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

impulses, hypersensitive outbursts, wrote of his
alter ego
, Charles Wentworth, ‘as to fixed detail of character, he had none’. 15 Markham describes himself indulgently as ‘a little bit spoiled by my mother and sister, and some other ladies of my acquaintance’ (p. 36). ‘Spoiled’ men are the tragic centre of the novel. Huntingdon is so totally spoiled that he can never grow up; Markham emerges from the narcissism that makes his judgements shallow (his preference for the silly and mean Eliza, his dismissiveness of the ‘nonentity’, plain Mary Millward). The infantile basis of the conditioned male psyche is humorously explored in the figure of Huntingdon, jealous of his own baby as a competitor for mother’s attentions (‘“That’s more, in one minute, lavished on that little senseless, thankless oyster, than you have given me these three weeks past’” (p. 242)), for Arthur is also ‘“a little selfish, senseless, sensualist”’, from cradle-days petted and privileged, and the novel asks: what if babies ruled the world?
    It answers: they already do.
    Reviewers, largely themselves male, naturally took exception to this depiction of males as either infantile or depraved.
Sharpe’s London Magazine
was shocked at the portrayal of women as ‘superior in every quality, moral and intellectual, to all the men’, who ‘appear at once coarse, brutal, and contemptibly weak, at once disgusting and ridiculous’. 16 The
Literary World
pointed out that all that was good or attractive about Acton Bell’s male characters ‘is or might be womanish’. 17 The author had searched the males of her acquaintance for signs of a higher nature: she had not found it conspicuous in a range of men from the lovable but unreliable William Weightman, to violently authoritarian men like her employer Joshua Ingham ofBlake Hall, and especially Branwell and his drinking cronies. Indulged as the only boy in a family of six, Branwell was a temperamental being who would ‘drive his first through the panel of a door’ to find relief from his powerful feelings: warm-hearted and void of purpose, he drifted into the arms of the fraternity of debauch. Anne Brontë, herself an educator, analysed the lack of sense and reason amongst males as the consequence of a value-system based on the worship of machismo. ‘“By G—d he drinks like a man”’, was a compliment Lord Byron had proudly reported of himself. 18 To hold your liquor was accounted then as now a sign of virility. Anne Brontë’s analysis, linking the mild case of Markham with the terminal case of Huntingdon, also bonds the debate in the opening section with the demonstration in the diary account, where the men pass round their needful alcohol like a baby’s bottle, stupefying themselves and creating mayhem for the women to clear up. At Linden-Car, the community expresses its view, through derision, that for a woman to guard and guide her son is to turn him into ‘“the veriest milksop that ever was sopped”’, ‘“you’ll spoil his spirit, and make a mere Miss Nancy of him”’ (pp. 31, 33). Helen’s diary, the testimony of experience, ironizes this prejudice, for the fraternity of the bottle is revealed as the real milksops, a gang of soaks who urge one another on to ‘“seize the bottle and suck away’” (p. 193), in a perpetual uproar, like children bereft of supervision. They remain in the equivalent of a ruffianly childhood, running amok, fighting, throwing things, cursing for effect, shamelessly baring their addled brains to public view. Huntingdon is in effect hardly literate: he unlearns the art of letter-writing and fails to compute his finances. Grimsby, who prides himself on his capacity to ‘“take three times as much as they have tonight”’, cannot tell a saucer from a cup for the purposes of pouring cream, and mistakes the sugar-basin for a slop-bowl (p. 275). All are at the stage of resourceless children requiring the stimulation of