#anne bronte

[bitchenpagan]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 3.5/5

Summary/thoughts: A mysterious and unsocial woman and her son show up to a town. We learn the hard truth of her origins.

Red and Black ink on an index card.

Disclaimer: I draw images by hand for novels I've read. I've been doing this since 2010. I used a variety of references from posters, movies, book covers, art, old paintings. I am not trying to claim the ideas are original by me.

[epifaniacintilante]

Bronte has foregrounded the meeting with Arthur in a conversation just prior to the ball, between Helen and her aunt, which is full of warnings and admonishment:

'I want to warn you, Helen ... and to exhort you to be watchful and circumspect from the very commencement of your career, and not to suffer your heart to be stolen from you by the first foolish or unprincipled person that covets the possession of it.'

Not only her aunt's words, but the evidence of her own experience in the early stages of her relationship with Arthur, suggest to Helen that he is not what he seems. But it remains her conviction that the worth of her piety and good influence are what Arthur needs: indeed, that it is her 'mission' to be his 'angel'. Helen is consistently identified as an 'angel', both in the language of the text (her ability to quote the Bible at will is one example of this) and by Arthur himself, in phrases like 'sweet angel' and 'I know she is an angel'. Her aunt's words about Arthur, that he is 'a bit wildish', which she defines as 'destitute of principle, and prone to every vice that is common to youth' , fail in sufficiently warning Helen of the true nature of what she is undertaking; first, because she believes herself to be a good judge of character and therefore that she understands Arthur's faults, and second, and more significantly, because it reinforces her sense of her 'mission' as a reforming 'angel' in Arthur's life:

'Do you imagine your merry, thoughtless profligate would allow himself to be guided by a young girl like you?'

'No; I should not wish to guide him; but I think I might have influence sufficient to save him from some errors, and I should think my life well spent in the effort to preserve so noble a nature from destruction ... sometimes he says that if he had me always by his side he should never do or say a wicked thing, and that a little daily talk with me would make him quite a saint. It may be partly jest and partly flattery, but still-'

'But still you think it may be truth?'

This conversation is a crucial episode, establishing both the focus of the novel and Helen's absolute conviction that, whatever Arthur may be now, being confronted by her love and moral worth on a daily basis will 'influence' him to become a good man. The fact that Arthur is playing this role precisely for the purposes of seduction is apparent both to Helen's aunt and to the reader, and discloses the trap into which Helen is walking, but the language of redemption becomes stronger as the passage continues. Helen states, 'if I hate the sins, I love the sinner, and would do much for his salvation', and 'I shall consider my life well spent in saving him from the consequences of his early errors, and striving to recall him to the path of virtue - God grant me success!" These are almost the words of a preacher, rather than a woman in love, yet Helen is, apparently, fulfilling her role as potential domestic angel to perfection. She is intending to utilize good intentions and virtuous love, not to 'guide' Arthur (which would suggest too much dominance) but to 'influence' him: she is placing his happiness before her own, is willing, at this time, to make any necessary sacrifices, forgive any sins already committed, and call on God to aid her in becoming his 'angel'. With such firm commitment to her correct role, and such eagerness and energy to carry it out, Helen must, surely, achieve some measure of success.

But Helen fails - dismally. Bronte's account of her marriage to Arthur is one of the most savage indictments of both the legal and economic constraints which supported Victorian marriage, and the mythical ideology which deceives Helen into it. Maria H. Frawley has analysed the way in which the language of' angelicness' is used by Arthur to entrap Helen and convince her that she will act as his redeemer:

it is important to note his means of attracting her - his use of language that appeals to her desire to function as a saviour -and the power that he maintains over her because of this language.

Bronte states, without equivocation, that the Angel in the House may exist, but her worth and influence are meaningless and succeed only in deceiving young women into marriage.

Siv Jansson, The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall: Rejecting the Angel's Influence

[wideeyedbitterfly]

How a well loved book looks

[elephantlovemedleys]

Oh, they have robbed me of the hope my spirit held so dear; They will not let me hear that voice my soul delights to hear. They will not let me see that face I so delight to see; And they have taken all thy smiles, And all thy love from me. Well, let them seize on all they can; One treasure still is mine, A heart that loves to think on thee And feels the worth of thine.

I could think of him day and night; and I could feel that he was worthy to be thought of. Nobody knew him as I did; nobody could appreciate him as I did; nobody could love him as I–could. ― Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë.

At this point in the novel Agnes is distraught because Weston is about to leave the parish, and she fears she will never see him again; this compares with the fact that Weightman had left and Anne would never see him on this earth again. Agnes then reveals one of her poems, one of her ‘pillars of witness’ as she refers to them, which is in fact Anne’s poem ‘Oh They Have Robbed Me of the Hope’. The lines that Agnes ends this poem with, within the novel, and her commentary on them are very revealing of Anne’s thoughts in the days, months and years following Weightman’s death.

― In Search of Anne Brontë, by Nick Holland.

EMILY (2022) dir. FRANCES O'CONNOR

[elephantlovemedleys]

In Agnes Grey we get the description of Agnes and Mr Weston getting engaged atop the hill overlooking the sea during a “glorious summer evening.”

Then in Tenant, Gilbert in the last few lines of his letter by the end says that him and Helen were finally married on a “glorious August morning” during the summer as well.

(Several biographies have taken to account that Anne Brontë and William Weightman got to see each other or be in each other’s company at Haworth before she headed back to the Robinsons’ to join them at Scarborough during the summer of 1842. Perhaps it seems to me that there was something about the certain summer during that year which ultimately Anne held deeply in her heart, and decided to give a more lighter outcome in her works rather than the tragedy that occurred later on in reality.)

— AGNES GREY and THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL by ANNE BRONTË // A LIFE OF ANNE BRONTË BY EDWARD CHITHAM // ANNE BRONTË by WINIFRED GERIN.

[fiercestpurpose]

In Agnes Grey, the main character keeps describing how her life will be dull for the rest of her days because she and her mother are going to run a school for young ladies in a fashionable seaside town and like. given that this character loves her mother, loves hard work and making her own way, and longed to see more of the world, I can’t see how this could be a terrible life for her, simply because she won’t be married.

[saimusage]

Tara Fitzgerald, Toby Stephens and Rupert Graves as Helen, Gilbert and Arthur in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" 1996 version.

[shannybasar]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

From the introduction by Stevie Davies:

Anne Bronte brings into full focus the expropriated, estranged nature of world men’s lives. Helen can call neither her home nor her name her own. Wildfell Hall is a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence. Helen ‘Graham’ or ‘Huntingdon’ or ‘Lawrence’ stands as an image of unaccommodated woman, in a landscape of biblical texts as well as moorlands and pasture, in which we plainly see that the daughter of woman has nowhere to lay her head. Paradoxically, her destabilising inheritance is contradicted by her exceptional strength and stability as a person, with a core of impregnable self esteem, far more steadfast in herself than the volatile male narrator, plodding through his acres, through whose eyes we first approach and experience her. The dispossessed Helen is transgressive: a challenge both to the narrator and the narrator’s community. She lives alone. She earns her own living; keeps her own counsel and tells the definitive version of her own story.