I was meant to have read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall approximately fifteen years ago for my Victorian Literature seminar about women and animals. With apologies to Professor Berg, I never got around to it at the time and, still unable to grapple with re-attempting to read Wuthering Heights, I picked the book before it on my unread shelf. So, here we are with Anne Brontë’s book about insufferable men and the supposed responsibilities of wives towards their reform.
The basic premise is this: a mysterious widow and her child arrive at Wildfell Hall (as tenants, no less!). The surrounding community, and Gilbert Markham in particular, take an interest in her and it is only after much cajoling that he gains access to Helen’s private diary, which becomes the central narrative of Brontë’s text for about two hundred pages. The first part of the book is Markham writing a letter to a man he has offended for not being more forthcoming with his own story; within the letter, he reproduces the pages of Helen’s diary—she, also, is not very forthcoming with her own story. Her tale is unraveled as a more traditional novel, documenting her marriage prospects in respectable society. She rejects her first suitor, the one her family encourages, because he is a boorish bore and she does not have any genuine affection for him. Instead, she marries Mr. Huntingdon, only for things to quickly turn sour—he is an incorrigible sinner and Helen is a woman of immeasurable patience striving to bring him back to God. That said, he is exposed as an adulterer and Helen tries to build a new life for herself without him, which returns us to Markham’s narration and the culmination of their love story. The book reads similarly to Pamela by Samuel Richardson—also epistolary in nature, also about an abusive and domineering husband, with some information missing to give it a gothic kind of quality.
Literary theorist Irving Howe makes the claim that it is a challenge to engage with literary works from the past; the more time that passes, the more inaccessible works become. While I’d say that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is pretty good, there’s definitely some unavoidable presentism in my reading. Helen’s story reads as pretty repetitive, bludgeoning the reader with how vile Mr. Huntingdon is to justify Helen’s respectable remarriage. There are any number of moments that I would deem to be the ‘last straw,’ but given the religious and societal mores of the time, it seems that Brontë really needs to convince the audience that Helen deserves to be free of her husband.
Truly, though, the men in the book are insufferable. Mr. Huntingdon and his friends drink, gamble, and hunt for months at a time. He takes prolonged vacations to the city, leaving Helen alone and pining for him. In one conversation, he asks her why she does not worship him (or at least his body) and hold him in higher esteem than God (the blasphemer!) and Helen tries to convince him to be more pious, less tempted by fleshly delights. Later, as I mentioned, he is exposed as being a long-term adulterer with his friend’s wife. Later still, he destroys Helen’s art and studio tools. Later still, he reads her journal while she tries to reclaim it from him and then tries to prevent her escape by limiting her finances to a set allowance, the expenditures of which she is forced to report. Any one of these things would be sufficient grounds for a dissolution of their bond, but Helen continually thinks she can bring him back to God. (There’s a footnote in my edition that comments on the trope of women in literature reforming their husbands and implies Brontë is taking a swipe at the convention—why is the responsibility on the eternally suffering woman?). The other historical factor is that Huntingdon refuses to allow Helen to leave because people will talk. Despite the open secret that is his relationship with Lady Lowborough, he will not suffer people to talk about his failed marriage. The notion that it would be worse to be seen as not having a good marriage than to actually have a bad marriage is pretty firmly rooted in the Victorian era.
Even the “good” men of the book are awful and in this Brontë is prescient of the “nice guys” that are secret misogynists. When Helen’s marriage is in decline, Mr. Hargrave steps in, wanting to save Helen and steal her away because he loves her so. She asks him over and over again (the book is repetitious, after all) not to comment any further on his love for her. If he truly loves her for her own sake, she says, he would be willing to hold that love in silence and not attempt to bring her further from God. The dweeb sure is persistent, though. The central narrator and new prospect for Helen, Gilbert Markham, while seemingly the protagonist of the novel, demonstrates the same toxic masculinity as all the others. He insists on seeing her paintings, which she does not want to show him. If you think about it, the very novel is a huge betrayal to her—he is exposing all of her secrets and experiences to a friend of his and a stranger, presumably, to her. Even when the journal cuts off and Markham returns to his own letter, he admits that he finds it more painful to read the parts of the journal where Helen is in love with Huntingdon than the parts which follow. He’s a selfish brat that betrays Helen’s confidence, which makes the climax of the novel where he rushes to interrupt what he believes to be her wedding fall a bit flat—why would I root for this guy?
All things told, the book is pretty good, if overlong. The writing style is not as far removed from current conventions as you might expect, making the novel pretty accessible. As unlikely as it seems, I would actually step up to defend Anne Brontë. It seems to me that everyone talks about Charlotte’s Jane Eyre or Emily’s Wuthering Heights and that Anne gets unfairly discounted by a lot of literature enthusiasts. She’s worth the read.
Happy reading!
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