“Improbable History of the Mysterious Lady”: Domestication of Gothic in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Section I: The Gothic as Prototype
All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that is proper or becoming for a man. (31)
In this preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte thoroughly explains her purpose and shows boldness in choosing the forbidden topics of profligacy, adultery and sexual disease as the subject of her novel. She is willing to endure disapproval, which shows a strong sense of commitment to her vocation; even if the task is distasteful, she is determined to perform her duty.
In her short life, Anne had been profoundly impressed by the tragic end of her brother, Branwell Bronte, whose alcoholism and illicit passions ruined the Bronte family. It was she who suffered the most because of Branwell’s conduct as a tutor at Thorpe Green, where he had an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the employer’s wife. Anne lost her position of governess at that place because of this scandal. Consequently, when she set out to write the history of Arthur Huntingdon, it was really the story of her brother that she wrote, in order to make her readers swerve from the path of damnation. Her sister Charlotte was convinced that the effort undermined her already failing health and led to her early demise. Winifred Gerin observes, “Charlotte Bronte made no secret of her dislike of Wildfell Hall. Her feeling about it could not be unbiased . . . for to her it evoked too painfully the ruin of a once-admired brother, and its disastrous effects on Anne’s health and spirits. She, rightly ascribed Anne’s subsequent death in great part to the burden it laid on her” (15). Charlotte was distraught because she lost all her siblings within a year, so her comments could not have been unbiased. However, in this story of a rake’s progress, Anne does succeed in showing the ruinous effects of alcoholism and libertinism on a family.
Arthur, the hero of Wildfell Hall is clearly modeled on Branwell Bronte, and throughout the novel we see how he sinks into a pit of dissipation and debauchery and drags his family down with him. Anne states her purpose is to educate her reader and prevent a “rash youth” from following in the footsteps of this “unhappy scapegrace.” Her book, a didactic work, shows a marked resemblance to the socially realistic novel of the eighteenth century. However, she does not choose only that form as a model; she also writes in the vein of Ann Radcliffe, that eminent eighteenth century gothic writer whose works strongly influenced the writings of all the Bronte sisters. Thus Anne’s novel is a most interesting hybrid of two different and even opposing genres like the satirical novel and the gothic. This combination also results in a fragmentary pattern in the novel, a common feature that we find in all the Bronte novels. There is the frame narrative in the form of a letter, and Helen Huntingdon’s diary inscribed in it. These ‘realistic’ forms of writing lend a new perspective to the old and established conventions of Radcliffean Gothic that Anne uses in her novel. In this article, we will see how Anne renovates these conventions, especially the character of the persecuted heroine in Radcliffean Gothic, in order to write about feminist issues of violence against women in Victorian society.
Anne is a feminist in her own right, although many critics have regarded her as a mere appendage of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. The problem is that Anne is compared with her elder sisters to her detriment and critics fail to notice the quality of her prose or her narrative skills. Wildfell Hall certainly establishes her as a feminist writer and it is her wit which sets her apart from her sisters; she alone among the Brontes has a gift of scintillating and incisive irony.
Anne combines irony, raillery and satire with the purpose of writing that kind of feminist novel which attempts to point out the inadequacies of Victorian society. In her novel she depicts an innocent young girl, Helen Huntingdon, trapped in a bitterly unhappy marriage; she manages to escape, by going to a place where nobody knows about her origins. Anne declares that if she has succeeded in preventing “one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain” (29). We wonder why she chooses the difficult and perhaps even unsuitable medium of the gothic for this purpose. Radcliffean Gothic provides excitement by building suspense; it entertains rather than instructs, so it is dismissed as non-serious, sentimental and even “pulp” literature. However, Anne adopts this mode for a serious purpose. She combines the conventions of Radcliffean Gothic with the scheme of the socially realistic novel, and a careful examination of both forms might illustrate how she renovates the gothic.
In the socially realistic novel, certain devices are used to discuss some issues and point out the injustices in a particular society. It is the injustices in Victorian society that are exposed in Anne’s novel, and she criticizes the laws that are inadequate in protecting women from the tyranny of their husbands or other male guardians. Women are unable to obtain divorce, even on very reasonable grounds, and cannot escape from the oppression of unhappy marriages. Their choice is also very limited because their guardians have absolute power over them. As a feminist, Anne is deeply concerned with these issues and in order to discuss them, she either uses some debate that scathingly critiques the position of women in such a repressive society, or the art of understatement and irony. Her satire becomes quite savage when she portrays domestic violence and her bitter laughter casts a gloomy shadow over an apparently comic scene. She emphasizes the need for reforms by exposing the double standard in society that subjects women to a very cloistered existence while allowing men to enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom. The corrupt atmosphere of London especially tends to make men dissipated. Although a Victorian writer, Anne distances the scene by portraying Regency London, that notorious society of rakes and dandies. Perhaps in following the tradition of the eighteenth century novel, she makes her portrayal less intensely personal. Huntingdon’s drunken bouts may have originated from agonizing memories of Branwell’s frenzies and his subsequent decline, but she portrays them with humor. Thus she seems to attain a detachment that is necessary in order to depict calmly and persuasively the disastrous effects of alcoholism on men.
In the eighteenth century satirical novel, things are credible and realistic, rather than fantastic. However, in Anne’s novel, there is a combination of realistic trends and gothic elements that has a remarkable result; the gothic, which contains elements of the supernatural and the horrific becomes credible. In other words, Anne domesticates the gothic, even though her heroine, Helen, often goes through the same adventures and trials as that of a gothic heroine.
In the gothic we find an orphaned girl who goes to a mysterious, dilapidated castle, whose master is a tyrannical patriarch who subjects her to psychological, perhaps even physical torture, in order to exploit or control her. The male antagonist with a shady past may be a wicked uncle or a Bluebeard-like husband, but ultimately, by winning a key to his secret, the heroine outwits him and escapes from his snares. An outstanding example of this kind is Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The heroine of this novel, Emily St. Aubert, is an orphan girl who is entrusted to the care of her widowed aunt. Her aunt marries a sinister-looking Italian, Count Montoni. Emily journeys with her aunt through the gloomy Pyrenees to the haunted, labyrinthine castle of Udolpho, the stronghold of Montoni. Many shady events take place there, and after many calamities she escapes with the help of loyal servants and reunites with Valancourt, her fiancé. Montoni is a condottiere, an Italian mercenary, who meets his just deserts. Emily’s property, which he has usurped, is restored to her and she marries Valancourt.
The patriarch is capable of any kind of outrageous act and the protagonist is entirely chaste and pure. Udolpho can serve as a formula for many gothic novels. The endless procession of martyr like maidens that we meet in these novels makes us wonder if they experience masochistic pleasure in being hurt by brutal men. However, even if these heroines suffer passively until they flee, they have one trait that is not passive; they seek power through knowledge about a patriarch’s hidden past, through observation and voyeurism. Thus the helpless maiden is cast into the role of the detective who must solve the mystery about the villain and thereby restore order. In that process, she also comes to know some facts about her own birth and parentage, and her right to inherit property. In Udolpho these various elements in the heroine’s character are not unified. As Nina da Vinci Nichols observes, Radcliffe “never quite resolves minor contradictions in Emily’s roles as etherealized maiden, as brave young detective, and as symbolic quester for identity” (192). Nevertheless, the powerless heroine, through her quest for identity, especially through her desire to solve a mystery at the core of the plot, arrives from a position of helplessness to a secure position, especially when her right to inherit property is established. She becomes an heiress instead of a penniless fugitive. Thus the conflict is resolved at the end.
Radcliffean Gothic has distinctive features besides the villain and the innocent heroine. Elizabeth Napier in The Failure of Gothic, sums them up with marvelous accuracy:
Take an old castle . . . and provide the owls and bats with uninterrupted habitations among the ruins. . . . Next take an old man and woman, and employ them to sleep in a part of this castle, and provide them with frightful stories of lights that appear in the western or eastern tower every night, and of music heard in the neighboring woods, and ghosts dressed in white who perambulate the place.
Convey to the this castle a young lady: consign her to the care of the old man and woman, who must relate to her all they know, that is all they do not know, but only suspect. Make her dreadfully terrified at the revelation, but dreadfully impatient to behold the reality. Convey her, perhaps on the second night of her arrival, through a trap-door, and from the trap-door to a flight of steps downwards . . . to a subterraneous passage . . . here present either a skeleton with a live face . . . or a suit of armor moving—fierce ‘put out the light, and then’—
Let this be repeated for some nights in succession, and after the lady has been dissolved to a jelly with her fears, let her be delivered by the man of her heart, and married. (30)
This description lists all the important elements of Radcliffe’s novels. It raises questions about the significance of the setting and why the heroines are intrigued by dilapidated ruins. As Juliann Fleenor, the editor of The Female Gothic explains:
The image of interior space, with its prisonlike atmosphere is used to indicate the disorder of the world for its female inhabitants. Such disorder could be the treatment women received at the hands of male physicians. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was intended, she claimed, to protest against her medical treatment after her mental breakdown. Regardless of the problem of authorial intent, it is clear that when Gilman wished to write a story of protest, she chose the Gothic as a vehicle with which to express it. (13)
Like Gilman who uses gothic to expose nineteenth century medical malpractices, Anne critiques the position of women in her society through gothic. She portrays the lot of women tormented by husbands, so the gothic becomes useful to her, since it often portrays persecuted maidens trapped in the fictional space of the ruined castle. Fleenor explains, “the ruin becomes doubly an expression of rebellion when it symbolizes both chaos and disorder, and the female herself” (13). The heroine’s disordered mental state is often reflected in the design of the plot itself.
Udolpho is filled with horrifying mysteries that are gradually uncovered. Its plot is episodic because the characters experience new adventures traveling from a castle to a monastery or seaside. There is a central mystery, the disappearance of Signora Laurentini and subsequent hauntings. Emily uncovers this mystery so the novel is rounded off with a happy ending. The plot’s aim is to preserve the reader’s interest; it sometimes leads us to the mystery, then veers away from it. The new light thrown on the mystery links the events.
Another element of Radcliffean Gothic like portraits and tokens serve as links in the narrative. They lend clues to the mystery and raise questions about the heroine’s identity. Emily observes her father weeping over a woman’s portrait and wonders if this woman is her father’s mistress. Later she finds it is the portrait of her paternal aunt. Likewise, in Radcliffe’s The Italian, the discovery of a locket worn by Ellena Rosalba stays Schedoni’s hand from murdering her. These miniatures are false clues that intrigue us, but after a while they are cleared up. Sometimes these discoveries are anticlimactic, like the hidden corpse of Laurentini that turns out to be a waxen image.
By adopting the Radcliffean Gothic mode, Anne demonstrates the pitiable plights of women in a male-dominated society. She proves how widespread are the problems of domestic violence in such a society. According to Gerin, Anne, like her heroine, was a “resolute-minded and courageous young woman,” but George Smith, Charlotte Bronte’s publisher, described her as a “gentle, quiet, rather subdued person . . . Her manner was curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal, which invited sympathy” (8). As her fiction suggests, an angry young woman lurked beneath that shy, fragile exterior, and she, like her sisters, felt at war with her lot. She was determined to put her “humble talents” to use to improve this lot.
We shall examine how the sensational plot of Radcliffean Gothic goes through a transformation and the devices that Anne uses: a narrative frame made out of village gossips that lends a touch of reality to the mystery, the break introduced by Helen’s diary in the narrative, and the underlying pattern of repetition in the frame and the diary that manages to link the truncated plot. We will see how domestic forms of writing like letters and diary renovate the outstanding motifs of gothic like imprisoned maiden, tyrannical patriarch and tokens that serve as links in a disjointed tale.
Section II: The Domestication of Gothic
Wildfell Hall consists of unequal pieces pasted together: gossip, diary and letters; these domestic “feminine” forms are fragmentary. According to Wendy Craik, “there is no plot, only a graded series of events” (232). Helen, the central character in the two narratives, is both the persecuted heroine fleeing from her husband, and the mystery. Until Helen reveals her past, there are only false conjectures about this widow. When she gives a diary to Markham, she tears off the last pages, so Gilbert does not know her attitude to him. These pages are never recovered, so Helen’s history remains a fragment to which Helen decides to put her end. It is Gilbert who has to be wooed back by Helen.
At first, Helen is the mystery instead of the detective and later her husband is the mystery, whose character she begins to understand as she discovers that he is no angel. Huntingdon’s long career of debauchery has no aura of the Byronic hero; it is the sordid tale of a character bent on self-destruction. Helen marries Huntingdon because of sudden infatuation and a strong sexual attraction. In endowing her heroine with a healthy sexual appetite, Anne certainly differs from the early gothic writers whose heroines are lily-white and pure maidens. Their passivity and endurance make them almost saint-like. The greatest of Anne’s achievement is to create a heroine who is not only strong-willed and courageous, but capable in the face of adversity, of taking momentous decisions that change her life.
The diary reveals how Helen undergoes a slow process of transformation from a naïve girl, full of high spirits, to a courageous woman whose nature becomes tempered with steel. As Gerin observes about Helen: “It is her growing awareness of the harm her husband is doing her, the hatred and anger that is eating into the natural charity of her disposition, that decides her to leave him. She is no patient Griselda but a strong-minded young woman” (15). She is a far more fully drawn character than the impeccably virtuous heroines of Radcliffean Gothic. She changes from a wayward girl to a disillusioned wife, and then to a totally independent, unconventional artist who lives the life of an outcast; but through all the vicissitudes of her experience, she never fails in her stoicism.
Helen’s bitter experiences have a positive purpose because she becomes a mentor to her friends. She marries Arthur thinking that she is capable of reforming a rake. When she realizes that he is beyond reclamation, she remains a wife only in name; but whatever painful experiences she has, she shares with others. Her advice to Esther Hargrave, Lord Lowborough and Milicent Hattersley saves them from an unhappy marriage, a suicide attempt and domestic violence, respectively. She manages not only to salvage some fragments from her ruined life, but also helps others to cope.
Helen’s advice to Esther becomes very crucial. She herself marries out of youthful fancy a man who is unworthy of her. Her aunt warns her that Arthur will not be a good husband, and she should accept instead the pompous, middle-aged and sober Mr. Boarham. Helen’s attraction to dashing young Arthur is as understandable as her repulsion from her middle-aged suitors, the appropriately named Boarham or Grimsby. Her unfortunate choice shows how limited a woman’s choices could be in such a constrictive society. The corrupt atmosphere of London tends to make men dissipated through wild bouts of gambling and drinking, and limits these choices further. Anne critiques the practices of her society by showing how Helen’s disastrous choice has far-reaching consequences for herself and her family.
Accordingly, Helen advises Esther as a woman made sadder but wiser through experience; she warns a girl who is a reincarnation of her own youth against the folly of choosing an unsuitable husband:
“Well Esther, I pity you, but still I repeat, stand firm. You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as marry a man you dislike. . . .
“I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure is not the enjoyment of my company—it will be worse for him—that’s all.”
“If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must indeed be careful whom you marry—or rather, you must avoid it altogether.” (380-1)
In advising Esther against an undesirable match, and finally arranging a good one for her with her brother Frederick, Helen seems to fulfill a mission. Her attempt to bring Frederick and Esther together succeeds because they are well-matched. The significant gesture with which Frederick helps his bride into the carriage proves that he is going to be a good husband, the very antithesis of Hattersley who mercilessly twists the locks of his wife: “‘And so cold it is too!’ said he gazing with dismay at her slight drapery, and immediately handing her into the carriage” (469). Thus the novel draws toward a happy ending, signifying hope that Esther will not suffer like Helen and Milicent. Anne’s goal in writing the novel, to improve the lot of Victorian women, seems to be realized. There is a solution, after all the suffering the women endure. The women become victims of their husbands, but Anne shows they can take resolute steps to end this suffering, if they are aware of the violation of their rights.
Besides Esther, Helen proves to be a kindly mentor to Lowborough as well. After discovering his wife’s affair with Arthur, he contemplates suicide, but Helen convinces him that this burden can be borne with dignity. When she realizes that her friend Milicent suffers from her husband’s ill-treatment, she tells him about it; Hattersley succeeds in mending his ways. Helen’s greatest decision is made when she flees her broken home and saves her son from a disastrous end. This attempt sets her life in another direction; by helping others, she unlocks herself from a prison of despondency to begin a new life for herself.
Helen goes through a crucial learning experience. The more she learns about her profligate husband, the stronger she becomes. In the old gothic the heroine uncovers a crime to satisfy her curiosity; the ghosts assist her in the unearthing of the mystery and give the reader “a fine fright.” In Anne’s didactic work, the knowledge Helen gains through sorrow becomes vital in turning lives around and serves the purpose of educating the reader. The trapped maiden in a gothic castle becomes a reformer who influences other people’s lives and in that process, changes her own.
In this novel, Helen discovers her husband’s past almost imperceptibly; no eerie sights or apparitions assist in these revelations. Her diary serves a specific purpose because of its day to day entries that throw light on Arthur’s character. He may appeal to Helen to reform him, but he is too weak to submit to any kind of discipline. The earliest entries in the journal predict this outcome of Arthur’s career. Although Helen is charmed by him, she gets a hint that Arthur is bent on self-destruction as well as that of his cronies. His account of Lowborough’s gambling presents him in an unflattering light, but Helen ignores this warning.
The diary, as well as reports by Arthur’s so-called friends like Hargrave, expose his licentious nature. Other unobtrusive methods employed by the writer, like the cruel treatment of his dog, show Arthur can be very unpleasant in a bad mood; Helen sees this in the early days of her marriage. Later, a most devastating revelation comes to her in the shrubbery where, mistaking her for Annabella, her husband passionately embraces her, giving her a false hope that he is mending his ways. When she sees Annabella at the shrubbery, this damning evidence of his villainy destroys all her expectations of happiness.
The failure of the marriage is brought out most powerfully in that scene of drunkenness when Hattersley, Huntingdon and Grimsby burst in on the ladies. Anne’s narrative about dissipation reaches a climax when the libertines start cursing and swearing. Human nature is portrayed at its worst in this scene, which could have turned out to be melodramatic in the hands of any gothic writer. There is nothing heroic about this group of sadistic, savage and maniacal drunkards. Anne portrays violence here with grim realism:
“Now Milicent, tell me what you were crying for.”
“I’ll tell you some other time,” murmured she, “when we are alone.”
“Tell me now!” said he, with another shake and a squeeze that made her draw in her breath and bite her lip to suppress a cry of pain.
“I’ll tell you Mr. Hattersley,” said I. “She was crying from pure shame and humiliation for you; because she could not bear to see you conduct yourself so disgracefully.” . . .
“Curse you for an impertinent hussy then!” cried he, throwing her from him with such violence that she fell on her side; but she was up again before either I or her brother could come to her assistance, and made the best of her way out of the room, and, I suppose, upstairs, without loss of time. (289-90)
Anne uses understatement and irony in her portrayal of drunkenness to condemn domestic violence. She shows how widespread are the problems of wife-abuse in a society that gives power to men over women and how inadequate are the laws to protect wives. Helen’s trials are subtle and complex, in keeping with a realistic novel. Arthur does not abuse Helen physically, but the mental pain he inflicts on her in his drunken bouts is worse. Helen, unlike Milicent, stands up for herself and thus gains stature as a feminist heroine; her growth is a pathfinder for Victorian women readers, after an endless procession of meek and passive heroines.
The novel’s settings, Grassdale which imprisons Helen and Wildfell that serves as a sanctuary, are not gothic. Grassdale reveals to Helen all her husband’s dark secrets, but it is not haunted; it is a squire’s country-seat with sitting rooms, shrubbery and hunting grounds. Wildfell is no Udolpho with secret passageways and hidden recesses, but an old building ruined by disuse. It is the one refuge where Helen can live an independent existence, hiding away from the prying of her neighbors and emerge victorious at last, after healing her wounds in a haven of seclusion. Thus Anne takes her heroine further from the Radcliffean heroine, for whom the interior space is an ominous setting. Wildfell has a reparative effect and helps Helen to earn a living by sketching the artistic-looking ruins. However, the dilapidated house’s description portrays a dismal scene:
“It amazes me, Mrs. Graham, how you could choose such a dilapidated, rickety old place as this to live in. If you couldn’t afford to occupy the whole house and have it mended up, why couldn’t you afford to take a neat little cottage?”
“Perhaps I was too proud, Mr. Fergus,” replied she, smiling; “perhaps I took a particular fancy for this romantic, old-fashioned place—but indeed it has many advantages over a cottage.” (82)
The greatest advantage it has is of being able to conceal Helen’s whereabouts from her husband. Helen’s casual manner in referring to the remoteness of the place succeeds in concealing the mystery from her neighbors. The realistic portrayal of Helen’s discomforts cloaks the mystery of her past. Unlike Emily, who is merely the detective in Udolpho, Helen assumes dual roles, as a mysterious figure and as a detective who tells the story of her dissipated husband. Both narratives, constructed by fragmentary forms like gossip and reports may seem disjointed, but they show unique methods of storytelling. It is these domestic forms like gossip and journal that makes a dramatic and even exaggerated tale of dissipation more credible.
The writer’s greatest achievement lies in weaving a story out of various strands, thus making the gothic appear credible. It is a task that is almost paradoxical because gothic often takes shape from the fantastic, the uncanny and the irrational. Her art is subtle in building up the “improbable history” of a mysterious lady. The device Anne uses, gossip, serves her another purpose in debunking the ways of society that are contemptible. She critiques her own sex scathingly through the comments of Gilbert’s brother Fergus: “And pray be quick about it; and mind you bring me word how much sugar she puts in her tea, and what sort of caps and aprons she wears and all about it; for I don’t know how I can live till I know” (38). It reveals the idle, useless lives the village women live, devoid of all entertainment except satisfaction of curiosity. Anne emphasizes the need for women to have some fulfilling work of their own instead of character-assassination, while using gossip to build a very realistic picture of Helen’s reclusive existence. All tongues in the village are astir with rumors about her liaison with Lawrence and the possibility of little Arthur’s illegitimacy and her widowhood being a deliberate hoax. It rouses Gilbert’s curiosity about Helen, this romantic young widow. His combat with Lawrence leads to the uncovering of the mystery in the second section, describing Helen’s life before she arrives at Wildfell Hall. Gossip makes the plot fluctuate in places, but it serves to bring Gilbert and Helen together. It is rumor about Helen’s wedding that makes Gilbert bestir himself to go to Staningley and also disheartens him from proposing, when he hears she is an heiress. It is finally Helen who offers herself to him when the picture is completely reversed.
Many false rumors spread by villagers like the slander about Helen’s lover are followed by anticlimaxes, very much in Radcliffean mode. Lawrence turns out to be a brother instead of a lover, just like Emily discovers that the dead woman is her aunt instead of her mother. The supposed corpse of Laurentini is a hoax, but it serves as a red herring throughout Udolpho. These tricks are necessary to preserve the suspense, but Anne’s craftsmanship really transforms the Radcliffean Gothic into a novel with a deeper psychological reality. It is as if she adopts the same material, same fabric and weaves a different story altogether, by clothing the language of gothic with an atmosphere of social reality, in a way an extraordinary task.
Like rumors, portraits and likenesses lend clues to the mystery, albeit false ones. In Radcliffean Gothic they serve as links in the plot but in Wildfell Hall they define Helen’s role as an artist, as an independent woman. Helen has a sense of growth when she uses her creative gifts to earn her living; it is her seaside trip for finding new subjects that first draws her to Gilbert. Thus we see that the paintings serve the dual purpose of providing clues as well as causing reversals in situations; for instance, the very sketches that lead to Helen’s undoing, later prove to be her means of survival in Wildfell Hall. The incident about Arthur’s portrait shows that Helen has a mind of her own, even though she vacillates in her attitude. Although she refuses to submit to Arthur’s teasing, she cannot persevere in her stance because as a Victorian woman she cannot assert herself effectively. The spirited dismissal of this dandy falls flat, and she shows a lack of judgement. Nicole Diederich notes: “Both Helen’s early portraits of Arthur and her nature scenes reveal her private and true feelings for him, feelings that will lead her to overlook his true character and lose herself to marriage” (26).
These fluctuations in the plot remind us of the tokens that lend clues to the mystery in Radcliffean Gothic, without completely unraveling it, and these clues are closely linked to the heroine’s quest for identity. Emily’s discovery of her aunt’s portrait makes her wonder if her father is really a virtuous man and if she is illegitimate. Similarly, when Helen defines herself as an artist and earns her living independently, or even boldly defies Arthur by tearing up his portrait, she progresses in a new path toward growth and independence; but she has a long way to go. Her sketching of Arthur’s portrait leads to her fatal decision to marry him, but later her sketches have far more positive consequences. Her paintings not only enable her to earn a living but also pave the way to a second, happier marriage with Gilbert Markham.
When the gothic heroine falls into danger, a reversal in situation occurs with her miraculous rescue by the hero, quite different from the reversals in Wildfell Hall, where the action is influenced by decisions made by the characters, instead of accidents. Helen vacillates, first dismissing Arthur as a suitor, then deciding to marry him. She stays with him until he starts corrupting her son; then she saves her boy by leaving the man who has ruined her life. Her flight from her husband is in gothic style, for with the help of her servants she arrives at a remote place where she can be safe, but she is no frightened Emily St. Aubert or Ellena Rosalba fleeing from the villainous Montoni or Schedoni. She is a strong-minded, angry young woman who faces adversity with courage and fortitude. Rachel Carnell describes her as “a woman who, within the confines of her inner narrative, refuses the gender role dictated to her by her culture, insists on her status as a professional painter, pursues an affective and humanistic bond between herself and her loyal servant Rachel, and challenges the economic subordination of wives” (23).
Helen’s fate shows how limited are a woman’s choices. Anne shows that it is not only the person but also society which corrupts youth that is to blame. Others besides Huntingdon, like Hattersley, Hargrave and Grimsby are not free of the taint; they escape without much damage, but the miserable end of Huntingdon reminds us of Branwell, who drained his family’s slender resources and finally died an alcoholic.
Arthur’s death is one of the many reversals in the novel and it sets Helen free to marry Gilbert. These reversals, as well as some false conjectures lead us further on to the mystery; Gilbert, suspecting Frederick of being Helen’s lover, attacks him and stumbles on to the truth. Helen’s discovery of Arthur’s tryst with Annabella deals a death-blow to her shaky marriage. These revelations in the novel’s two sections form a repetitive pattern. Other red herrings, like Gilbert’s brief courtship of Eliza Millward and Jane Wilson’s wooing of Lawrence, show the influence of Radcliffe; but it is also peculiarly the method of Anne Bronte. She adheres closely to the language of everyday use, the humdrum, to describe extraordinary events. The red herrings conceal the mystery until we reach the middle section which deals with Arthur’s downfall. These situational red herrings, while causing fluctuations in the plot, paradoxically hold it together.
Helen’s journal deals with a different set of characters and introduces a very sharp break in the narrative. This break was regarded as a serious defect by George Moore, an early critic of Anne Bronte. He thought that a recounting of the events in the journal by Helen to Markham would have been more dramatic. Although the plot of the novel becomes increasingly diffuse after Arthur’s death, reported by Helen to Frederick through letters, it is not a defect. We need to examine the author’s method for constructing the story in such a way, in order to see that therein lies her strength rather than weakness.
The gothic has a pattern of nightmarish horror, so its plot is loose, but Anne does not write a fragmentary novel merely because it is based on gothic patterns; her writing recalls the style of the Bronte sisters, who all use fragmentary forms in their novels. Although Anne’s method varies from that of her sisters, especially in her use of satire, she does not differ from them entirely. Her novel shows a marked similarity to Emily’s Wuthering Heights, because both have twin tales welded together. N. M. Jacobs says that the two sisters handle the censored topic of domestic violence in their works: “The narrative structure of both of these novels represents an authorial strategy for dealing with the unacceptability of the subject matter, a strategy drawn but significantly modified from the familiar framing narrator of the gothic tales” (206). Anne is in many respects a deviant yet an imitator of her sisters’ novels. In all the intertextualities of their novels, we discover that the sisters were seemingly devising works that belong to a cycle like the Gondal sagas where they constantly collaborated, edited and critiqued each other’s works. Anne was an inheritor of her elder sisters even though she had the boldness to differ from them. George Moore observes about Wildfell Hall:
The author broke down in the middle of her story, but her breakdown was not for lack of genius but experience. An accident could have saved her; almost any man of letters would have laid his hand upon her arm and said: “You must not let your heroine give her diary to the young farmer saying, ‘Here is my story, go home and read it.’ Your heroine must tell the young farmer her story” . . . the diary broke the story in halves. (216)
What someone did not tell George Moore is that this is perhaps exactly Anne’s purpose, relating the story in a fragmentary way, an outstanding characteristic of the Brontes.
Works Cited
Bronte, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ed. G. D. Hargreaves. London: Penguin, 1979.
Carnell, Rachel K. “Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, no.1, 1998, 1-24.
Craik, Wendy A. The Bronte Novels. London: Methuen, 1968.
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