Expressions // ‘An Unpalatable Truth’: Moral Nurture and Individual Responsibility in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The eponymous tenant of Anne Brontë’s second and final novel is the mysterious widow Helen Graham. She arrives at the hitherto uninhabited Wildfell Hall with just her young son, a servant and a view to earning a living through her art. Naturally reticent and wary of forming any real attachments to the inhabitants of the neighbouring village of Linden-Car, the mysterious Helen soon becomes the subject of unfavourable local gossip. Gilbert Markham, who lives in the village with his mother and siblings, is initially rather taken with her, but in the face of village speculation and Helen’s own evasiveness, grows increasingly suspicious of her personal history. Only when narrative control is handed over to Helen in the form of her diary entries does Gilbert (and by extension, the reader) learn that she is not a widow at all; she has run away from her abusive husband, Arthur Huntingdon.
Critics have long pointed out the parallels between Huntingdon and the Brontës’ ill-fated brother Branwell. While he very probably served as inspiration, it’s been suggested more recently that Anne’s novel was born out of disapproval of her sister’s work, rather than (or at least, in addition to) the spectacle of her brother’s rapid decline. Smith, for example, describes Tenant as ‘a sharp commentary… on Wuthering Heights’,[1] and Liddell agrees: the novel, ‘in which conscience triumphs, is in some sort an answer to the triumph of passion in Wuthering Heights.’[2] Nevertheless, Anne’s novel was poorly received by contemporary critics. Among those critics was her sister, Charlotte, who wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams that ‘it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve.’[3] Although the book’s instructive emphasis is certainly evident to the modern reader, the moral of Anne’s story was apparently lost on many 19th century reviewers who wrote primarily of the book’s ‘revolting scenes’ and took issue with its ‘inconceivably coarse language.’[4] Otherwise, that moral was counteracted altogether by the author’s ‘morbid love of the coarse’.[5] Consequently, Anne’s novel was considered highly unsuitable for its intended demographic of young women.
It is perhaps understandable, then, that Anne felt compelled to respond to her critics’ accusations of coarseness and brutality. She does so in the preface to the second edition of Tenant in which she outlines her initial motive for the novel and makes clear both its didactic origins and the realism that such a message demands. She explains: ‘my object in writing the following pages, was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste’.[6] Rather, the composition of Anne’s novel was a laborious task; one, she states, which proved ‘painful’, and as ‘detrimental’ to her ‘immediate pleasure’ as that of her readers (TWH, p.4), and one driven by a profound sense of duty to protect and instruct those readers. Though initially reluctant to accept the task of ‘vindicat[ing] [her] own productions’, Anne justifies her depiction of the violence and depravity of Huntingdon and his companions on the basis of her own commitment to the truth, however unpleasant that truth may be: ‘I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth,’ and ‘if I have warned one rash youth from following in [the characters’] steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain’ (TWH, p.4). It seems, therefore, that Anne’s particularly maternal impulse to protect the ‘rash youth’ and the ‘thoughtless girl’, and to prevent them from making the same mistakes as her characters is analogous to the desperation of the virtuous Helen Huntingdon in her attempts to shield her son from the corruption of adult vice, and to deliver him from the contaminating influences of his profligate father. In this context, Helen becomes the mouthpiece for the novelist’s indictment of her own society.
It seems almost obvious to draw comparisons between Helen Huntingdon and Jane Eyre, what with their similar sense of personal integrity, of endurance and moral resolution, and their efforts to remain on the path to virtue, most notably in their refusal to accept the offer of becoming the mistress of a married man.[7] Yet it is perhaps Helen Burns, who dies in childhood, to whom Anne’s heroine initially bears the most resemblance in her particular religious ideology. Looking upon her young son, Helen remarks that he is ‘the tiny epitome of [his] father, but stainless yet as that pure snow, new fallen from Heaven’ (TWH, p.229). Physically, little Arthur is the likeness, and the flesh of his father, but unlike Huntingdon, his spirit is ‘stainless’ in its innocence, as he has not yet been exposed to the ‘germs of folly and vice’ (TWH, p.166). The simile of ‘pure snow, new fallen from heaven’ recalls the ‘spark of spirit, pure as when it left the Creator’,[8] of which Helen Burns assures the young Jane Eyre in Charlotte’s novel, and, again, is demonstrative of the increasingly popular belief in the sanctity of childhood as a ‘prelapsarian phase of life’.[9] The conjunction ‘but’, in Helen Huntingdon’s observation therefore establishes the contrast between the ‘corruptible body’, and the more abstract purity and virtue with which every child is born (JE, p.61).
Helen’s diary entries also emphasise the malleability of human inclinations and behaviour during the phase of childhood, using a series of natural metaphors to articulate her feelings about her son, and about the significance of her role in his upbringing. Her fears that Arthur might die are assuaged in some measure by the fact that ‘the bud, though plucked, would not be withered’ (TWH, p.228). The comforting assurance that, should the unthinkable happen, her son would be transplantedto the ‘fitter soil’ and ‘brighter sun’ of Heaven has its foundations in Helen’s firmly held conviction of the child’s innate innocence. Unlike his selfish, drunken father, little Arthur has not yet been corrupted, and it is the responsibility of his mother to keep him ‘unsullied from the world’ as long as she possibly can, a task made more difficult by Huntingdon’s attempts to ‘[rob] me of his very love’ (TWH, p.228, p.312).
Following her husband’s departure for another season, Helen emerges from her state of apathy and despondency over her son’s learned behaviour in order to ‘exert all [her] powers to eradicate the weeds that had been fostered in his infant mind’ (TWH, p.354). Again, Arthur is described in terms of the natural world to emphasise his original state, and the ‘weeds’ to which Helen refers are the behaviours he observes in his father which he has learned to imitate. It is not simply that Huntingdon teaches his son this behaviour in conjunction with Helen’s careful instruction which so upsets her, but rather that he outright ‘destroys my influence on his tender mind’ (TWH, p.312). Fortunately for Helen, it is precisely the ‘tenderness’ of Arthur’s young mind which renders the task of ‘eradicating the weeds’ of his father’s negative influences somewhat less complicated. ‘Thank Heaven,’ she exclaims, ‘it is not a barren or stony soil; if weeds spring fast there so do better plants’ (TWH, p.354). She hopes, therefore, to supplant these weeds with the ‘better plants’ of virtue, still confident in her son’s impressionability at this stage. The metaphor of ‘weeds’ to describe the unwanted habits Huntingdon and his friends have deliberately cultivated in Arthur is especially astute since it not only connotes the undesirability of their presence, but also their capacity to multiply at an alarmingly aggressive rate, and even to inflict long term damage when left unchecked. The use of these metaphors in Tenant is also striking in its resemblance to an analogy made several decades earlier by Rousseau; that just as plants are ‘fashioned by cultivation’ so man is fashioned by education.[10] In employing this metaphor, Helen also obliquely suggests that, due to his age, Huntingdon is now beyond this kind of moral guidance, and his mind can no longer be considered the fertile soil from which bad habits can be extracted and ‘better plants’ established in their stead.
Gilbert also draws upon natural imagery to articulate his own philosophy of child-rearing and education, though his solution is markedly different from Helens. He tells Helen:
…if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hothouse, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered from the shock of the tempest. (TWH, p. 30)
‘In this account’, states Cocks, ‘all threat is to be understood as elemental and natural’; it is as ‘unavoidable as bad weather’, and the oak sapling ‘grown up on the mountain-side’ is wholly ‘unsupported in its exposure to such elements.’[11] Thus, the kind of education offered by Helen is, according to the Markhams, at least ineffectual if not totally counterproductive. The irony is, of course, that it is Helen who speaks with the authority of experience – of exposure to ‘the tempest’ – and not Gilbert.
Helen’s own ‘natural error’, is in initially believing that she can reverse her husband’s process of moral decay. Before her marriage to Huntingdon, Helen is convinced that she alone might save him from himself; that she might, that is,‘recall him to the path of moral virtue’ and ‘make him what he would have been’ had he not been misguided in his youth (TWH,p.4, p.165). [12] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tenor of the whole novel, Huntingdon’s moral failures are attributed to his own upbringing, traced back to a discordant household governed by a ‘bad, selfish, miserly father who […] restricted him in the most innocent enjoyments of childhood’ and managed by a ‘foolish mother who indulged him to the top of his bent’ (TWH, p.165-166). This insight into Arthur’s childhood presents a damaging dichotomy which, in their turn, Helen and Huntingdon are at risk of replicating themselves: ‘if I attempt to curb his will […] he knows his other parent will smile and take his part against me’ (TWH, p.312). In a somewhat heated conversation with her aunt following Huntingdon’s proposal, Helen contends that his behaviour originated in childhood due to his parents’ neglected sense of duty, and, still sure of the ‘better self’ and ‘genuine goodness’ in him, promises that as his wife, she will ‘undo what his mother did’ (TWH, p.165, p.166).
This certainly does not render Huntingdon blameless for his misconduct and his inability to resist temptation, however. Helen’s aunt openly scoffs at her arguments, pointing out that, as an adult, he alone is in control of his own destiny: ‘he is not so light-headed as to be irresponsible: his Maker has endowed him with reason and conscience as well as the rest of us; the scriptures are open to him as well as to others’ (TWH, p.166). Sure enough, after several years spent enduring her husband’s selfishness and ‘hopeless depravity’, Helen’s gradual disillusionment with her marriage is finally consolidated by her discovery of her husband’s adultery, and she reaches the long-awaited epiphany that without his co-operation, she cannot save her husband from his own vices. Whilst Helen had previously insisted upon the existence of some ‘genuine goodness’ in him that had simply been ‘clouded’ over, she begins to question whether it was ever there at all: ‘I have struggled hard to hide your vices and invest you with virtues you never possessed’ (TWH, p.165, p.295). Most distressingly, Helen realises her mistake in scorning her aunt’s advice despite her careful guidance and instruction, and in a confrontation with Huntingdon she echoes the sentiments she had previously self-assuredly ignored, stressing the role of individual responsibility, and instructing him thus: ‘now you must look to yourself’ (TWH, p.253, p.295). In other words, Helen cannot seek repentance on his behalf; she ‘cannot act for him’ (TWH, p.150). As Summers states, ‘Anne is not simply saying that a Christian upbringing is sufficient in itself, but rather that it is also the individual’s qualities of mind and spirit’ which determine that person’s moral character and success in life.[13] Since Huntingdon is, as Helen readily admits, a man ‘without self-restraint’, the process of his degeneration and his eventual death are neither particularly surprising occurrences inthe plot, and, as Smith observes, are both‘deliberately divested of any tragic grandeur.’[14]
Summers’s claim that a careful balance between effective parenting and individual self-restraint is essential to a happy and virtuous life is certainly borne out in the text, but her argument begins to lose ground when she cites Mrs Markham’s relationship with her children as one of the few examples of ‘good parenting’ in the novel.[15] It is clear from the outset that, like many mothers of her day and like Mrs Reed of Gateshead Hall, she heavily favours her eldest son, much to the resentment of her daughter Rose, who angrily exclaims that in the Markham household, ‘I’m nothing at all’. She points out her mother’s double standards after Gilbert returns home late for tea and she is expected to re-boil the kettle for him: ‘Well! – if it had been me now, I should have had no tea at all – ’ (TWH, p.53). Given the intensity of Rose’s rant and the numerous examples she is able to cite, there is no reason to suggest that this is in any way a deviation from her whole upbringing. Mrs Markham proudly agrees: ‘And very good doctrine too’, and even Gilbert himself suggests that ‘perhaps […] I was a little bit spoiled by my mother’ (TWH, p.32).
Mrs. Markham’s response to Reverend Millward’s complaint that she indulges her sons too often is merely to point out that he has no sons of his own and therefore cannot understand her situation. Through her double standards, Mrs. Markham and other mothers like her excuse and enable the expectation of pre-eminence demanded by the majority of men in the novel. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that a similar indulgence of the son at the expense of his female siblings can also probably account for Hargrave’s persistence, and sense of entitlement as he tries to tempt Helen into an extramarital affair. After reading Helen’s diary entries Gilbert readily admits that ‘the former half of the narrative was, to me, more painful than the latter’, and though his honesty may be laudable, it nonetheless betrays a profound sense of selfishness at the root of his affection for Helen (TWH, p.381). Indeed, the question may well be asked as to whether Helen will truly be happy in her marriage to Gilbert. Gordon suggests that Markham’s occupation and his ‘greater sobriety’ make of him a marginally better match for Helen than Huntingdon, but taking into account his selfishness, jealousy, and even his propensity to violence, ‘it is difficult to see Markham’s superiority’.[16] Unfortunately, though, this is where the story ends. We can never know how Helen would have fared in her marriage to Markham; all we can do is speculate based on this evidence and, as it is, this second union seems far from a satisfactory conclusion to Anne’s long-suffering heroine.
[1] Margaret Smith, ‘Introduction’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Emily Brontë (1848; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), p.ix.
[2] Liddell, Robert, Twin Spirits: The Novels of Emily and Anne Brone (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1990), p.94.
[3] Charlotte Brontë Selected Letters, p.176.
[4] Anonymous review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Sharpe’s London Magazine, Volume 7, October 1848, p.184.
[5] Anonymous review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Spectator, July 8 1848, p.663.
[6] Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848; repr. Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1998), p.3.
[7] Gordon, Felicia A Preface to the Brontës (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p.178.
[8] Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (1847; repr. Croydon: Penguin, 1994), p.61.
[9] Roberts, Lewis C., ‘Children’s Fiction’ in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p.354.
[10] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile (1762; repr. London: J.M. Dent & Son, 1977), p.6.
[11] Neil Hayward Cocks, ‘The Child and the Letter: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Textual Practice, Volume 27 (2013), 1125-1147, p.1132.
[12] Smith, ‘Introduction’, p.xv.
[13] Summers, Mary, Anne Brontë: Educating Parents (Beverly: Highgate Publications, 2003), p.53.
[14] Smith, p.xii.
[15] Summers, p.54.
[16] Gordon, p.179.
