The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)
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Authors: Anne Brontë
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
ANNE BRONTË, who was born in 1820, was brought up in the Yorkshire. village of Haworth where her father was curate. She was educated at home and, as a child, she invented with her sister Emily the imaginary world of Gondal, for which she wrote copious chronicles and poems. She held two positions as governess, with the Inghams at Blake Hall and, from 1840–45, with the Robinson family at Thorp Green. As a religious lyric poet, Anne Brontë’s hymns and lyrics rank with those of Cowper. Her first novel
Agnes Grey
(1847), published under the pseudonym Acton Bell, is in the tradition of fictional spiritual autobiography, written with conciseness, integrity and irony.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) is a powerful feminist testament, attacking the marriage laws, double standards of sexual morality and the education of men and women. Anne Brontë died at Scarborough in 1849. She was the youngest of the Brontë sisters, whose extraordinary gifts are only now receiving just appraisal.
DR STEVIE DAVIES lectured in English Literature at Manchester University from 1971 to 1984. She left to become a full-time novelist and literary critic. Her novel,
Boy Blue
, published in 1987, won the Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1989, and was followed by
Primavera
(1990),
Arms and the Girl
(1992) and
Closing the Book
(1994). She has published eleven critical books, the most recent being
John Donne
(1994),
Emily Brontë: Heretic
(1994) and
Henry Vaughan
(1995). She has written three books in the Penguin Critical Studies series:
To the Lighthouse, Twelfth Night
and
The Taming of the Shrew
. She is currently Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton Institute.
ANNE BRONTË
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
STEVIE DAVIES
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1848
This edition first published 1996
Editorial matter copyright © Stevie Davies, 1996
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
ISBN: 978–0–141–90825–0
‘Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways,’ scribbled Anne Brontë in pencil at the back of her Prayer Book.
1
In her 1845 diary paper, she wrote of having undergone ‘unpleasant and undreamt-of experiences of human nature’
2
at Thorp Green, where she had been working as governess for five years. Anne had seen at close quarters her brother’s degeneration and disgrace; the hypocrisy, affectation and abuse of privilege of the gentry class. She had been bereaved; had understood that she would probably never marry and have the baby she craved; had felt her faith severely tested by desperate periods of religious doubt.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
was the testament of this sombre vision. Reviewers reacted with fascinated shock to this ‘coarse’ and ‘brutal’ work, in which élite males degenerate into addicts and libertines.
3
Charles Kingsley criticized the work as atonal, ‘tortured by a defective chord, in which one false note perpetually recurs’.
4
The defective chord might be called the key of ‘H’,
5
in which a system of characters – Huntingdon, Hargrave, Hattersley, echoed by Halford and Helen, and, in ‘G’, Grimsby, at Grassdale – riot against human decency. The ‘H’ characters are more than men behaving badly – drinking, gaming, abusing their wives (and servants, and dogs), squandering fortunes, fornicating – they are hell-bent souls recklessly playing away the hope of heaven, within a patriarchal system that licenses the soulless pleasures of ‘gentlemen’. The cosmic and the domestic occupy the same page; and the realism of the telling coexists with a quality resonant of medieval morality drama and
Dr Faustas
. In
Wildfell Hall
, moral disease has become a norm.
Charlotte Brontë, who had always for complex reasons babied Anne, failing to recognize her strength of character and originality, wished
Wildfell Hall
had never been written. She recoiled with hot pangs of shock from the account of ugly facts which brought to mind the shattering disintegration of their brother: ‘
Wildfell Hall
it hardly seems to me desirable to preserve,’ she wrote betrayingly to her publisher. ‘The choice of subject in that work is a mistake’,
6
and she said the same to the public in her ‘Biographical Notice’ of Ellis and Acton Bell. The book was morbid, Charlotte said, the work of ‘a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature’ which, having been confronted at close quarters by ‘talents misused and faculties abused’, felt conscientiously bound to warn others about the dangers, although she ‘hated her work’.
7
Yet Anne Brontë was and remained a child of Gondal, the land of the imagination she founded with Emily in her childhood – a grown-up child, of course, a rational, realistic, pensive, radically Christian woman. If she had put away childish things, she was still the same person who had acted the characters of seducers, adulterers, warriors, hell-raisers, outlaws and who, though her heart was no longer in the play, had into her mid-twenties improvised with Emily a cast of Gondal characters, all the way to York and back: ‘And during our excursion we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena… escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists’, wrote Emily in her diary paper of 1845.
8
Echoes of Gondal combined with addictive childhood reading of Moore’s life of Byron, with its account of wild Regency womanizing, gaming, shooting, carousing, and those more recondite pleasures of sacrilege exemplified in dressing as monks and drinking from ‘a human skull filled with burgundy’.
9
Hence, surely, the bold and free dialogue in the diary section of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall;
the quality of language caught warm, slangy and sharp from the speaker’s mouth. The scintillating sex-appeal of Arthur Huntingdon and the voluptuous physique of Annabella Wilmot may well be relics of Gondal. Wit, humour and irony, as well as tender passages and lyrical scene-making, are essential to the telling. It is impossible to credit Charlotte’s statement that the author ‘hated her work’.
*
The title of Anne Brontë’s second novel relates a person to a place – but her surname, Helen ‘Graham’ is an assumed name and the place, the derelict moorland mansion, does not belong to her. Helen therefore is inscrutable to the northern community amongst whom she has sought sanctuary, and exists on their margins as a focus of rumour, gossip, speculation and suspicion. Neither does she wish to be known. She hides behind her pseudonym and buries herself as far off the map as she can retire. The first of the two narrators, Gilbert Markham, is a member of that community, a young farmer with hints of a culture beyond agriculture, whose ownership of the ‘paternal acres’ roots him to the earth, to primogeniture and settled custom. Helen’s ‘real’ name, we later discover, is Helen ‘Huntingdon’ – but she can only be accounted nominally married to her degenerate husband, for ‘my higher and better self is indeed unmarried’ (p. 243), and besides, when a woman has been handed round for the use of anyone who will have her, how far can she count as the offerer’s wife: ‘“I value her so highly, that any one among you, that can fancy her, may have her and welcome”’ (p. 355)? When Helen leaves her husband and chooses an incognito, she homes to her mother’s maiden name (p. 388) to which she feels she has some claim, and returns to the ruined home of her own childhood where Rachel, her servant, said ‘she had often walked with me in her arms, and little thought to come again so many years after’ (p. 391). The ‘tenant’ therefore has a vestigial title to her adopted name and the refuge she leases. But this belonging is known neither to the reader nor to the tattling community, which registers her not as a returnee but as an unknown quantity, bringing in alien values. Into the old-fashioned provincial world retires a strong-minded independent woman, who earns her living as an artist, eloquent, forceful, anomalous. Dispossessed and displaced, she becomes a mysterious object of fascination both to the community and the narrator.
Anne Brontë’s novel is a powerful and disputatious sister-novel to Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. The very initials of the place –’W.H.’ – and those of the system of ‘H’ characters (playing on the Heights series, Hindley, Heathcliff, Hareton) spell out this kinship. In both novels, the moorland house is dynastic and the locus of
desire and curiosity. But neither uncanny presences, violent usurpation nor extremes of possessive hatred and need haunt Anne’s hall as they do Emily’s. ‘Wild’ and on the ‘fells’, just off the edge of the community, where culture meets nature, ‘the superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era’ has already made progress in resolving issues of patrimony by crumbling uninhabitably back into the heath. Human beings have abandoned the place as too wuthering – ‘only shielded from the war of wind and weather by a group of Scotch firs, themselves half blighted with storms’ (pp. 22–3). The phrasing echoes
Wuthering Heights
: ’the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house; and… a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun’ (Chapter 1). Perhaps both houses derive from a common
Ur
-hall in Gondal. Emily’s utilitarian Romanticism is answered by Anne’s picturesque rationalism. Whereas Wuthering Heights is a working farm run by hardy, spartan people, the hall of Anne’s novel is the decayed relic of an outworn patrician class, whose armorial bearings dominate the church but whose pretensions are mocked by the recrudescence of mansion into moor. Her ruin is a folly. Its garden displays the heraldic pretensions of a grotesquely deformed topiary sprouting back into the wilderness of nature: ‘the old boxwood swan, that sat beside the scraper, had lost its neck and half its body’ and laurel castellations, warrior and lion guarding the gateway ‘had sprouted into such fantastic shapes as resembled nothing in heaven or earth’ (p. 23). The overgrown garden of Anne’s hall mocks the vanity of human wishes, a late-flowering instance of eighteenth-century Enlightenment consciousness in an author who, following Ecclesiastes and Dr Johnson’s
The Vanity of Human Wishes
, had written a poem entitled ‘Vanitas Vanitatum’:
Should wealth or fame our life employ,
Death comes our labour to destroy,
To snatch th’untasted cup away,
For which we toiled so many a day.
(32–5)
Anne Brontë’s garden of vanity comments on the fabrications of
human architecture and that arboricultural boastfulness which cultivated nature (boxwood, laurel) into an art-work in imitation of nature (swan, lion) appropriated to the self-glorifying iconography of ‘great’ families, only to be overrun by the profusely scathing energies of nature. Anne Brontë’s ancient hall demystifies Gothic. Her ruined house is not haunted. It is simply dilapidated, damp and un-welcoming.
Helen Graham is a transient. At her married home, Grassdale, she was numbered, we later discover, amongst goods and chattels. Anne Brontë brings into full focus the expropriated, estranged nature of women’s lives. Helen can call neither her home nor her name her own.
Wildfell Hall
is a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence. Helen ‘Graham’ or ‘Huntingdon’ or ‘Lawrence’ stands as an image of unaccommodated woman, in a landscape of biblical texts as well as moorlands and pasture, in which we plainly see that the daughter of woman has nowhere to lay her head. Paradoxically, her destabilizing inheritance is contradicted by her exceptional strength and stability as a person, with a core of impregnable selfesteem, far more steadfast in herself than the volatile male narrator, plodding through his acres, through whose eyes we first approach and experience her. The dispossessed Helen is transgressive: a challenge both to the narrator and the narrator’s community. She lives alone. She earns her own living; keeps her own counsel and tells the definitive version of her own story.
The reader views not only the narrator’s word-picture of Wildfell Hall but, in a chapter entitled ‘The Studio’, the figure of a woman with easel and oils (the prerogative of the male artist) painting her own picture of Wildfell Hall ‘as seen at early morning from the field below, rising in dark relief against a sky of clear silvery blue… very elegantly and artistically handled’ (p. 46). Anne Brontë’s portrait of the artist as a fee-earning young woman trebly trespasses on the domain of the masculine: female artists dabbled in water-colours or sketched decoratively in pencil or pen and ink; ‘ladies’ did not engage in trade; and, besides, the tools of her trade in this case count as stolen. The artist’s materials noted by Markham on entry are formally the property of her husband – a point Anne Brontë concisely
makes in Chapter 40 when Huntingdon burns her materials – ‘the oil and turpentine sent hissing and roaring up the chimney’ (p. 365) and has the easel, canvas, stretcher and half-finished picture carted off for a larger conflagration. Then he laughs in her face. For what’s hers is his; but what’s his is not hers. Hence, Helen must sell her pictures under false names: ‘Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall’ (p. 47). Names, for the author who wrote pseudonymously as ‘Acton Bell’ rather than Anne Brontë, to protect herself from the unjust criticism meted out to women authors, were a place of hiding to the woman who wished to publish her fiction without publicizing herself. The Parsonage at Haworth, on the threshold where the village community met the wild fells, was a retreat in which to be securely oneself. The fugitive heroine covers for an anomalous author at odds with the male-dominated society in and against which she had formed her vagrant personal truth.
Wildfell Hall
is told by two narrators, in two literary forms (Markham’s letters framing Helen’s diary), concerned with two periods of time (the beginning and end of the 1820s), in two keys. Beginning in the minor key of romantic-domestic social comedy, it moves back in time to the major key of tragic irony in Helen’s inset diary, succeeded by further letters by Gilbert encapsulating a cluster of new letters from Helen. Both frame and core narratives are spiritual testaments in the tradition of Puritan spiritual autobiography – Richardson’s epistolary novels on the one hand, Bunyan and the Puritan conversion narratives and spiritual journals on the other. But the outer, epistolary, witness, is subordinate to and changed by the inner diary witness, and though spatially his account encompasses hers, spiritually hers dominates, rebukes and transforms his. The central diary represents an individual’s authoritative personal witness to the fruit of traumatizing and chastening experience, ‘experience’ being a key-word. Appropriating themes from Richardson’s
Pamela
and more especially
Clarissa
(the sexual pursuit by a libertine of a virtuous woman under family pressure to accept an obnoxious suitor), Anne Brontë transfers what in Richardson was shown in letters into the private testimony of the diary: things outward and
visible are converted to confessions inward and spiritual. Richardson has his heroine write giddily to her friend:
And then the secret pleasure intruded itself, to be able to reclaim such a man to the paths of virtue and honour: to be a
secondary
means, if I were to be his, of saving him, and preventing the mischiefs so enterprising a creature might otherwise be guilty of, if he be such a one. (Letter 40, p. 183)
Anne Brontë’s Helen writes, to herself:
there is a secret something – an inward instinct that assures me I am right. There is essential goodness in him – and what delight to unfold it! If he has wandered, what bliss to recall him! If he is now exposed to the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions, what glory to deliver him from them! – Oh! if I could but believe that Heaven has designed me for this! (pp. 152–3)
For Richardson’s rapist, Lovelace, Clarissa is ‘that angel of a woman’ who never falls from grace but, like a greater Eve, endures her 1,500-page trial of virtue (p. 430) transcendently. The male author turns his heroine face-outwards so that we can all enjoy her. The transactions of Helen’s diary are soliloquistic, moving from naïve self-delusion to the recognition that ‘I am no angel’ (p. 267). Though Arthur Huntingdon echoes Lovelace’s assumed name of ‘Hunting-ford’ (
Clarissa
, p. 417) and has some of his qualities of Godforsaken levity, Lovelace’s predatory sexuality is realized in the vulpine Hargrave, a more minor character. For the nineteenth-century woman author, the question of chastity is secondary to problems of integrity, truthfulness, affection, motherhood, livelihood. The framing letters in
Wildfell Hall
communicate outwards to an imagined reader (Halford) and to ourselves as readers how ‘the old Adam’ may be charged and changed by the private words of a compulsive truth-seeker and truth-teller. Helen’s words build on the Word, and the seriousness of her attempt to account for her life stands in contrast to the mindless ‘small talk’ of Markham’s community: ‘“;I was wearied to death with small-talk,”’ she tells him – ‘“nothing wears me out like that I cannot imagine how they
can
go on as they do.”’ Gilbert cannot help ‘smiling at the serious depth of her wonderment’
(p. 85).
10
Anne Brontë’s novel is profoundly concerned for the integrity of the word: it examines the abuse of language in the small talk of women, the big talk of men, in prattle, insult, gossip, curses and the bearing of false witness both through lies and self-delusion.
Wildfell Hall
searches toward a communication which will be communion: ‘the unity of accordant thoughts and feelings, and truly loving, sympathizing hearts and souls’ (p. 485).
