The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (76 page)

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.

11
.
the burden
: a resonance of Christian’s lonely burden in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
: ‘I dreamed, and behold I saw a man… [with] a great burden on his back’.

12
.
a suppressed exclamation
: emended from the first edition, ’explanation’.

13
. (p. 306)
husband and wife only in the name
: Anne Brontë is explicit in establishing that at this point Helen quits her husband’s bed.

14
.
pity their folly and despise their scorn
: the chapter of Helen’s humiliation ends on a proud note of self-assertion, a spirit of righteous anger that is at one with the feminist spirit of the novel and its fiercely Protestant theme of the individual’s power and duty to resist a corrupt consensus.

1
.
with a feeling of malevolent gratification
: Anne Brontë does not shrink from a full portrayal of the gall which provides a blackly compensatory pleasure to a hurt or rejected person. In this chapter Helen characteristically channels her destructive feelings not toward depression but outwards as retaliatory anger.

1
.
to recover the shock
: ‘recover’ could be used transitively in the nineteenth century in cases where we would say ‘recover from’.

2
.
Then, go, and sin no more
: John 8:n. The irony of this riposte lies in its gender reversal. In the Gospel, this is Christ’s admonition to the woman who ‘was taken in adultery, in the very act’ (8:4). Here a woman enjoins it upon a male committing the sin of sexual harassment.

1
.
petrifaction
: ‘turning to stone’, completing the process of emotional hardening implied in a chain of images: ‘hard, embittering’, ‘habitual coldness’, ‘frigid civility’, ‘congealed me to marble’. For a warm-hearted person like Helen, the necessary hardening is a personal disaster, but not as great a danger as to remain sensitive and at her husband’s mercy would be.

2
.
a slight titter on seeing me turn colour
: the word ‘titter’ is exquisitely chosen. Helen is married to the moral equivalent of a baby who must crave and suck at all and any attention, and has no notion of piety or dignity save as threats to his insecure sense of self.

3
.
and stay upon his God
: Isaiah 50:10. Rosengarten comments, ’Probably cited from memory’, presumably because of the slight inaccuracy and the italicization – but it is far more likely that Anne Brontë cited
all
her biblical texts from memory and, like her father, knew much of the Bible by heart.

1
.
perils that beset him on every band
: the language is Bunyanesque. Helen’s child is a pilgrim at the vulnerable outset of his journey through the wilderness of this world, in need of cherishing guidance. The realistic battle of indulgent, feckless father against severe, grieving mother for the soul of the child enacts the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. The father, like the devil in the Morality plays, enjoys an inbuilt advantage since he is offering fun and games – but the equation is complicated by the fact that Helen, on the side of the angels, sees that play and light-heartedness (which she can no longer give) are necessary to her son’s development. Ironically, she is replicating her aunt’s behaviour towards herself. The child now becomes pivotal to the plot.

2
.
Such goodness overawes me
: The characterization of the unctuously flattering Hargrave may owe something to the reptilian advances of Milton’s Satan, here echoing
Paradise Lost
, IX: ‘her every air I Of gesture or least action overawed I His malice… and for the time remained / Stupidly good’ (459–61, 464–5), and his insincere praise of Eve’s virtue (IX. 538–9). ‘So glozed the Tempter,’ Milton says; and Anne Brontë’s Hargrave also persistently ‘glozes’. There are also shades of the contest between Comus and the Lady in Milton’s
A Masque: Comus
(1634), 244–52, 659–813). Richardson translated the biblical and Miltonic contest of fiend and woman to the sexual arena: see
Clarissa
, Letters 31,152 and 199: ‘Surely this is an angel, Jack’ (p. 642); Lovelace is ‘ashamed of being awed by her majestic loveliness and apprehensive virtue’. Ironically, Clarissa’s and Helen’s very virtue arouses the seducer.

3
.
that indefatigable foe
: again, Miltonic. Satan (whose name means ‘Enemy’) is recurrently alluded to as ‘our grand foe’ ‘their secret foe’ (Paradise Lost IV. 7), with his ‘indefatigable wings’ (II. 408).

4
.
I have no rest day or night
: Hargrave impudently ransacks Scripture to furnish an account of his afflictions as a latter-day Job (Job 30:17) and a lamenter of Lamentations (‘we labour, and we have no rest’ (Lamentations 5.5)).

5
.
we may reap in joy, hereafter
: Psalms 126:5.

6
.
I still have my God and my religion
: Compare Jane’s manifesto in
Jane Eyre
: ‘The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man’ (Ch. 27). Helen, of course, does not feel tempted by Hargrave as Jane does by Rochester, being repelled rather than attracted.

7
.
I thank God for this deliverance!
: Helen concludes the second volume in a style comparable with that of the Puritan spiritual autobiographies which influenced Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, e.g., after the battle with Apollyon, ‘So when the battle was over, Christian said, “I will here give thanks to him that hath delivered me out of the mouth of the lion, to him that did help me against Apollyon”’.

1
.
one bright star
: Hesper-Vesper, the evening and the morning star, associated with Christ’s death and resurrection: cf. Milton,
Paradise Regained
:
‘So spake our Morning Star then in his rise’ (1. 294). Anne Brontë poignantly uses this sacred image to express the grace of Mr Weston’s coming into Agnes’s life in
Agnes Grey
: ‘appearing like the morning star in my horizon, to save me from the fear of utter darkness’ (Ch. 11).

2
.
When that dying light… wholly comfortless
: Rosengarten defines this as paraphrase of ‘a recurring biblical sentiment’, referring to Psalm 112.

3
.
Let her injure you no farther
: the first and second editions omit ‘no’.

4
.
like one under the influence of acute physical pain
: Lord Lowborough’s violent physical manifestations of grief resemble in less extreme form those of Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff, who grinds and gnashes his teeth (
Wuthering Heights
, Ch. 15) and dashes his head against a tree (Ch. 16).

5
:
for you are a man, and free to act as you please
: i.e., it is open to Lord Lowborough as an injured husband to obtain a divorce, a right not available at that period to the vast majority of women, whatever their grievance. Divorce, before the Marriage and Divorce Law of 1857, was only possible by Act of Parliament even after that date, a woman was unlikely to obtain one.

6
.
blackened his name with a deeper disgrace
: Anne Brontë here attacks the scapegoating of cuckolded husbands in a patriarchal culture that plays all males off against one another as rivals for the females and measures male success by sexual prowess and willingness to resort to violence if this is brought into question.

7
.
a little girl between one and two
: i.e., Arthur Huntingdon’s child by Annabella, conceived near the beginning of their adultery. The physiological details of blue eyes and auburn hair make clear that the child ‘takes after’ her father.

1
.
to make a man of him
: in
Agnes Grey
Uncle Robson inculcates similar principles into the heir, Tom, by encouraging him to drink wine and brandy and to equate high consumption of these with a ‘bold and manly spirit’ and superiority to his sisters (Ch. 5); also by egging him on to sporting endeavours requiring ‘spunk’. Manliness is equated with self-indulgence and public gratification of power-lust, symbolized by Tom’s whip and spurs (Ch. 2).

2
.
moped to death between an old nurse and a cursed fool of a mother: cf. Agnes Grey
: ‘“He’s beyond petticoat government already: – by G—, he defies mother, granny, governess, and all!’” Ch. 5). In
Wildfell Hall
, the fraternity is initiating Helen’s son into tribal customs by teaching him to despise gentleness and self-control as effeminate. They thus pass their own contempt for women to the next generation, who will visit it on their wives and beget
it in their children. These events are only an extreme case of the control-system of patriarchy. In removing her son, Helen is attempting to put herself between the elder and younger generations of males in order to stop the damage being passed along the line.

3
.
set the table in a roar
: like the jester, Yorick, in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, V. i. 185. The allusion brings to mind the
memento mori
of Yorick’s skull.

4
.
the infant profligate
: Emily and Anne Brontë were both interested in the skin-deep character of ‘civilization’.
Wuthering Heights
is also a fable of culture and degradation, in which a controlled experiment in conditioning is carried out. As Heathcliff says to Hareton, ‘“Now, my bonny lad, you are
mine
! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it’ (Ch. 17). Hareton, like ‘the infant profligate’ in
Wildfell Hall
, loves the man who has taught him to curse and is reclaimed when ‘petticoat government’ (in the form of the second Cathy) supervenes.

5
.
my sober toil-fellows now
: the theme of the self-supporting working woman is important in both Anne Brontë’s novels, and central to
Agnes Grey
, in which Agnes is a governess (‘working as a hireling among strangers’ (Ch. 21)), and her mother, though born like Helen into the leisured classes, is proud to support herself as a teacher – to ‘earn her own livelihood, and be chargeable to no one’ (Ch. 19). The profession of visual artist was rarely possible to women, since formal training was not available until the 1850s (see Germaine Gréer on the ambivalence of Helen’s attitude to her art in
The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work
(Pan with Seeker & Warburg, 1979), pp. 310–12; see also Karen Petersen and J. J. Wilson,
Women Artists. Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century
(Women’s Press, 1994 edn.)).

6
.
par parenthèse
: ‘by way of parenthesis’ (French).

7
.
Ye twain shall be one flesh
: incorporated into the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, from Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:8. The quotation is ironically inserted into Hargrave’s speech since he is offering Helen an adulterous liaison in which she would forfeit all personal dignity.

8
.
you could not choose but yield
: Hargrave threatens rape, the logical conclusion of his long assault. Lovelace’s rape in
Clarissa
finds an echo here.

9
.
his ramrod and his gun
: the current muzzle-loading gun required a ramrod to drive home the charge. Males in
Wildfell Hall
are recurrently seen armed with weapons; for the first time, Helen has taken up a weapon to defend herself (significantly, her palette-knife, the tool of her trade, which will ultimately guarantee her independence). Anne Brontë queries male glorification of arms and violent activity as compensation for their absence
of a sense of wholeness: she had read in Moore’s
Byron
of the young aristocrat’s passion ‘for arms of every description’, slicing at the bed-hangings with a bedside sword as a morning recreation and terrifying young women with wild ‘firing at a mark’ (p. 72). Byron’s pugilism, disastrously aped by Branwell Brontë, even down to the boxing gloves, was shown by Moore as a compensation for the weakening deformity of his club foot.

10
.
a puss or two
: sporting idiom for hares.

11
.
the satisfaction of a gentleman
: a duel, over a question of ‘honour’, according to the ‘gentlemen’s code’. Hargrave’s acknowledgement has formally placed him in a position of having insulted Huntingdon by making sexual advances to his wife. Throughout this scene, there is irony on the word ‘gentleman’, a dignity to which the crew are only nominally entitled.

1
.
With your leave, my dear, I’ll have a look at this
: ‘With your leave, my dear’, in keeping with the courteous phrasings and endearments which accompany Huntingdon’s intrusion into Helen’s personal space (the book of her life and her life’s work), carries sombre irony, since Helen has neither power nor legal right to stop her husband asserting possession of all her nominal property and alienating or destroying it as he sees fit. This scene represents a rape of Helen’s spiritual world in the form of her diary-testament, as well as the temporary demolition of her means of securing liberty.