The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (77 page)

2
.
bladders
: containers for artist’s paints, made of animal bladders.

3
.
stretcher
: frame on which artist’s canvas is stretched tight

4
.
it will cleave to the dust
: Psalms 119:25.

5
.
He hath hedged me about… children of men
: Lamentations 3:7, 3:15, 3:32–3. The third chapter of Lamentations is structured upon the man of affliction’s search to accept God’s apparent abandonment and to see it in a providential perspective.

6
.
It is not the will… should perish
: Matthew 18:14. Helen comforts herself by resigning her son to the tenderness of the Almighty Father.

1
.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast
: Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man
(1733), I. 95. Pope’s point in praising Hope is ironic: whereas its existence depends on our ignorance of the future, its presence is essential to make life bearable. William Cowper in a long poem entitled ‘Hope’ saw
Hope as the deepest resource of the Christian: ‘Hope, as an anchor firm and sure, holds fast / The Christian vessel, and defies the blast’ (167–8). Hope was an important motif in Victorian iconography, painted blindfold with rainbow-coloured wings. It is personified in Emily Bronte’s poetry (‘O thy bright eyes’, 37; ‘How beautiful the Earth is still’, 37–48, identified with the ‘Comforter’ and ‘Guide’, Emily’s heretical version of the Holy Spirit). Anne Brontë’s poetry represents a ceaseless conflict between reasons to hope and a tendency to despair (sustained as dialogue in ‘Self-Communion’ (1847–8): see especially on Hope, lines 245–96).

2
.
so do better plants
: referring to the parable of the sower: Matthew 13; Mark 4. The naturally fertile soil of Arthur’s genetic inheritance resembles the ‘wealthy soil that might yield luxuriant crops under other and favourable circumstances’ of Hareton Earnshaw’s nature in
Wuthering Heights
, Ch. 18. Anne Brontë like Emily insists on the dual importance of genetic inheritance and conditioning.

3
.
enlist all the powers of association in my service
: Helen is able to use a basis of Lockean associationism on which to construct a programme of aversion-therapy prefiguring modern behavioural theory and techniques.

4
.
against
: ‘by the time that’ (archaic).

5
.
younger sons
: a younger son would not be seen as a good catch because under the system of primogeniture, the eldest son would inherit the whole estate.

6
.
a mere cumberer of the ground
: cf. the parable of the barren fruit-tree in Luke 13 (‘why cumbereth it the ground?’ (13:7)). Anne Brontë reflects on the dismaying pressure brought upon surplus daughters to marry and quit the parental home. She had personal experience of this callousness in the behaviour of her employer, Lydia Robinson, forcing her daughters to marry against their inclinations. As Charlotte Brontë wrote, ‘Mrs Robinson is anxious to get her daughters husbands of any kind, that they may be off her hands’ (Letter to Ellen Nussey, August 18,1848;
SHLL
, p. 247).

1
.
worriting
: worrying, brooding (colloquialism).

2
.
our duty to admonish our neighbours of their transgressions
: ‘speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another’ (Ephesians 4:25). Helen’s audacious plain speaking, which violates the female decorum of dumb submission to the male masters, claims the authority of the early church for the duty (not merely the right) of intervention in another family’s concerns.

3
.
that house so founded on the sand
: in Jesus’ parable (Matthew 7:24–7), the wise man built his house on a rock ‘and it fell not’ (7:25) but the foolish man built his on sand, and the house was destroyed in a storm (7:27). The allusion expresses the insecurity of the dependent state of wifehood, whose house is in a literal sense founded upon her husband’s character and behaviour.

4
.
dash away a tear
: while tears were not, in the mid-nineteenth century, as taboo for males as they later became, the males of Huntingdon’s set would have scorned them as effeminate. Hattersley’s tears, however, have a yet larger significance: in Christian iconography, tears are signs of contrition, denoting the melting of the heart so that the work of Grace and redemption can take place.

5
.
mite
: ‘might’, erroneously, in the first edition.

6
.
one bright spot, at least, whereon to rest my thoughts
: it is an index of the importance and value of female friendship in
Wildfell Hall
that Helen can take real comfort from the amelioration of her friend’s lot, brought about by her forthrightness, despite the unremitting horror of her own situation.

1
.
THE BOUNDARY PASSED: THE BOUNDARY PAST
in the first edition.

2
.
down of that new governess
: distrustful or suspicious of her (dialect).

3
.
intelligence
: in the sense of ‘information’ (
OED
).

4
.
barns
: Yorkshire dialect for ‘children’, cognate with Scottish ‘bairns’, cf the ballad Nelly Dean sings in
Wuthering Heights
, Ch. 9: ‘It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat’.

5
.
of the last importance
: in the sense of ‘of the ultimate importance’.

1
.
some surprising outburst of hilarity
: something of Gondal emotion bursts through here in the paeon to liberty Helen inwardly utters. Anne’s and Emily’s Gondal heroines typically spent much of their lives imprisoned and dreaming of liberty. They might also be, like Helen, outlaws, hunted and homeless – but elated and free, as in ‘Song: “Come to the banquet”’ (1845), 25–30:

O happy life! To range the mountains wild,
The waving woods – or Ocean’s heaving breast,
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.

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.

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.

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
.

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).