The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)

by Brontë, Anne

  With limbs unfettered, conscience undefiled,

  And choosing where to wander, where to rest!

  Hunted, oppressed, but ever strong to cope –

  With toils, and perils – ever full of hope!

  2. walked there with me in her arms: Wildfell Hall is focused as Helen’s devastated maternal home: she is returning to the site of her babyhood, her mother-country, a refuge though in ruins. Rachel, who is named after ‘the mother of Israel’ in the Old Testament, is a vestige of the mother-world, per haps as Tabitha Aykroyd (the Brontes’ beloved servant) had seemed for Anne.

  3. indefinite dreams of the far past and bright anticipations of the future: Helen can only conceive of a future when she has brought herself into relation with her origins.

  CHAPTER 45

  1. wasted with many sorrows: Hargreaves’s reference to 1 Timothy 6:10, adopted uncritically by Rosengarten, is entirely inappropriate, since it concerns persons who have erred from the faith through love of money. In fact the phrase has only a general biblical resonance, associated for instance with ‘a man of sorrows’ of Isaiah 53:3, ‘The sorrows of a travailing woman’ of Hosea 13:13, etc.

  2. But not as we are now: a clear reference to 1 Corinthians 15:51–2: ‘We shall all be changed’, read in association with the Pauline texts which deny distinction in heaven of gender, race, status (e.g., Galatians 3:28). These passages reflect Anne Brontë’s deep scrutiny of the scriptural texts concerning Heaven, no doubt in dialogue and latterly dispute with Emily Brontë, and her awareness of the inhumanity of the traditional reading of the divine system of reward and punishment Heaven is distrusted by Markham as a place of separation, a magnified and irreversible version of that experienced on earth, for in heaven personality is lost. This is Markham’s version of Cathy’s dream in which ‘“heaven did not seem to be my home”’ (Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9).

  3. ten thousand thousand angels: Revelation 5:11.

  4. losing me in a sea of glory: some of the finest phrasing in the novel is devoted to the nightmare vision of heaven. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff choose their own heretical antinomian heaven rather than encounter this threat to their exclusive bond, rejecting the sanctions of anything ‘that God or Satan could inflict’ (Ch. 15).

  5. the grovelling caterpillar: compare Emily Bronë’s use of the caterpillar/butterfly motif, an ancient emblem of the soul’s immortality, in her apocalyptic Brussels essay, ‘The Butterfly’ (1842): ‘As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth’ (tr. S. Davies, in Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (Women’s Press, 1994, p. 251). But Emily’s vision of earth as ‘a vast machine constructed solely to produce evil’ gives this conclusion a satiric edge.

  6. we feel as children, and we understand as children: echoes 1 Corinthians 13:11.

  7. if faith would never fail: Anne Brontë had wrestled with strong religious doubts, to the extent of fearing that God was a ‘vain delusion’ (‘A Hymn’, 29). The faith she represents in Helen was formed on the basis of conflict with the doubt voiced by Markham in this important dialogue.

  CHAPTER 47

  1. on household cares intent: casual allusion to Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, V. 332 (‘on hospitable thoughts intent’).

  2. a few words of course: a few commonplace words.

  3. We never mention her; her name is never heard: from ‘Oh! no! we never mention her’, by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–1839).

  4. I must have a written agreement: Helen seeks to use her advantage to bind her husband to sign away his right to custody of his son. Such a contract could not in fact have been binding in law, since the husband could revoke it at will.

  5. acidulated: rendered acid (considered, as in the case of lemon, to have thirst-quenching properties).

  6. heaping coals of fire on my head: see Proverbs 25:21–2: ‘If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee’. Huntingdon is accusing his wife of vindictive virtue. It is a shrewd hit.

  7. casting her pearls before swine: see Matthew 7:6.

  CHAPTER 48

  1. elude: the first edition has ‘illude’, an archaism.

  2. such gall and wormwood: See Anne Brontë’s favourite chapter of Lamentations, 3 (19). The biblical phrase had passed into common usage.

  3. a stately, branching herb: like the mustard seed in Jesus’ parable, the tiny grain which grows into ‘the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree’ (Matthew 13: 31–2). Charlotte Brontë uses this image to designate the Brontë children’s creative life in a poem called ‘Retrospection’: ‘The mustard-seed

  1n distant land / Bends down a mighty tree’ (29–30).

  4. That worthy student was now at Cambridge… collegiate career: following in Anne Brontë’s father’s footsteps, for Patrick Brontë had studied at St John’s College, and was ordained in 1806.

  5. full of years and honours: cf. Genesis 25:8, 1 Chronicles 29: 28.

  6. Reverend Richard Wilson: the first edition has ‘Edward’ for ‘Richard’, perhaps an authorial confusion with Reverend Edward Weston in Agnes Grey.

  CHAPTER 49

  1. The rain descended… great was the fall of it: Matthew 7:27: another, and this time apocalyptic, allusion to the parable of the house built upon sand (see Ch. 42, n. 3 above). The radical instability of Huntingdon cannot withstand the final stress of the terror of death.

  2. dip the tip of your finger in water to cool my tongue: Huntingdon plays on the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) which had evidently gripped the imaginations of Anne and Emily Brontë as a focus of separation-anxiety, even under optimistic conditions of personal salvation. (See Ch. 20, n. 10 above). The parable reverses the status of oppressor and oppressed in the afterlife, stressing the absolute pro rata basis of punishment hereafter for sin now. The question arose in Emily’s, Branwell’s and Anne’s minds: how lovable was such a God, and how heavenly could heaven be under such conditions?

  3. the great gulf over which I cannot pass: a near-direct quotation from the parable of Dives and Lazarus (see n. 2 above), in which Father Abraham replies to Dives’ entreaty that Lazarus ‘may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue’ (Luke 16:24) that ‘between us and you there is a great gulf fixed’ (16: 26).

  4. if I could look complacently on in such a case: Anne Brontë could not Through Helen, she unfolds her hope of an intermediate state of purgatorial atonement between hell and heaven. Emily Brontë repudiated such a heaven as callous, in the light of earth’s suffering: ‘Heaven itself, so pure and blest/Could never give my spirit rest’ (‘I see around me tombstones grey’ (1841), 13–14.

  5. Oh, it’s all a fable: the stated opinion of the Romantic sceptics, Byron and Shelley, and latterly of Branwell Brontë, e.g., in his poem ‘Azrael’. The phrasing also recalls Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (c. 1594): ‘I think hell’s a fable’, answered by Mephostophilis with the grimly ironic, ‘Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind’ (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus, ed.J. D.Jump (Manchester University Press, 1962), sc. v, 128–9).

  6. But death mill come – it is coming now – fast, fast!: cf. Dr Faustus again in the accelerating panic of his final soliloquy: ‘The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d’ (sc. xix, 144).

  7. I can’t repent; I only fear: cf. Dr Faustus again: ‘My heart is harden’d, I cannot repent”, sc. vi, 18.

  8. God is infinite Wisdom… and Love: Psalms 147:5 1 ‘John 4:8, 4:16.

  9. in whom the fulness of the godhead shines: Colossians 2:9. Helen tries to settle Huntingdon’s panic-stricken mind upon the human and intercessive person of the Trinity, the atoning Son, who has already taken Huntingdon’s sins upon himself.

  10. as if I had never been; while I– : compare Catherine’s speech beginning, “I wish I could hold you… till we
were both dead”’ ( wuthering Heights, Ch. 15).

  11. No man… agreement unto God for him: Psalms 49:7–8.

  12. God, who hateth nothing that he hath made: see Ezekiel 33:11, and the Book of Common Prayer (collect for Ash Wednesday). See Ch. 20, notes 10–18 above for Anne Brontë’s belief in universal redemption.

  CHAPTER 50

  1. rank and circumstances: as ‘Mrs Huntingdon of Grassdale Manor’, Helen is a person of ‘rank’, i.e., of inherited property, unearned income and gentry status. As ‘Mrs Graham the artist’, a working person living in a tenancy, she was merely middle class and therefore might be considered eligible by a farmer. Anne Brontë makes much of this perhaps in order to extend the novel to the required three-volume length.

  2. my philosophy: i.e., ‘my philosophic state of mind’.

  3. come out from among them:2 Corinthians 6:17. The quotation goes on: ‘and be separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.’ The novel here circles back to Ch. 20, and regretfully concurs with Aunt Maxwell’s opinion, which she had attached to the same chapter of 2 Corinthians, that the unbeliever and the believer must live in separation. See Ch. 20, n. 7.

  CHAPTER 51

  1. appeal to the laws for protection: Mr Millward, the voice of ecclesiastical authority in the area, speaks for the forces of reaction which decreed that there were literally no circumstances under which a married woman could take autonomous action, apart from appeal to law. However, the law offered women no redress from abuse. Charlotte Brontë records this in the case of Caroline’s mother, Mrs Helstone, in Shirley: ‘The world’s laws never came near us – never! They were powerless as a rotten bulrush to protect me – impotent as idiot babblings to restrain him!’ (ch. 24).

  2. tell the tale as ‘twas told to me: cf. Sir Walter Scott, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1805), II. xxii.

  3. balled the horses’ feet: packed the hoofs with snow, thus hampering progress.

  4. post-chaise: enclosed coach carrying four persons, hired from stage to stage.

  5. A gig then – a fly – car: a ‘gig’ was a light two-wheeled vehicle; a ‘fly’ a small hired carriage (drawn by one horse); a ‘car’ a two-wheeled cart of various description.

  6. clod-hoppers: dismissive term for rustic labourers.

  7. sotto voce: low-voiced, on an undertone.

  CHAPTER 52

  1. pea-jacket: a short woollen overcoat.

  2. platitude: level condition.

  CHAPTER 53

  1. and respectively returned: Hargreaves emends ‘respectively’ to ‘respectfully’, on the grounds that the former is ‘at best extremely weak’: I have retained it, on the grounds that it makes adequate sense and that Anne Brontë’s writing could on occasion be ‘extremely weak’.

  2. dared not believe in so much joy: Hargreaves prints ‘believe in such felicity’, since the 1848 New York edition has ‘hope for such felicity’, a discrepancy which he hypothesizes may represent ‘different stages of the transmission of the text through proofs and a change of mind by the author’. However, since the New York version may erroneously have picked up the phrase ‘believe in such felicity’ from the manuscript for the page succeeding, I have retained the original, stronger version.

  3. Linden-Car: the first edition has, erroneously, ‘Linden Grange’.

  4. I bequeathed the farm to Fergus: marriage to Helen has emancipated Markham from the need to work for a living and translated him into a landed gentleman who needs to do nothing but supervise his wife’s estates. No regret is shown at this emancipation, and we are given no idea as to how he and Helen spend their lives.

  5. June 10th, 1847: possibly the date on which Anne Brontë completed the draft of The Tenant af Wildfell Hall (see Chitham, Life, p. 152).

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  Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)