A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  Getting mono brought me close to the end, but what really put me over the edge was sexual assault. I’d met up with my former fellow intern, the free-wheeling Bianca, in New York for fall break, resolving only to have a drink or two so we could go somewhere and catch up properly, which somehow became drink after drink at bar after bar. I would later find out that having mono had compromised my liver function, but at the time I hardly even noticed, because my only goal, once I was drinking, was to drink until I passed out anyway. Somewhere in there we met a foreign journalist named Juan, and I blacked out. The handful of snapshots I have left from that night were enough to send me shaking to the ER for a rape kit, a morning-after pill, and a series of appointments at the counseling center back in Ithaca. The counselor who took me on helped me process the trauma of the assault (I couldn’t stand to be touched for weeks, and was convinced I was somehow at fault) and began the work of helping me understand my own drinking. When I found myself slumped on her couch for our weekly appointment after another unintentional black-out night, she referred me to an alcohol counselor, who brought in a guest speaker, who offered to take me to a twelve-step meeting.

  I got sober just four months after my twenty-first birthday, clinging to the twelve steps like a life raft. I needed safety, I needed structure, and I needed friends who saw me for who I was. And for the first time, I actually found them. They helped me handle the routines of daily life without becoming overwhelmed—simple, basic things, like getting a headlight fixed or going to the grocery store. That’s not an exaggeration—I once called my sponsor from the cereal aisle, immobilized. My father was relieved I’d put on the brakes, and my former drinking buddies soon disappeared from my peripheral vision. I stumbled across the finish line to graduation, thanks in large part to the people I met in the program.

  Once I moved to New York, as hard as it is to be a sober twenty-something in the land of the happy hour, meetings and sober parties became my home base, my anchor. The anxiety and feeling of being lost took time to abate, but I knew I never had to be lonely in the city unless I wanted to be. Dating was harder—I needed people who would be both understanding about my sobriety and sensitive to the trauma of sexual assault. Even once I was willing to be touched again, it felt like an excruciating hurdle, a terrible dream I had to relive before I could feel comfortable getting close to someone new.

  By the time I started fixating on Eric, I had two home groups—one near my apartment in Brooklyn that I attended Saturday mornings and before work a few times a week, and one near the office at lunchtime. I had recently celebrated my fourth sober anniversary, and had started to chafe under the program’s suggestions and slogans. I didn’t want to check in with a sponsor anymore, now that I didn’t feel like I was in constant danger of going out and getting drunk. I resisted the steps about making things right and staying humble—I thought I knew what I was doing and could manage on my own. It’s not uncommon for people to drift away from the program between the five- and ten-year marks; some learn to navigate sobriety on their own, others go out and start drinking again, others drift back in as “old-timers.” I knew I should stick around and help people who were newer to sobriety, but I was feeling too defiant to be a good sponsor to anyone seriously interested in the twelve steps. I also didn’t want to listen to the advice of more clear-eyed friends in the program who had made their share of destructive relationship decisions, both drunk and sober.

  Eric wasn’t unsupportive of my sobriety, by any means (just like he was warm and loving when I told him about the sexual assault), but when I was confronted with a choice between an hour in a basement meeting or a romantic walk around lower Manhattan… well, I made it to fewer meetings. Then, I wanted my Saturdays free so we could spend them strolling from one flea market to another in Park Slope and Fort Greene, walking Gracie, drinking smug smoothies, and occasionally having passive-aggressive spats because I wanted him to just clean out his damn apartment and invite me over already, while he continued to protest he couldn’t rush things. As I lost touch with the program that had brought me so far from the scared, hapless twenty-one-year-old I had been, there was no solid ground to replace it, only the slippery embrace of this headlong infatuation. Fortunately, Anne Brontë had me covered.

  The enigmatic Helen Graham, the aforementioned tenant of Wildfell Hall, fascinates the local populace of the small village where the novel is set, especially a local gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham. Who can blame him—she is beautiful, mysterious, and one of the earliest literary characters to explicitly bring up gender inequality in polite literary society. She’s also concealing the existence of an estranged raging alcoholic husband from her neighbors.

  Gilbert attempts to court Mrs. Graham and is at first rebuffed (because he’s nosy and irritating), but gradually they become friendly. He bides his time until he can make one of the more awkward literary proposals in existence. No proposal where the man assures his beloved that he wants to marry her despite the neighborhood slander, while she tries frantically to retrieve her hand from his grasp, can be said to have gone well. Afterward, Gilbert is loitering on the grounds when he sees her walking affectionately with her landlord, Mr. Lawrence. Convinced he has uncovered a secret romance, Gilbert resolves never to see her again.

  If Gilbert had been a lovestruck literary heroine, his only option would have been to fret and pine in solitude, maybe catch a consumption or squeeze a scorpion. Being the rugged, arrogant man that he is, when he crosses paths with Mr. Lawrence a few days later, he assaults him with a whip and leaves him bleeding and semiconscious in the road. It was after this development that my sympathy for Gilbert finally passed the point of no return. I believe I would rather endure a week of St. John Rivers lecturing me about the frivolity of my disposition and habits than read any more about Gilbert Markham.

  In response to Gilbert’s jealous accusations (and, probably, to get him to leave), Helen presents him with her diary, which we get to read over his shoulder. Helen’s diary begins when she first falls in love with the handsome, devilish Arthur Huntingdon, the sort of man who dances elegantly, socializes superficially, and flatters to provoke compliments for himself. Helen defends his faults to her aunt and guardian by placing her own good sense and judgment at Huntingdon’s disposal (because who is easier to reform than a self-assured sociopath with no personal boundaries or sense of decorum?). She intends to be Jiminy Cricket to his Pinocchio, flouting her aunt’s gentle urging to reconsider. Since I had intended to smooth over any number of Eric’s faults with my own virtues, this is about when I started feeling sheepish. The talking-to Helen was getting from her aunt sounded an awful lot like the one I’d gotten from my mother, to which I had petulantly closed my ears. Mrs. Maxwell makes one last attempt to persuade Helen that Huntingdon is bad news. Helen responds with Bible passages that promise a sinner can be delivered from Hell once he has paid his debt, which we can all agree bodes well.

  Only a few weeks into our reunion, Eric thought our reasons for breaking up were all resolved and everything was fine. This was mostly my fault since I’d assured him everything was fine in order to get us back together. I was spending a good deal of my energy on an elaborate performance art piece I liked to call “Being The Cool Girlfriend.” But beneath all the masquerading, I wanted to be wooed a little, or at least to be with someone who appreciated my wooing. I wanted a partner who made time for me, showed up promptly, and never made me wonder if they cared. Eric wanted someone to casually date while he sorted through the detritus of his last relationship. Though I have no patience for anyone who is habitually late or discourteous, I bore his inevitable rescheduling with the patience of a bodhisattva. Most of the time.

  Unfortunately, Helen discovers within a few weeks of their marriage that Huntingdon is selfish, frivolous, and demanding, as predicted by her aunt and literally everyone else. Like, “Stop reading—those books are taking your attention away from me,” levels of demanding. Imagine if Belle from Beauty and the Beast had actually m
arried Gaston, and he then developed a drinking problem. Or, as one delightful critic put it in the North American Review, he becomes “as fiendlike as a very limited stock of brains will allow.”5 It’s downhill from there.

  This is the beginning of Anne Brontë’s critique of the institution of marriage, or at least of young women who enter it convinced their job is to ameliorate all their husbands’ faults. Tenant contains several other indictments of the paucity of women’s options. Helen’s gentle friend Millicent finds herself engaged to one of Huntingdon’s friends because he is rich and her mother is enthusiastic. Millicent is soon pregnant and utterly miserable. Later in the novel, Helen’s neighbor Esther Hargrave comes home dejected from her first London season because her mother only cares about finding her a wealthy spouse; Helen encourages her to stand up to the familial pressure: “You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as marry a man you dislike. If your mother and brother are unkind to you, you may leave them, but remember you are bound to your husband for life.”6 Keep in mind this is 1848, more than a hundred years before Betty Friedan, thirty years before the campaign for British suffrage got serious, and we are hearing literary women candidly acknowledge that marriage, their main feminine concern, leaves women worse off. Sociological studies that reach the same conclusion today receive significant social resistance—most of us are romantics at heart, and want to believe that marriage will fulfill us, keep us from being lonely, or lighten our burdens. And Anne Brontë isn’t having it. Where Charlotte foments my wildest romantic notions, Anne is that friend who takes you to brunch and tells you to get a cat and just stop pining.

  Everything that Jane Eyre resists at Rochester’s hands—being dressed up like “a painted butterfly,” being shown off in London despite her preference for domesticity—Helen suffers with Huntingdon. And when he has finished dragging her around the city’s drawing rooms, he sends her home to Grassdale Manor while he continues to do whatever a dissipated gentleman does in London without his wife’s supervision.

  This was like having a mirror held up to my own naïveté—I still thought that after two people got married, they would have fewer problems than they’d had while dating. At least, I imagined, anything that didn’t stay the same would get easier. Like the foolish Caroline Helstone before me, I thought when you love, you marry. That’s just what happens. I had no sense of moderation, and I wasn’t exactly an expert on serious long-term relationships. James and I had only been in the same state at the same time for about a year, all told, though we’d been “together” for three. Then there had been a five-year dry spell of terrible dates that went nowhere. The Preeti Infatuation had lasted longer than any of the entanglements that had followed, but you can’t call it a relationship if one of the partners doesn’t know she’s in it. Or so I’ve been told by an exasperated therapist or two. After I’d thought Anne Brontë was on my side, with all those “he’s not that bad!” rationalizations, it was becoming clear this was a cautionary tale, not an aspirational model.

  One evening after dinner, Helen catches Huntingdon flirting with the unladylike Annabella Lowborough, even going so far as to sneak a kiss to her hand in a room full of guests (which, for the 1820s, is basically as egregious as you could get in a drawing room during a dinner party). The diary abruptly leaps forward two months to Helen’s announcement that she has become a mother, then picks up a full year later with Helen’s ruminations on how to spare her son from the sins of his father. By this point Huntingdon is regularly throwing lavish drunken parties, physically abusing Helen, and having a full-blown affair.

  Finally, five years into this disaster of a marriage, Helen is ready to make her bid for freedom. She begins selling her paintings, with the help of her maid, Rachel. One uncharacteristically sober night Huntingdon finds her diary and discovers her plan. He burns her painting supplies, steals the money she has saved, then confiscates her jewelry and her remaining canvases. The competition for Worst Brontë Husband between this guy and Heathcliff is pretty fierce; Heathcliff might have an early lead because his debauchery spans multiple generations—but Huntingdon has no tortured backstory and thus absolutely no reason to mistreat everyone in his path. The final straw for Helen is when Huntingdon brings his new mistress to Grassdale to be young Arthur’s governess. Helen escapes to Wildfell Hall and adopts her mother’s last name, Graham. Here’s where we learn that Helen’s maiden name, just by the by, was Lawrence. Enjoy a moment of satisfaction as you imagine Gilbert, reading this diary, realizing the man he beat over the head and left for dead is not the paramour, but the beloved, heroic, lifesaving brother of the woman he loves.*

  By the way, when we meet Gilbert Markham, he’s midway through a letter to his brother-in-law, Halford. The entire novel is essentially a pre-Victorian version of How I Met Your Mother, replacing “Your Mother” with “Your Wife’s Sister-in-Law.” The “letter” has fifty-three chapters. Though I accept Helen’s diary without question, I have a continual problem with this epistolary device. Can you imagine receiving a letter that was three hundred pages long and featured hand-copied pages from a total stranger’s diary? I very much want to appreciate Anne Brontë’s experiment in multiple perspectives, but my pragmatism cannot help but focus on how long it would take to copy one’s wife’s diary by hand to send to one’s brother-in-law, and wonder that Gilbert didn’t just go for a simpler, “We met when she moved in down the lane.” Why hadn’t he ever told Halford the whole story over Christmas dinner some year? I might have appreciated the gesture more if Gilbert had recorded the events in his own diary or, I don’t know, written a novel instead. Wouldn’t Halford have written back after the first chapter, “This letter cost me fifty pounds. Why can’t you tell a story like a normal person?”

  But then, Anne was hardly the first to strain the bounds of credulity this way. Austen wrote Lady Susan in letters (recently reborn as Love and Friendship); Mary Shelley did the same with Frankenstein; Bram Stoker used letters to soften the torridness of Dracula’s behavior a few decades later. It gives authors distance from, and plausible deniability for, their characters’ behavior; it’s not something the author is responsible for, they’re just describing what someone else did! And yes, there’s something literarily interesting about Anne Brontë’s choice to nest a story about an alcoholic and an abused mother within the more socially acceptable hands of a male outsider. Society had a hard enough time with the idea of a woman doing what Helen (or Cathy Earnshaw before her) did, let alone a woman writing about it unapologetically. Maybe to preserve Helen’s moral high ground, she couldn’t be allowed to articulate romantic feelings for a man who wasn’t her husband, despite the fact that her husband was an absolute snake.

  Counter to Charlotte Brontë’s later claims that her sisters were just innocents, born of the wild moors with no idea their imaginary tales would strike the reading public as unseemly, both Anne and Emily went to great lengths to put space between themselves and their characters, and, on Anne’s part, to introduce us to them in a way that would earn them our sympathies. Why would they have done that if they weren’t fully aware of the transgressive nature of these imaginary people? Anne plays with chronology, with reader expectations, and with multiple voices. This is not the work of a lucky amateur. Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and Villette are all anchored by the first person perspective of lone narrators (who bear passing resemblances to the authors themselves). In Tenant, it’s hard to tell who the first person is even supposed to be. That strikes me as sneaky and subversive, and I like it. If the cost of this literary subterfuge is a (completely implausible!) letter-writing device, I suppose I must accept it.

  After I had avoided Tenant for so long, Branwell’s sorry state and Huntingdon’s dissolution had a surprising effect on me. By then I’d been sober for going on five years, but I had to confront the fact that I wasn’t “fixed.” My impulsive decision-making—anything to avoid the pain of confrontation or loss or being disliked—was still causing me problems. I might talk about being tired
of Eric’s evasiveness or his emotional baggage, but I maintained our destructive status quo long after it started to hurt. It was my choice to see him every single time he suggested it, and to continually pepper him with invitations in return, even when he turned them down or avoided committing to a time or place. Once we actually made it to that agreed-upon place, he still maintained this wall I couldn’t get through. I was still, somehow, convinced things would be easy instead of labored if I could just get to the other side. And here I found Anne Brontë doing her best to disabuse me of that whole idea.

  Unfortunately we have nearly caught up to the “present,” where Gilbert waits like a squishy worm on a rain-soaked sidewalk. He reads this harrowing tale of a woman’s degradation and liberation, and his main takeaway is “joy unspeakable that my adored Helen was all I wished to think her.” The fact that Helen’s not having an affair with her landlord + she’s actually married + her husband is a monster = Virtue? Gilbert belongs in an Austen novel married to an unpleasant younger sister that his parents chose for her dowry, and if not for Helen, that is basically what would have happened to him. The idea that Helen returns Gilbert’s warm feelings remains utterly inexplicable. But. Love him she does. Then, after returning her diary (without mentioning he’d copied the entire thing into a letter), he ungracefully apologizes to Frederick Lawrence. Not that there is a very graceful way to say, “Sorry I whipped you and left you for dead in the road—I thought you were your sister’s boyfriend.” Possibly my favorite research discovery on this entire quest was a series of critics making exactly the same complaints about Gilbert. Charles Kingsley, in his review for Fraser’s, said,