by Brontë, Anne
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.
CHAPTER 34
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.
CHAPTER 35
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.
CHAPTER 36
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.
CHAPTER 37
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”’.
VOLUME III
CHAPTER 38
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.
CHAPTER 39
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.
CHAPTER 40
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.
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.
CHAPTER 41
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).
CHAPTER 42
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 Chri
stian 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.
CHAPTER 43
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’.
CHAPTER 44
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,