The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (71 page)

1
.
the light of your countenance
: Psalms 4:6, a flippant allusion. Markham’s scriptural allusions tend to be glib and arbitrary until his narrative has been touched by Helen’s influence.

2
.
Linden-Car
: ‘Linden’ from lime-trees; ‘car’ (-‘carr’ or -‘ker’) in
northern dialect denotes marsh or bog (Kenneth Cameron,
English Place-Names
(Batsford, 1961), p. 214).

3
.
Wildfell, the wildest and the loftiest eminence in our neighbourhood
: although Anne Brontë’s style in describing Wildfell and the hall becomes itself rather wild, straining for effect in long, tortuous sentences connected by numerous dashes, it is notable that the narrative eye remains concerned with the agricultural properties and use of the land (or the lack); the prevalence of game; the territory as the property of farmer or land-owner: a perspective suited to Markham’s calling.

4
.
mansion of the Elizabethan era
: somewhat over half a century younger than Wuthering Heights, which bears the date 1500. For fuller consideration, see Introduction, pp. ix-xi.

5
.
the shapes he chose to give them
: the topiary details add a unique twist to the theme of recidivism played out both by
Wildfell Hall
and
Wuthering Heights
(see S. Davies,
Emily Brontë
(Harvester Wheatsheaf, etc., 1988), pp. 130–54). Nature, ‘tortured’ to an art which represents nature (the boxwood swan, the lion) is in process of reverting to nature. However, swan and lion belong with laurel towers and fabricated warrior as armorial tributes to dynasty – a dynasty which has died out, subverted by nature. For Emily Bronte’s mystery, Anne Brontë substitutes grotesquerie, in a chaotic vision in which human aspirations are in process of recrudescence, paralleling the disintegration in the ethical sphere of the novel: but the author fails to develop these implications.

6
.
either in heaven or earth… under the earth
: Exodus 20:4. The source emphasizes the impiety of graven images, underlying the ‘vanity’ theme exemplified in the ruined garden.

7
.
ghostly legends
: the first edition has ‘legions’.

8
.
the upper portion of a diminutive ivory nose
: the stylized but tender description of the gradually emergent child, preluding the arrival of his mother into the reader’s ken, typifies Anne Brontë’s affection for children and her longing for a baby of her own. The mother-child bond haunts the poetry, both Gondal and personal lyrics (e.g., ‘Verses to a Child’ (1838) in which the father has abandoned wife and child; ‘Dreams’ (1845): ‘Then I may cherish at my breast / An infant’s form beloved and fair…’ (5–6)). In
Agnes Grey
, however, Anne Brontë showed an unsentimental awareness of original and conditioned sin in children.

9
.
like Mahomet… since the mountain would not come to him
: proverbial.
OED
quotes Francis Bacon’s essay, ‘Of Boldness’: ‘If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.’

10
.
by the frock
: this detail points to the tender but transitional age of
the child. Boys were dressed as girls and belonged to the female world until initiation at five or six into the patriarchal hierarchy. Helen attempts to keep her son as a ‘mother’s boy’ – condemned as effeminization and retardation by the community but in fact a radical attempt to save him from the evils of the men’s world.

11
.
roused my corruption
: i.e., the unregenerate ‘old Adam’ in Markham’s male (and here, sexual) nature. The arousing ‘proud, chilly look’ seems to have been a feature of Gondal females, written into
Wuthering Heights
as the first Catherine’s imperious manners and the second Catherine’s scowls.

12
.
the mania for Berlin wools
: ‘a fine dyed wool used for knitting, tapestry, and the like’ (
OED
). A perfunctory attempt to imply a historical period.

1
.
Ruin, Mrs Markham
?: Helen’s emphasis on the word ‘ruin’ points up the ironic narrative mode in foregrounding key-words whose meaning will lie at the centre of the moral drama.

2
.
the ‘Farmer’s Magazine’
: we must presume this to be an old copy of
The Farmer’s Magazine… Exclusively Devoted to Agriculture, and Rural Affairs
, published in Edinburgh but discontinued in 1825.

3
.
done what I could to make him hate them
: Anne Brontë’s novel is an early example of the ‘temperance novel’, whose best-known protagonist was Mrs Henry Wood, who won £100 for her novel
Danesbury House
in a Temperance League competition in 1860. Anne’s presentation of the subject in a society where alcohol addiction was commonplace opens the subject to rational debate: Mrs Henry Wood argues that
all
who are not taught to abhor alcohol in childhood are due for damnation. A multitude of wine-and gin-lovers are shown dying horrible deaths or being saved by water-loving wives, or the factory-owner, who opens a coffee-shop to wean his workers from liquor.
Wildfell Hall
is exclusively concerned with abuse amongst the ‘genteel’ classes.

4
.
What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs Graham
?: Markham recites the essence of the doctrine of experience and choice famously expounded in Milton’s
Areopagitica
(1644): ‘If every action which is good, or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name… when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing” (
Complete Prose Works
, Vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 527). Anne Brontë’s position was a modified version of this; but her experience of the corruption
latent in human nature taught her caution, and
Wildfell Hall
multiplies instances of men incapable of resisting temptation, however privileged their position. This is why Helen attempts behavioural immunization of her son.

5
.
hitherto been able to muster against them
: Helen’s confession of personal fallibility stokes the reader’s curiosity (what is her history?) and reflects Anne Brontë’s own practice of rigorous self-questioning and self-criticism, as revealed in the poetry (‘Despondency’: ‘how many times / My feet have gone astray’ (25–6)). Her concern for the young in a world of betrayal is most powerfully stated in ‘Self-Communion’: ‘How shall it centre so much trust / Where truth maintains so little sway…?’ (61–2).

6
.
a mere Miss Nancy
: in West Riding dialect, an effeminate man, still current in ‘nancy-boy’, with homosexual aspersion. Anne Brontë highlights the function of ridicule in social control, especially in the construction of ‘male’ attitudes and behaviour by making a fool of men’s so-called ‘female’ characteristics.

7
.
get Mr Mill-ward to talk to you about it
: Anne Brontë, herself a clergyman’s daughter, satirically refuses the authority of the church in adjudicating for the individual conscience – a strongly Protestant attitude held in common with her sisters.

8
.
though one rose from the dead
: Luke 16:31.

9
.
the same argument with regard to a girl
: the chapter now becomes a full-scale debate on the double standard for male and female education, conducted as a dialectic, with Helen challenging Markham with the logical (and insulting) implications of his assumptions.

10
.
to teach her how to sin is at once
: The first edition has ‘to teach her how to sin, is it at once’. I accept Hargreaves’s emendation of this convoluted, angry speech, in which either Anne Brontë or the compositor had become hopelessly entangled.

11
.
incomprehensible discourse
: the excess manifested in Helen’s attitude may imply her departure from reason and authorial backing, despite the fact that Helen’s project to warn the young of snares is identical with that of the novelist in the Preface.

12
.
spoiled by my mother and sister, and some other ladies of my acquaintance
: the narrator undermines the validity of the norms maintained by his own household against the stranger’s feminism in a final ironic
coup
for the author and the newcomer.

1
.
to do what their soul abhorred
: a characteristically frivolous allusion to
Scripture by Markham (Psalms 107:18), which, however, carries an ironic resonance of the debate on aversion-therapy from the previous chapter.

2
.
a crack
: brisk chat, or jest.

3
.
the oracle with a Jove-like nod
: Jove (Zeus, or Jupiter) was the authoritarian father-god of classical mythology, not without bibulous and socializing tendencies (hence, ‘jovial’). Mr Millward comically pontificates over the gathering, his prejudices and inclinations all dignified to oracular status by virtue of his priestly office.

4
. (…
Mr Lawrence’s father had shortened his days by intemperance)
: the significance of this fact, slipped in parenthetically, becomes clear later when we learn of Arthur’s father’s alcoholism: if the condition is hereditary, he stands to inherit the tendency on both sides, accounting for the intensity of Helen’s anxiety. George Eliot alludes to ‘hereditary constitutional craving’ for drugs and laudanum in
Middkmarcb
(1871–2), Ch.
66
.

5
.
laudanum
: a derivative of opium used for medical purposes, freely available from pharmacies. Branwell Bronte’s addiction to laudanum put him in the company of the great Romantic addicts, Coleridge and De Quincey, whose
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1822) was a favourite book of the four children. See Daphne du Maurier,
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
(Gollancz, 1960), pp. 179–80. Although alcohol then as now was socially acceptable, Lawrence is able to gain credit for his argument by paralleling alcohol with opium, whose dangerous and antisocial properties were recognized. His decline of a second glass quietly reinforces the distrust of alcohol he shares with Helen.

6
.
evolutions
: ’a wheeling about, a movement in dancing’ (
OED
).

7
.
I don’t allow that!
: Mr Millward displays a provincial and puritanical antagonism to the waltz, a late eighteenth-century dance in triple time, of German origin, which swept Europe in the early nineteenth century. Its movements and the embrace of partners were considered sensual.

8
.
Let your moderation be known unto all men!
: Philippians 4:5.

1
.
a painter’s easel
: Anne Brontë’s heroine is a professional artist, a painter in a period where women painters were rare, for they could acquire no training. Branwell Brontë had attempted to enter the Royal Academy Schools and had set up as a portrait painter in Bradford, neither of which was a possibility for a young woman: Anne here usurps this privilege for her heroine. However, although Anne Brontë makes her
alter ego
practise a different art from her own as novelist, she herself was competent at drawing
in pencil and ink and water-colour: her sketches survive from the age of nine (see Chitham,
Life
, p. 29). She tended to prettify her subjects, which, like Helen’s, were chiefly portraits, landscapes and buildings, both representational and imagined. She had a light, soft touch with the pencil, and a classicizing tendency. In her novels, she is fond of word-painting descriptions of localities and seasons. Helen, as an artist on a larger scale than anything to which Anne could aspire, uses the ‘male’ oils in which Branwell had received training. See Gérin,
Bran-well Brontë
, p. 58.

2
.
the portrait of a gentleman
: the method of disclosure through a portrait to which the narrator responds is analogous with Lockwood’s viewing of Edgar Linton’s portrait in
Withering Heights
, Ch. 8: ‘a soft-featured face… The long light hair curled slightly on the temples; the eyes were large and serious; the figure almost too graceful’. The description of the representation of Arthur Huntingdon is revealing of the levity, narcissicism, lively sensuality and personal beauty of its as yet unknown subject

3
.
trespassed too much upon the forehead
: the phrasing hints subtly towards the trespasses committed by the sexually attractive and irresponsible Huntingdon.

4
.
Let not the sun go down upon your wrath
: Ephesians 4:26.

1
.
Miss Millward
: Mary Millward, since ‘Miss’ with surname signifies the precedence of the eldest daughter. Hence, Charlotte was ‘Miss Bronte’, Anne merely ‘Miss Anne Brontë’.

2
.
to cure a greater evil by a less
: Markham’s thought processes are made to betray a shallowness and manipulativeness which render it difficult for the reader to consider him as seriously eligible for the strong-minded heroine. Here he proposes to flirt with Helen on homoeopathic principles, curing himself of one source of malaise (Eliza) by taking it in a smaller dose (Helen). While this attitude is essentially misogynistic, and Anne Brontë is caustic about male manipulation of women’s affections, it is also in this case psychologically unconvincing, sitting ill with his supposed sterling qualities, culture and feminist consciousness.

3
. ‘
the clear, cold eve’ was fast ‘declining’
: this is from Thomas Moore’s ‘Let Erin Remember the Days of Old’, from
Irish Melodies,
No. 2 (1808).

4
.
the gibbous moon
: between half and full moon.

5
.
the last atom that breaks the camel’s back
: variation of the proverbial ‘last straw that breaks the camel’s back’.