Given my predilection for novels of Christian experience (see earlier posts), when I read somewhere—I forget where—that Anne Brontë’s The tenant of Wildfell Hall was a novel of this kind, I was rather surprised. I had never associated the Brontë sisters with Christian faith. I had long ago seen at least one film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and had read and enjoyed Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights years ago. So I read Anne’s The tenant of Wildfell Hall, in the Penguin Classics edition of 1996, edited with introduction and notes by Stevie Davies. I cannot say I enjoyed it, but it made an impression.
It was quite a wild read, astonishing in the light of her sisters’ novels and of 19th century novels in general. It was published in 1848 when Anne was just 28 years old, but the novel reflects such a an Anglican clergyman in a country village in Yorkshire. After her schooling, she spent six years as a governess for various families, and I take it this is where she witnessed the shocking behaviour of upper-class men towards their wives and towards women in general, not to mention badly behaving women too. She also watched as her brother Branwell, three years older than her, fell into an increasingly degenerate life, dying of tuberculosis in the year the novel was published.
These experiences provide the basis for The tenant of Wildfell Hall. (Spoiler alert: this paragraph does include an incomplete rough outline of the story, but I doubt that this is enough to spoil the novel for the reader.) The tenant is an enigmatic woman, Helen, who with her small son and an elderly female servant comes to live in a few rooms of the otherwise derelict Wildfell Hall. The novel has two narrators. One is Helen. The other is Gilbert, a young middle-class farmer of marriageable age who lives nearby. Gilbert’s narrative is written to a friend we never meet, and Helen’s is her journal. Neither is convincing as a literary device, but I soon forgot this, as the narrative itself held my attention. Gilbert, the first narrator, decides he wants to know more of this mystery woman who has arrived in circumstances that give rise to various unkind rumours in the village, and begins to visit her. The two fall in love, although Helen’s feelings are only hinted at until shortly before she leaves the Hall to return to her now sick husband. At this point she gives Gilbert her journal as an explanation of why and how she has come to be at the Hall. The journal takes up 29 of the novel’s 53 chapters, and ends in torn out pages that return the narrative to Gilbert.
Helen’s journal is the story of her life from her meeting with the charming, promiscuous, alcoholic Arthur, leading to their marriage and her move to his country house. Helen is convinced she can reform him, but in this she fails. Arthur is utterly possessive of Helen, and then of their young son, and wants her to constantly do his bidding. He tries to shape his son in his own image. There follows an increasingly horrendous sequence of Arthur’s weeks- and months-long absences in London. Like Helen, we are shielded from a detailed knowledge of what goes on, other than that an enormous amount of alcohol is consumed and fortunes expended at the gaming table, and that Arthur is with a group of friends who egg each other on to more and more self-destructive actions. Eventually, Helen and the reader witness a sample of this behaviour when Arthur invites the “friends” to his country estate. We are witness to the gradual breakdown of Arthur and Helen’s relationship, as she accedes to his demands only as far as her faith allows. He interprets this as coldness and lack of love for him. Finally, as their relationship hits rock bottom and Helen fears for his father’s influence on their son, she decides to leave Arthur, and she and her son and her old nanny flee to Wildfell Hall, where the events of Gilbert’s abovementioned narrative take place. Eventually Helen and Gilbert tear themselves apart, and she returns to her husband to take care of him in what turns out to be his final illness. He clings to Helen, yet his words are often cruel and demanding. He is terrified of death, uncertain whether it means hell or nothingness. She counsels him to repent, but he can’t, and as far as Helen knows he dies unrepentant for the damage he has done to himself and many others, including Helen. This was challenging to read.
I leave the rest of the narrative for the reader to discover, and I don’t think I can capture the awfulness that Anne Brontë depicts, but I hope it is enough to show why The tenant of Wildfell Hall is sometimes called one of the first feminist novels. It certainly highlights the ways in which some “gentlemen” spent their leisure, and the degree to which they expected their wives to love and serve them and to expect nothing in return. Stevie Davies sums up the situation well when she writes of these men that they
are more than men behaving badly––drinking, gaming, abusing their wives (and servants, and dogs), squandering fortunes, fornicating––they are hell-bent souls recklessly playing away the hope of heaven, within a patriarchal system that licenses the soulless pleasures of ‘gentlemen.’
Contemporary commentators labelled the novel “coarse” and “brutal”, and Anne Brontë’s novelist sister Charlotte wrote that it should never have been published, but Anne bravely wanted to alter the status quo. Although Helen is unable to bring about change in her own husband, she does cause change for the better in some of his cronies who are less completely committed to dissoluteness, and they learn to share happier relationships with their wives.
However, I don’t think the term ‘feminist’ fully captures the ideology embodied by Helen, Anne Brontë’s main female character. Early in their marriage, Arthur complains that she is “too religious”: her devotion to God, he says, “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.” This twisted logic whereby Arthur blames Helen for his own wrongs occurs again and again, but the crucial point here is Helen’s response:
‘I will give my whole heart and soul to my Maker if I can, … and not one atom more of it to you than He allows. What are you, sir, that you should set yourself up as a god, and presume to dispute possession of my heart with Him to whom I owe all I have and all I am, every blessing I ever did or ever can enjoy – and yourself among the rest – if you are a blessing, which I am half inclined to doubt.’ (Chapter 23)
When Helen realises that Arthur is secretly meeting Annabella, a wealthy visitor to their home, in a woodland visible from the house, a male friend keeping the woman’s husband occupied meanwhile, she responds, ‘”God help me now!’… Then, while I lifted up my soul in speechless, earnest supplication, some heavenly influence seemed to strengthen me within. … I saw the eternal stars twinkling down upon me. I knew their God was mine, and he was strong to save and swift to hear.”'(Chapter 33)
Note in passing that Annabella lives a dissolute life, and eventually suffers for it. The author’s critique understandably focusses on males, but does not exclude females.
During her husband’s illness, Helen writes to her brother, “I am exerting my utmost endeavours to promote the recovery and reformation of my husband, and if I succeed, what shall I do? My duty, of course. But how? No matter. I can perform the task that is before me now, and God will give me strength to do whatever he requires hereafter.” (Chapter 45)
When Arthur is near death, he says, “God is only an idea.” And Helen answers,
“God is Infinite Wisdom, and Power, and Goodness, and LOVE; but if this idea is too vast for your human faculties, if your mind loses itself in its overwhelming infinitude, fix it on Him who condescended to take our nature upon Him, who was raised to Heaven even in his glorified human body, in whom the fullness of the Godhead shines.” (Chapter 49)
Arthur shakes his head and sighs, and seconds later wishes he could take Helen with him so that she could plead on his behalf. She replies,
“No man can deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him. … It cost more to redeem their souls––it cost the blood of an incarnate God, perfect and sinless in Himself, to redeem us from the bondage of the evil one. Let Him plead for you.” (Chapter 49)
Helen comments that she seems to speak in vain. Arthur no longer laughs in scorn at these blessed truths, “but still he cannot trust them, or will not comprehend them.”
The feminism that Helen represents grows out of a relationship with God that puts him first, and by implication, insists that all human beings are equal in his sight, be they male or female. It insists that in the person of his son God paid the price of salvation for everyone who is willing to receive it, and it is this faith that motivates Anne Brontë to expose the awful wrongdoings of some of England’s “gentlemen”.
Evidence from other writings by members of the Brontë family imply that Anne’s own faith was not quite as strong as that she imputes to her heroine. Helen perhaps represents the ideal of faith that Anne herself would like to attain. But Helen is not represented as faultless. Because the entire novel is narrated in the first person, we hear much of the thought life of both Helen and Gilbert, and at times, we often hear them regretting a thought or deciding to apologise for unseemly behaviour. The thought lives of Helen and Gilbert are at times recounted with such devastating realism that this reader was caused to reconsider events in his own past.
An afterthought: If I have one qualm about the novel, it is that Anne Brontë’s God seems more remote and his love less real than I pefer. I attribute this to a difference between Christian teaching 180 years ago and today.
PS It is a long time since I have posted, and in the meantime ChatGPT has become one of my study accessories. But I assure the reader that it has played no part in this post.