The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) Read Free Page A

he and the community fall out of love with one another. The stranger, with her outlandish values, provokes and threatens parish norms as endorsed by the comic vicar, Reverend Millward, who regards Helen’s attempt to immunize her son against alcohol as ‘“criminal, I should say – criminal!”…“contrary to Scripture and to reason to teach a child to look with contempt and disgust upon the blessings of Providence”’ (pp. 42–3). Markham’s mother amiably but vacuously polices the community’s patriarchal values in the home, where she ensures that her elder son is nicely spoilt, fed, fussed, and endorses the scandalous rumours circulating about the stranger at Wildfell, for ‘“I always thought there was something odd about her. – You see what it is for women to affect to be different from other people”’ (p. 89). Social comedy after the manner of Jane Austen characterizes Markham’s letters but they also incorporate glimpses of another, emotionally and intellectually ampler world, as the text rises in a chapter entitled ‘A Controversy’ to the style of a novel ofideas. In a powerfully argued Miltonic debate about experience, choice and temptation, Helen contests the segregated education of male and female, with its over-protection of girls and over-exposure of boys.
    The intimation of worlds beyond the insular tea-party world of innuendo and rumour recurs in the view of the sea in Chapter 7, ‘The Excursion’, which kindles the haughty and sombre Helen into ‘a smile of exalted, glad intelligence as her eye met mine’ (p. 65). Anne Brontë recaptures the magic of her own sea-visits to Scarborough which would call her back as she was dying: it was her version of the ‘oceanic feeling’ which Emily Brontë associated with the moors. After Anne’s death, Charlotte was to remember her in large vistas: ‘the distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon’. 11 The woman artist at the cliff-edge who ‘plied her solitary task’ recalls Anne Brontë’s pencil-sketch of a young girl looking out to sea in valediction or welcome, towards a sun that is rising or setting. But even here the low style is held, as the callow, magnetized lover–narrator hovers round the artist, aspersing plain women, ‘grumbling’, wheedling, sulking. Later, in a spasm of jealous rage, Markham astoundingly beats her supposed lover, Lawrence, delivering ‘a powerful blow’, for which, even with the advantage of twenty years’ mature consideration, he does not know whether to claim ‘credit’ or ‘blame’. Then he leaves him for dead. Later he uncouthly apologizes. The unstable tone of this episode repelled reviewers, who felt, like E. P. Whipple in the
North American Review
that Markham ‘would serve as the ruffian of any other novelist’ but ‘seems to be a favourite with the author’. 12 It was generally assumed that Acton and Ellis Bell were one person, ‘violent’, ‘coarse’ and ‘brutal’.
Wildfell Hall
fails to comprehend its twin narrators as does
Wuthering Heights
in its system of ‘Chinese box’ encapsulations. 13 Markham’s character constantly flies asunder, and whether the author or the character cannot hold him together is at times unclear. Maybe Anne felt men did not really make sense, a suspicion that has occurred to women before and since. As Charlotte Brontë wrote to Miss Wooler, ‘You ask me if I do not think men are strange beings. Ido indeed – and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange.’ 14
    Any flaw in design is not fatal. In some respects the instability vitalizes the link between the inner and major plot told by Helen’s diary and the outer domesticated realism: for the males of
Wildfell Hall are
unstable. Ironically, they are what men have conventionally called women:
varium et mutabile semper
. Branwell Brontë, himself driven by violent rages, directionless