The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) Read Free

key-word. Appropriating themes from Richardson’s
Pamela
and more especially
Clarissa
(the sexual pursuit by a libertine of a virtuous woman under family pressure to accept an obnoxious suitor), Anne Brontë transfers what in Richardson was shown in letters into the private testimony of the diary: things outward andvisible are converted to confessions inward and spiritual. Richardson has his heroine write giddily to her friend:
    And then the secret pleasure intruded itself, to be able to reclaim such a man to the paths of virtue and honour: to be a
secondary
means, if I were to be his, of saving him, and preventing the mischiefs so enterprising a creature might otherwise be guilty of, if he be such a one. (Letter 40, p. 183)
    Anne Brontë’s Helen writes, to herself:
    there is a secret something – an inward instinct that assures me I am right. There is essential goodness in him – and what delight to unfold it! If he has wandered, what bliss to recall him! If he is now exposed to the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions, what glory to deliver him from them! – Oh! if I could but believe that Heaven has designed me for this! (pp. 152–3)
    For Richardson’s rapist, Lovelace, Clarissa is ‘that angel of a woman’ who never falls from grace but, like a greater Eve, endures her 1,500-page trial of virtue (p. 430) transcendently. The male author turns his heroine face-outwards so that we can all enjoy her. The transactions of Helen’s diary are soliloquistic, moving from naïve self-delusion to the recognition that ‘I am no angel’ (p. 267). Though Arthur Huntingdon echoes Lovelace’s assumed name of ‘Hunting-ford’ (
Clarissa
, p. 417) and has some of his qualities of Godforsaken levity, Lovelace’s predatory sexuality is realized in the vulpine Hargrave, a more minor character. For the nineteenth-century woman author, the question of chastity is secondary to problems of integrity, truthfulness, affection, motherhood, livelihood. The framing letters in
Wildfell Hall
communicate outwards to an imagined reader (Halford) and to ourselves as readers how ‘the old Adam’ may be charged and changed by the private words of a compulsive truth-seeker and truth-teller. Helen’s words build on the Word, and the seriousness of her attempt to account for her life stands in contrast to the mindless ‘small talk’ of Markham’s community: ‘“;I was wearied to death with small-talk,”’ she tells him – ‘“nothing wears me out like that I cannot imagine how they
can
go on as they do.”’ Gilbert cannot help ‘smiling at the serious depth of her wonderment’(p. 85). 10 Anne Brontë’s novel is profoundly concerned for the integrity of the word: it examines the abuse of language in the small talk of women, the big talk of men, in prattle, insult, gossip, curses and the bearing of false witness both through lies and self-delusion.
Wildfell Hall
searches toward a communication which will be communion: ‘the unity of accordant thoughts and feelings, and truly loving, sympathizing hearts and souls’ (p. 485).
    The opening section (Chapters 1–15) reveals Gilbert Markham as first cousin to Emily Bronte’s Lockwood – an unreliable narrator, fundamentally a decent man in a novel not rich in human decency especially amongst males, but with a little of the oaf, a little of the cad. Subject to swerves of feeling, he is sometimes silly and imperceptive, often kind, generous, sympathetic, and willing to grow in spirit – that is, if such growth will turn Helen into Helen Markham. Flouncing and exploding, manipulative and irresponsible, he rises to displays of prodigious learning (‘So we talked about painting, poetry, and music, theology, geology, and philosophy…’ (p. 73)), and sinks to peevish sulks or twaddling conferences with his irritating brother Fergus. Markham’s tenderness for animals and children would have spoken eloquently for him in Anne’s book. As he falls in love with Helen,