The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) [NOOK Book]

Born in West Yorkshire in 1820, Anne Brontë was the youngest child in a family whose story became legendary. The young Brontës' childhood was riddled with loss; by the time Anne was five she had witnessed the deaths of her mother and her two eldest sisters. Influenced by the Methodism of her Aunt ElizabethBranwell, who came to live with them just after their mother's death; her father's Evangelicalism; and the gloomy and severe religion of early schoolmasters, Anne struggled throughout her life against the bleak idea that salvation came only to those free from sin. She and her sisters found on the vast moors that surrounded the Haworth Parsonage, where their father was perpetual curate, a sense of wild and sublime freedom that served as a spiritual escape and a door into the boundless world of the imagination. Anne spent her childhood days creating with Emily the imaginary world of Gondal and peopling it with the fantastically passionate and tragic lives of characters such as Lady Geralda, Alexandrina Zenobia, and Olivia Vernon. As a young, middle-class woman living in Victorian England, Anne had few options to help support her siblings and her aging father: she could be a schoolteacher, a governess, or marry. At nineteen, she left to become a governess to the Ingrams at Blake Hall, near Mirfield, and out of this trying experience came her comic and tragic governess novel Agnes Grey, published in 1847. Dismissed from this position for such measures as having tied the two children to a table leg so that she could have the space to write, she became governess at Thorp Green, near York, where she observed examples of an idle and morally lax gentry, an experience that informed her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. After leaving this position in 1845, Anne lived at home for four years, completing and publishing a book of poetry with her sisters and then her two novels. A year after Emily and their brother Branwell died from tuberculosis, exacerbated in Branwell's case by alcoholism and opium addiction, Anne fell ill and died of tuberculosis in 1849, at the age of twenty-nine.

When the Brontës were children, the Romantic Age of literature was coming to a dramatic close, with the later Romantic poets—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—dying tragic, early deaths. Revolutionaries at heart, the Romantics called for a radical rebirth of humanity through the regenerative powers of the individual imagination, egalitarian social reform, and an almost mystical relationship with nature. As imaginative and precocious girls, the three Brontë sisters drank in the high Romanticism of Lord Byron's poetry and his life, full of scandal, rebellion, and exuberance. In his poetry, Byron reimagined the villain from the Gothic novel—nightmarish tales of heroines imprisoned in haunted, storm-shaken castles by enigmatic and fascinatingly evil men. Byron's hero, cursed and tormented by his superior passions, by petty, materialistic society, and by his misanthropic, brooding nature, falls deeply in love with a virtuous and idealized woman who might be his salvation. The Brontës were entranced by the outcast Byron eroticized in his poetry, and in their busy and brilliant early writings they all created their own male and female versions of the dangerous lover. What woman wouldn't want to marry a dashing, reckless, dissolute fellow—self-destructive and careless of others—and reform him through love? In the long history of the reformed rake genre that began with the English novel itself—Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740–41)—and reached its pinnacle with Charlotte's Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall stands as a cautionary tale against just such desires. While a narrative frame complicates the novel's structure—Gilbert Markham, a well-educated and genteel farmer who eventually falls for Helen, tells the entire story in a series of letters to an old friend—the central tale is of Helen's past with her husband Arthur. Helen and Arthur meet in the leisurely, upper-class world of balls and country house parties, and the gorgeous and brilliant Helen is left open to the bold advances of Arthur because of an unusual lack of supervision—her mother is dead and her father has carelessly abandoned her to be raised by her aunt and uncle. A spiritual and morally minded woman yet also a sensuous, private artist, Helen falls in love with Arthur Huntington's "handsome face . . . and all his wit, and mirth, and charm" even though she is warned by her Aunt that he is "banded with a set of loose, profligate, young men . . . whose chief delight is to wallow in vice, and vie with each other who can run fastest and farthest down the headlong road to the place prepared for the devil and his angels. In fact, his dangerousness makes him more erotic, a subtle theme that runs through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformed-rake novels. Sexual desire for the "devil" in the "devil/priest" complex—what Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls the female version of the "Madonna/whore" complex —was often sublimated in a culture that had trouble openly admitting such radical female desire. Thus, as Elizabeth Langland points out, the vehemence with which women would relish the idea of spiritually saving the fallen man had a submerged erotic current, a physical pull masked by a spiritual calling. Helen exclaims, "I shall consider my life well spent in saving him from the consequences of his early errors, and striving to recall him to the paths of virtue. Yet to marry the devil is to descend into hellishly Gothic realms, and Brontë dips from domestic realism into Gothic fantasy in her picture of the impossibility of living with the selfishness of the rampant narcissist, the chronic restlessness of the addict, and the cruelty of the sadist who delights in forcing the lover to witness and participate in his brutality.

What made Wildfell Hall such a daring novel at its time—and even though it sold well, many reviewers were shocked by it, seeing it as brutal and coarse—is Helen's decision to leave her husband and support herself by becoming a professional artist. While her art generally follows Romantic themes—wild seascapes, a woman in love, a melancholy child holding withered flowers—Helen paints in order to sell her work. For most of Brontë's life, a married woman had very few legal rights; she became a "possession" of her husband and all she owned belonged to him upon their marriage. Brontë's radical social critique is seen in the excruciating scenes when Helen's husband, discovering she plans to flee with their son, destroys her painting materials and her art works. Because it was almost impossible for women to obtain a divorce at that time and also very difficult for them to obtain legal custody of their children, Helen must become a fugitive, living under an assumed name in a near-ruined mansion, in order to escape the devil she has wed, since he has a right, by law, to have her brought back to him. That Brontë flouts these laws in her novel and shows the intrinsic justice in their flouting, made this book powerful upon its publication. Still, the truly subversive element in the text lies in its ruling image: the woman who stands utterly alone, turning her back on gossipy convention, sustaining and freeing herself with productive seclusion. We are struck by the modernity of this woman as outsider artist, and this vision is part of the precious legacy of Brontëana. All three of the Brontë sisters desired, ultimately, to subsist by their art, to open up stifling domestic spaces and be dashing, celebrated, rebellious, and self-exiled artists. They thirsted to be like the Romantics they so loved. The Brontës galloped way ahead of their time, though. For Victorian-era daughters of a relatively poor clergyman such sublimity was not a possibility. The three sisters all went out as governesses at various times, generally loathing their work, forced to be meek, submissive schoolmistresses and snatching stolen hours to do their own transcendent and luminous work.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens with Gilbert Markham telling the story of his meeting Helen who has just moved into his neighborhood after leaving her husband. A fugitive from the law, she lives under an assumed name and tries to avoid the society of her immediate neighbors—Markham and his cohorts. Seen through the lens of Gilbert's desire, Helen's character emerges as the archetypal misanthropic stranger, inhabiting a wild and romantic Gothic mansion, her past replete with dark secrets. Brontë has done something astonishingly new: she has created a plausible female Byronic hero, coveted for her very "unfeminine" qualities: inquietude, difficulty, and distance. She is the "mysterious lady" who is so reserved that, "they tried all they could to find out who she was, and where she came from, and all about her, but [no one] . . . could manage to elicit a single satisfactory answer . . . or throw the faintest ray of light upon her history, circumstances, or connexions. Moreover, she was barely civil to them. . . . Anne revises Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights: it is not Rochester who rules this Thornfield Hall nor is it Heathcliff who lurks about Wuthering Heights seeing ghosts. This time, the woman takes the role of the stormy and seductive artist who charms and mesmerizes the man. Wildfell Hall is a dilapidated, storied mansion, like so many other homes of Gothic literature; it is "cold and gloomy . . . with its thick stone mullion and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air holes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation" surrounded by trees "half blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the hall itself" which "harmonized well with the ghostly legend and dark traditions our old nurse had told us respecting the haunted hall and its departed occupants. Helen haunts these bleak rooms, and Gilbert longs to redeem her from her dark past and bring her back into the fold, just as Jane yearns to be Rochester's salvation, his earthly paradise.

Helen has a profound kinship to the demonic misfits of Emily's Wuthering Heights, those cursed men who are ruined by Heathcliff's vengeance. This kinship rings out in their names: Hareton, Hindley, Heathcliff, Helen. Many have written about Brontë's odd framing device—Helen's story told through the words of a man, writing to a friend—and have come up with various reasons why Brontë uses it, including the wholly unsatisfactory one that Brontë just didn't know what she was doing (the tack taken by George Moore and Winifred Gérin). But the frame can be understood as expressive of women's complex erotic desires; with it Brontë recuperates the dark Gothic stranger as female, the erotic artist with an unknown interiority as a woman. By presenting her heroine to the reader through the eyes of desire, as an enigmatic entity to be hungered for, Brontë makes of her a Romantic heroine. Only after Brontë sets up Helen's Byronism does she then tell us her dark history; thus Helen begins the novel as the solitary artist the Brontë girls so admired and wanted themselves to be.

Many readers find Gilbert unsatisfactory as a partner for Helen; he has violent and selfishly sulky tendencies as his brutal beating of Helen's brother and his refusal to apologize prove. It's hard not to see him as a man different from the blackguard Arthur Huntington only in degree. But Gilbert's character begins to make sense if we read it as an element of the intricate play of Helen's erotic longings. The first narrative of desire Brontë writes is that for the masterful and elusive woman—Gilbert's for Helen—a construction that fulfills Helen's (and possibly Brontë's) desire to be wanted in this way. The second depiction of desire is one a woman has for a rakish man. She has both the freedom to desire what she wants and to be desired in the way she wants. Helen continues to be erotically attracted to the type of man Arthur represents, but she realizes she must modify her desires to make them tenable. Gilbert stands for the lover whose Byronism is controllable by Helen's strong hand. This is having one's cake and eating it too; she obtains the erotically dangerous object but she is able to contain and master its dangerousness at the same time. This movement of containment is similar to what Brontë does with the Gothic and the Romantic itself: she appropriates and tames them for her domestic realism. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall thus comments on the previously published Wuthering Heights; Anne takes the excessive passions and the nightmarish, selfish cruelties of Emily's novel and represents how they don't function. She then depicts a tempered and softened version of Emily's hell on earth. Helen thus enters into the community of female characters who struggle with their love of Byronism. Jane Eyre can forge a relationship with Rochester only when he loses his sight and is partially crippled; thus much of his wild temperament is circumscribed and manageable. Lizzie Eustace in Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1873), a clever social climber, wants her own "corsair"—Byron's murderous pirate from his poem of that name—but she wants to tame his dark violence; she wants only to risk enough to obtain that frisson of erotic fear without losing control of her own life and desires.

An integral part of Byronism involves tightening the chains of existence until they bite painfully. To feel the bite is to know vertiginously of one's existence and to long for its larger expression. But without being bound, the worth of the expansive break of the chains cannot be fully appreciated. So many poems in the Brontë oeuvre sing the melancholy, passionate lament of one who is not free, and who grieves more wildly for the other because he cannot be reached. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Brontë tells the story of a woman's troubled relationship to prisons and to freedom; she portrays brilliantly the complicated play of erotic desires an intelligent woman learns to explore and satiate. In fact, it is not too much to state that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall stands as marker, albeit a nuanced one, in the history of feminist writing and Helen as a clear-sighted rebel and forerunner of the modern woman.

Dr. Deborah Lutz teaches Victorian literature and culture at Hunter College in New York City. Her book, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, explores the literary history of the erotic stranger and outcast.