall (e.g., ‘A Voice from the Dungeon’, 53–4).

  2. He may live to curse his own existence: Anne Brontë’s earnest awareness of the harshness and corruption of human life for the young and growing spirit is evidenced in the poems of this period, especially ‘When sinks my heart in hopeless gloom’ (1845), 37–48.

  3. flesh of my flesh and shrine of that pure spark: weds
allusion to Genesis 2:23 (which denotes, however, the ‘one flesh’ of man and woman) with the New Testament idea of the body as temple of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 3:16–17). In her tendance of her child, Helen discerns a sacred duty to foster the Platonistic ‘spark’ of the divine in her child. She views her motherhood in the light of eternity; and, in her aghast recognition of the depravity unfolding in the father, desperately seeks means to abort it in the son. The novel now recurs to the theme of education set forth in the early chapters.

  4. Little angel!: not entirely metaphorical. Anne Brontë recalls Christ’s preference for children: ‘Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven’ (Matthew 18:10). Compare also the dual meditation over the cradle of Hareton in Wutbering Heights, Nelly’s ‘“How sweetly he smiles in his sleep!”’ succeeded by Cathy’s prophetic, ‘“Yes; and how sweetly his father curses in his solitude! You remember him, I dare say, when he was just such another as that chubby thing – nearly as young and innocent”’ (Ch. 9), deriving from Lord Byron’s drama, Cain, with its lament over the disinherited future of Cain’s sleeping baby: ‘He smiles, and sleeps…’ (III. i. 18ff.).

  5. You are absolutely infatuated about it: Anne Brontë’s understanding of the infantile basis of Huntingdon’s despotic possessiveness is dramatically focused, with poignant comedy, in this scene witnessing the father’s jealousy of his wife’s attention to their baby.

  CHAPTER 29

  1. worn out with the baby’s restless nights: Helen is evidently breast feeding the baby herself, in defiance of the then norms for women of rank.

  CHAPTER 30

  1. degrade yourself: ‘degrade’, repeated here four times in close succession, is a key-word in the moral world of Wildfell Hall as it is in Wutbering Heights, where Hindley degrades Heathcliff, who in turn degrades Hindley’s son Hareton.

  2. almost a partaker in his sins: Anne Brontë had an unsentimentally realistic view of the contaminating effects of the corrupted upon the apparently innocent or principled. Agnes Grey feels herself undergoing a comparable process of pollution: ‘Already, I seemed to feel my intellect deteriorating, my heart petrifying, my soul contracting, and I trembled lest my very moral perceptions should become deadened’ (Agnes Grey, Ch. 12).

  3. the gulf: corresponds with the Miltonic ‘abyss’ down which the presumptuous damned fell to hell. For Emily Brontë, the ‘gulf was for daring and defying: ‘Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound’ (From her poem, ‘Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle’, 84).

  CHAPTER 31

  1. my corruption rises against it: see Ch. 2, n. 11, where Markham’s ‘corruption’ is aroused by Helen’s proud beauty. It is because Helen has suffered the ascent of her own unregenerate nature in the novel’s central panel that she carries the moral authority, based on experience and self-knowledge, in the outer panels.

  2. Sine as ye brew… drink the yill: (‘Since as you brew, my fair maiden, bear in mind that you must drink the ale’). Anne Brontë quotes from Robert Burns’s (1759–96) ‘Country Lassie’.

  3. power to save him from the worse: Helen is carrying out the rational programme for dealing with a degenerate husband proposed by Agnes in Agnes Grey, whose conclusion is ‘if she still found him incorrigible, to endeavour to abstract herself from him – to wrap herself up in her own integrity, and trouble herself as little about him as possible’ (Ch. 23). Helen is never able to reach this conclusive stage of distancing because of the dangers to her son and the impossibility in practice of maintaining one’s ‘integrity’ in proximity to a pathological attention-seeker.

  4. In quietness and confidence shall be your rest: from Isaiah 30:15. The context of the quotation is also one of righteous indignation: Israel is said to ‘despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness’ (30:12).

  5. sensibly: ‘acutely, intensely’ (OED).

  6. the fowls of heaven and the lilies of the field: a drunkenly blasphemous garbling of Matthew 6:26, 28.

  7. thy whole body shall be full of light: another blasphemy of Matthew 6:22. The text goes on: ‘But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness’. Chapter 31 of Wildfell Hall is concerned with incorruptible ‘treasures in heaven’ (6:20), profaned by the squalid roisterers at Grassdale.

  CHAPTER 32

  1. Esther Hargrove: Esther (named after the biblical queen whose influence with her husband liberated the Jews) is an important secondary character, a form of youthful alter ego for Helen, exemplifying Anne Brontë’s concern for the tutelage of the younger generation of women, commodified on the marriage-market by unscrupulous mothers (see Chitham, Life, pp. 152–3: ‘Anne begins to wrestle with a now recurrent problem: how to warn young people about the pitfalls of life without robbing them of their spontaneity’). Branwell Brontë depicted ‘Queen Esther’ (after Martin) in a water-colour of 1830: see Gérin, Branwell Brontë, Plate 1.

  2. loose upon him, like a cloak: a verbal echo of Macbeth, V. ii. 21.

  3. in the horse-jockey line: used here to signify one who owns or breeds horses.

  4. a thought too soft: Milicent’s excessive compliance is another object-lesson in this chapter. Anne Brontë uses Milicent’s husband, not a despicable man though at once rough and weak, to voice her case against female pliability, which can act as an incitement to men to misbehave. The author’s concern is for the dynamics of relationships.

  5. it spoils the best of us, doesn’t it?: Hattersley’s observation echoes in a major key the theme introduced by Markham in the minor key in Ch. 6: ‘I might sink into the grossest condition of self-indulgence and carelessness about the wants of others, from the mere habit of being constantly cared for myself’ (pp. 57–8).

  6. she lies down like a spaniel at my feet: Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), memorably compared women with spaniels: ‘“These dogs,” observes a naturalist, “at first kept their ears erect; but custom has superceded nature, and a token of fear is become a beauty”’ (ed. Miriam Brody (Penguin, 1992 edn.), Ch. 5, p. 179).

  7. melts away and makes no sign: cf. II Henry VI, III. iii. 29.

  8. God be merciful to me a sinner: Luke 18:13.

  CHAPTER 33

  1. mind: I see no reason to emend ‘mind’ to ‘mend’ as Hargreaves does: the phrase ‘mind our manners’ was current and makes enough sense in context.

  2. a game of chess: Anne Brontë deploys a Renaissance motif, used, e.g., to ironic effect in Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c. 1620–24), Act II, where the game of chess mirrors a seduction scene. The chess game between Helen and Hargrave is replete with sinister double entendre: it figures the war between the sexes enacted in Hargrave’s attempt to entrap and ‘conquer’ Helen.

  3. my bishop: Helen attacks with the chess piece known as the ‘bishop’, signifying the integrity she hopes to retain unassailably. However, Hargrave’s ‘knight’ (his male sexuality) finds her bishop undefended, leaving her ‘queen’ (her integrity as a woman) open to attack, so that ultimately she is checkmated.

  4. my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth: citing Job 29:10, where Job recalls the days of his glory, in which the great of the earth were silenced ‘and their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth’, whereas now ‘They abhor me, they flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face’ (30:10). At this crisis of recognition of her forsakenness, Helen’s affliction represents itself in scriptural language which is structured as a mesh of texts, moving from an Old Testament language of trauma towards a New Testament promise and assurance.

  5. a gust of wind swept over me: Helen has involuntarily prayed ‘God help me now!’ and fallen to her knees: God answers in the breath of wind, his quickening Spirit This experience of being breathed upon is Helen’s personal version of the Pentecostal wind received by the disciples in Acts 2:2.

  6. some heavenly influence… within: ‘influence’
means, originally, ‘flowing in’, and represents the second stage of Helen’s experience of spiritual assurance. This derives from the Reformation tradition of the individual’s receiving of prevenient Grace in the soul’s dark night. Jane Eyre is steeped in this tradition, and in this climactic passage, Wildfell Hall shares the psalmic intensity of Jane’s despair at the end of Ch. 26: ‘“Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.”… That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, “the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire; I felt no standing…”’.

  7. strong to save and swift to hear: James 1:19. The night scene is close in feeling to Jane Eyre, Ch. 28, where, kneeling on the heath, Jane ‘felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made…’

  8. I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee: Helen, in her need, lays hold of the promises of Scripture, in the tradition of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666): here, Hebrews 13:5. Anne Brontë may have remembered Christ’s words as repeated in the Epistle rather than the Gospel because Paul places his quotation in proximity to a judgement on adulterers (13:4).

  9. he would not leave me comfortless: John 14:18. Jesus is here promising his own presence within each believer, in the person of the Holy Spirit, ‘another Comforter, that… may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth’ (14:16–17).

  10. Much of my newborn strength and courage forsook me: this does not invalidate the reality of the ‘Pentecostal’ scene; rather it tests the assurance of the Christian spirit against the arduous conditions of the real world – as with Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most important texts of the Brontes’ childhood.