by Brontë, Anne
If Wildfell Hall is a dissenting sister of Wuthering Heists, it is also spiritual kin to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Sharing the passionate truth to self of Charlotte’s novel and with something of the mutinous energy of Jane’s ‘I’, which begets itself in the reader who shares her journey, the ‘diary’ section of Wildfell Hall (Chapters 16–44) also represents its territories as landscapes of the mind, viewed in the light of eternity. Jane makes Bunyanesque linear passage from one emblematic resting-place and tempting-place to another – from Gateshead, through Lowood, Thprnfield, Whitcross, to Moor End, whence, having acquired an independent inheritance and the romantic equivalent of the Puritan ‘call’, she circles back via the destroyed Thornfield, the site of Rochester’s atonement, to sanctuary at Ferndene. But Helen’s journey, from Staningley to Grassdale, escaping to Wildfell, only to return via Grassdale to Staningley, ultimate sole heir to both, is viewed both retrospectively and prospectively from the way-stage of Wildfell. The ‘progress’ is therefore not as clearly marked. The struggling, implicated quality of human life is more evident in Wildfell Hall as Helen is tainted by the corruption she cannot escape: ‘I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him – I hate him!’ (p. 308); ‘Instead of being humbled and purified by my afflictions, I feel that they are turning my nature into gall’ (p. 313). Grassdale bears a weight of symbolic meaning comparable with the pilgrim’s sojourns in Jane Eyre: at first it is a fool’s paradise, then a false paradise. Lush and tender descriptions of its natural beauty are blighted not only by the loneliness of Huntingdon’s absence but by the lurking of a snake in the grass, Hargrave, a cold comment upon the intemperately warm-hearted attempt to master Jane by Rochester. Insinuating himself into Helen’s good graces in a scene of wistfully Edenic beauty, Hargrave resembles Milton’s Satan’s slyly ingratiating approaches to Eve in Paradise Lost. The sense of paradisal innocence is conveyed by a tenderly observed scene of play between mother, nurse and child in the grace of a ‘sweet, warm evening’ in the park:
I was standing with Rachel beside the water, amusing the laughing baby in her arms with a twig of willow laden with golden catkins, when greatly to my surprise, he entered the park, mounted on his costly black hunter, and crossed over the grass to meet me. (pp. 246–7)
This sinister figure again penetrates the lyrical scene of Helen kneeling before her baby, ‘having gathered a handful of bluebells and wild roses… and presenting them, one by one, to the grasp of his tiny fingers’ (p. 250). Hargrave, the dark mounted figure on the ‘costly black hunter’ hunts Helen with sexual threat which culminates in the chess-game of Chapter 33, so reminiscent of the chess-scene in Middleton’s tragedy, Women Beware Women.22 Grassdale represents a paradise already lost in the moment of enjoyment: Helen must substitute for its idyll the Miltonic ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ (XII. 587) in her flight from its bounds. The house becomes a hell on earth, and the repeated ‘hell’ chimes with Helen’s name. Her sufferings culminate in the detection of Huntingdon and his mistress in sexual play in the shrubbery, where Helen’s husband swears ‘“by all that’s sacred”’ that he no longer loves his wife (p. 303). In this moment of absolute affliction, the prose deepens to a throbbing biblical intensity reminiscent of Jane Eyre: in the extremity of need is vouchsafed a breathing of grace and the fellowship of the creation in a vision of the stars: ‘I knew their God was mine, and He was strong to save and swift to hear’ (p. 303).
One of the novel’s triumphs is to make Arthur Huntingdon not a fiend incarnate but an immature, boyish figure, with real gaiety, some warmth and charm, who feels as deep a tenderness for his wife as he knows how to feel. Possessive and despotic in his initial affection for Helen, he lavishes affectionate attention on her, and craves total attention in return. Jealous of all that distracts her from him (‘when he sees me occupied with a book, he won’t let me rest till I close it’ (p. 208), Huntingdon has no inner resources and hence is easily bored, filling the time when Helen runs out of amusements for him by ‘lolling’ beside her on the sofa trying to arouse her jealousy by spinning tales of former amours. Their honeymoon is a bizarre scamper round Europe, which is no novelty to him and whose fascinations he begrudges to his wife ‘in as much as it proved that I could take delight in anything disconnected with himself (p. 203). Objecting to her religious devotion, he explains that ‘“it is enough to make one jealous of one’s Maker – which is very wrong, you know; so don’t excite such wicked passions again, for my soul’s sake” ‘ (p. 204). Helen’s locking of her door against her spouse is a memorable act of feminist defiance; it is also an episode in a banal household row, which reflects credit on neither party. The next morning Huntingdon seethes with malign sulks; it rains; he yawns, fidgets, drinks, bangs doors and strikes the cocker spaniel off ‘with a smart blow’. The dog retreats and, when its master wants to pet it again, cleaves to Helen and will not come. ‘Enraged at this, his master snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at his head’ (p. 212). Helen lets it out Such minor fracas are proleptic. Helen will love; be abused; recoil in anger and hurt; and, for her recoil (interpreted as rejection) be rejected; then she will reject in earnest. The particular quarrel is resolved within the chapter, in which the tension is broken by her yielding to his not very abject penitence and caresses. But it sets up a pattern of deterioration which is mercilessly inexorable, for Helen’s very character in its forthrightness and integrity have the ironic effect of alienating her husband. The narrative moves in a rhythm of mounting misery with pauses and reprieves; chapters end on upbeats of hope or downbeats of apprehension as skilfully managed dynamic scenes of quarrel are played out, in which both manoeuvre for advantage. ‘What shall I do with the serious part of myself?’ ends Chapter 22 ominously. ‘I trust we shall be happy yet,’ Chapter 24 falteringly concludes.
Long before Helen has consciously recognized her bad bargain, the reader has understood that there is nothing to Arthur Huntingdon. It is not that he is an intrinsically evil person. He is a brat. The centre is painfully hollow. Even Huntingdon seems conscious of this absence of something vital in his human make-up: gentle when ill after his first major debauch, he turns thankfully to Helen, as though her resources could serve for them both. A real pathos surrounds him. But he must fill his emptiness with excitement and intrigue, and in the measure that Helen withdraws from this compulsion, she helps to empty him further, so that he must have more gratification. He pours drink into himself; fills his house with the roaring fraternity; courts that fine animal, Annabella; abuses Helen. Helen’s tenderness is hard to kill; its durability is expressed when she sees a letter in Hargrave’s hand, ‘with Arthur’s still beloved hand on the address’ (p. 251). The author does not allow us to forget how sexually attractive and childishly appealing Huntingdon is: how puzzled (when he can be bothered to think) by the circumstances he is creating. But Huntingdon’s behaviour is not an isolated instance; it belongs to a social norm for élite males. In the confraternity, Anne Brontë studies the dynamics of group mentality, the mutual reinforcement of male ‘club’ behaviour. The melancholy and Byronic Lord Lowborough’s betrayal to drink, drugs and suicidal despair, taunted with unmanliness by his ‘friends’ and his adulterous wife; Hattersley’s abuse of his ‘invitingly meek and mim’ wife, the timorous Milicent; the cynicism of Hargrave’s sexual approaches and Grimsby’s squalid antics represent a group code which not only legitimates but authorizes infantilism as a norm. Hattersley is redeemed; Hargrave repelled; Lowborough divorces, to begin a new life: only Huntingdon is entirely destitute of hope. Anne Brontë focuses the nihilism attendant on terminal weakness and self-indulgence; spoilt in this life, he is spoilt for the next world. We smile at his Branwellian antics in church, perusing his Prayer Book upside down, adopting a ‘puritanical air of mock solemnity’: ‘“I’ll come home sighing like a furnace, and full of the savour and unction of dear Mr Blatant’s discourse –”’ (p. 174). Bran well too had monkeyed about in his pew and
had a running joke about how ‘two fireballs’ (brandy with egg) make the tippler ‘a brand plucked from the burning’23 – Wesley’s favourite text for his own conversion. Branwell too had been spoilt, and lost. As his friend Grundy put it, ‘he was just a man moving in a mist who lost his way’.24 The reality of such loss and such burning are borne out in Huntingdon’s death-scene, an evasion of ‘repentance’ by one who has misplaced his soul and now, in extreme need, cannot lay claim to it: ‘“I’m not going to die yet. – I can’t and won’t.” ’ He clings to the person who has kept hers (‘“Helen, you must save me!” ’) and tries to grapple her down into the grave with him, to answer for him. His last words are ‘“Don’t leave me!’” (pp. 441–7). He dies, indeed, without being weaned.
Helen’s testament is a story of double temptation and double failure: Huntingdon’s and her own. The diary throws the mature woman of 1828 back to her susceptible, needy and spirited girlhood at the beginning of the decade, the pert niece of a severe aunt whose anxious piety is counter-productive in provoking mischievous answers. When Aunt Maxwell points out the horror of finding your husband ‘“a worthless reprobate, or even an impractical fool”’, Helen flightily wonders, ‘“But what are all the poor fools and reprobates to do, aunt?”’ and mentions the danger of depopulation (p. 132). The levity in Helen is evidently fair game for Huntingdon’s sparkling flightiness: but Helen is a complex, deep, and deepening character. The notion she boasts of ‘saving’ her irresponsible spouse – a favourite female myth of the mid-nineteenth century – is exposed as rash arrogance, the tragic flaw of pride which brings her falling headlong. It unleashes in Huntingdon a Nemesis whose black taunts she has herself invited: ‘“Yes, now, my immaculate angel…”’ (p. 441). Helen’s diary plots her downward course into disillusion, hurt, rage, moral petrification and embitterment. To her alarm, she begins to adapt to the debased norms of Grassdale,
till I am familiarized with vice and almost a partaker in his sins. Things that formerly shocked and disgusted me now seem only natural… Fool that I was to dream that I had strength and purity enough to save myself and him! (p. 262)
Her temper sours; her tongue lashes out, for ‘I am no angel’ (p. 267). Helen wrestles not only against her husband but against herself, for her own soul. The two climaxes of action come in Chapter 33, the anguished scene in the shrubbery in which she comes face to face with her husband’s adultery; and Chapter 40, the centre of violation, in which Huntingdon rakes through her diary, discovers her savings and has her paintings burned, a spiritual rape. Huntingdon’s early proposal to ‘“Let me have its bowels then”’, as he eviscerates her portfolio, and rifles the contents (p. 160), proleptically foreshadows the vandalizing of Helen’s inner and private world and the destruction of her means of subsistence.
Helen’s life is centred in her child, the second Arthur Huntingdon – bidding fair to become a second edition of the first as the father and his peers ‘“make a man of him” ‘ by teaching him ‘to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man’ (p. 350). Cursing his mother as Heathcliff teaches Hareton to curse his family, ‘the infant profligate’ (p. 351) terrifies Helen with the success of the experiment to alienate him from her loving, principled education, reconstituting him in the image of the patriarchy which has in turn reproduced and authorized its damaged pattern in father and son from generation to generation. Shocking as this perversion is, Anne Brontë presents it as an extreme version of a norm familiar to all of us, current in phrases such as ‘like a man’, ‘make a man of him’, ‘manly’, which by this stage in the narrative have a chilling effect on the reader. Meanwhile, Helen recognizes her own unfitness to mother Arthur under this pressure: ‘I am too grave to minister to his amusements’ (p. 325) and play with him as he needs, for she is neurotically given to detecting the father’s pernicious influence in the son’s innocent high spirits. Ironically, Helen is reproducing the repressive demeanour of the aunt against whom she had rebelled. Faced with the choice between a depressed mother and ‘joyous, amusing, ever-indulgent papa’, the child naturally gravitates toward the fun and games. Any normal child would do the same. The cycle begins again.
If marriage to Gilbert Markham is not felt by the reader to be the ideal union of souls to which a young woman might aspire, Gilbert is presented as honourable in intention, ordinary, solid, open to reason. Helen will keep him in order. Transposed from farming into landed opulence, he will certainly do more good than harm, and the book seems disposed to settle for common decency as a rather rare commodity in the marriage-market of the time. In such competition, Gilbert’s price is above rubies. It seems significant that Helen has to come down a class to find him. Contemporary reviewers tended to point out that such rakes as populate the central story were not a feature of contemporary Victorian life. The raunchy bucks of the Regency have not ‘been tolerated for many years, within the pale of civilized society’.25 But the author of this historical novel insists in her Preface that this is ‘the truth’: ‘I know that such characters do exist’ (p. 4). She had lived in books but, at Thorp Green, she had seen at first hand the behaviour of the gentry and aristocracy (Branwell liked to boast that the Robinson family was collateral to a Marquis and a Member of Parliament); Anne’s employer would remarry to become Lady Scott. She could say ‘I know’ because she had lived through a momentous equivalent of the events transcribed in Wildfell Hall and had tasted the disgrace of a beloved brother, sharing his disintegration as if she were (as indeed a sister is, in a literal sense) ‘one flesh’.
She dated her Preface 22 July 1848. Branwell was at home, in advanced stages of addiction. Six days later, Charlotte wrote that his ‘constitution is shattered’; ‘he sleeps all day’ and is ‘awake all night’. Two months later, on 24 September, he was dead. Eight months later, the twenty-nine-year-old author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall followed him, making a self-commanding Christian death of awesome control and determination: ‘Take courage, Charlotte; take courage.’26
NOTES
(Abbreviations are explained on p. 491.)
1. See Edward Chitham, The Poems of Anne Brontë (Macmillan, 1979), Appendix III.
2. No manuscript is available. The diary paper’s first transcribed publication is in Clement Shorter’s Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (Hodder & Stoughton, 1891), pp. 152–3.
3. See the reviews assembled by Miriam Allott in CH, pp. 254-73.
4. Charles Kingsley, ‘Recent Novels’, Fraser’s Magazine 39 (April 1849), p. 273. Kingsley, in a conspicuously intelligent review, which however is tense with self-contradiction, defines Wuthering Heights as a disharmonious defiance of musical key, which he regrets on Christian humanist grounds which serve to point up both Anne Brontë’s technical protomodernism and her post-humanist analysis of human nature.
5. Characters’ names in Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall tend to cluster under identical initials, especially ‘H’ and ‘L’: the latter novel consciously echoes Wuthering Heights in its system of ‘H’ characters, designating (chiefly but not exclusively) the libertine males. In Wuthering Heights the ‘H’ characters are Hindley, Heathcliff and Hareton; in Wildfell Hall, Huntingdon, Hattersley, Halford, Hargrave, Helen. This coding sets up a kind of indeterminacy and identity-loss amongst the fraternal ‘club’ which turns Helen’s life into hell (a recurrent word). Characters also group under other letters, a tendency which is also seen in the lists of fragments which have survived from the Gondal saga. I also posit a vestigial influence from the ‘H’ and ‘L’ names in Richardson’s Clarissa, which incorporates a similarly cryptic patterning of namings and shares several names in common with Wildfell Hall, attached to the theme of pathological libertinism.
6. Charlotte Brontë, letter of 15 September 1850, to W. S. Williams.
7. ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, as reprinted from the second edition (1850) in the edition of Wuthering Heights by Ian Jack (OUP, 1981), pp. 362–3.
8.
Emily Brontë’s diary paper of 1845, SHLL, Vol. II, pp. 49–51.
9. Thomas Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his Life (Chatto & Windus, 1830), p. 136.
10. For this theme, see Jan B. Gordon, ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’, English Literary History, 51, 4 (Winter 1984), pp. 719–45; Elizabeth Langland, Anne Brontë: The Other One (Macmillan, 1989), pp. 120–23.
11. Charlotte Brontë, letter to James Taylor, SHLL, Vol. Ill, p. 138.
12. E. P. Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’, North American Review, 141 (October 1848), in CH, p. 262.
13. On Emily Bronte’s narrative mode in Wuthering Heights, see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Harvard University Press, 1982).
14. Charlotte Brontë, letter of 30 January 1846, to Miss Wooler, in The Brontës, Life and Letters, ed. Clement Shorter (Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), Vol. I, p. 315.
15. Branwell Brontë, History of Angria (1836). See Winifred Gérin, Branwell Bronte (Nelson, 1961), p. 99. Huntingdon is in no sense a ‘portrait’ of Branwell: rather, Branwell’s decline gave Anne Brontë insight into the processes she describes in Wildfell Hall.