home healthier than when he left. His health slowly but steadily suffers from his drinking, which is inextricably tied to the fast life he leads in London. Huntington occasionally brings his debauched lifestyle home to Grassdale Manor in the form of his friends Hattersley and Grimsby. Hattersley, who is also given to physical violence toward his friends and wife, is following a similar path of ruin but saves himself when he sees the irreparable damage Huntington has done to himself. Hattersley breaks from his life in London and retires to the countryside with his family and thereafter the Hattersley family is very happy.

Those who are also brought to ruin by a city lifestyle or mentality are Annabella Lowborough and Jane Wilson. Annabella’s death illustrates. She lives a fast and lavish life, estranged from her husband and flirting endlessly with other men. She ultimately finds herself abandoned and impoverished and dies a lonely woman. Jane moves to a country town after her mother’s death and settles into a life of gossip and scandal. She never marries because her expectations are higher than her possibility of attainment. Once Jane leaves Ryecote Farm, she does not talk about her childhood home or her older brother Robert, who now runs the farm. She only mentions her younger brother, the vicar. In this way, Jane completely eschews any association with life in the countryside and thus any association with peace, beauty, and true happiness.

Into the early 2000s, British people love their countryside in all of its varieties, from the rocky seacoast to the wooded hills to the wild moorlands and beyond. The government maintains right of way public footpaths that crisscross the island despite the occasional inconvenience these trails may impose on private property. Bicycles and horses are not permitted on footpaths, although wheelchairs and leashed dogs are allowed. These footpaths are important to the British sense of belonging to their landscape. In the region of Yorkshire where the Brontë family lived there is a forty-three mile footpath called the Brontë Way, which runs from Oakwell Hall near the town of Bradford to Gawthorpe Hall near the town of Burnley. This footpath goes by important sites such as Brontë’s birthplace in the village of Thornton, Ponden Hall (a gloomy Elizabethan manor that inspired the three sisters), and the village of Haworth where the Brontës lived for most of their brief lives. The north of England is famous for its rough beauty. The heather moors of West Yorkshire, where Haworth is located, are more rustic and wild than many other places in Yorkshire. The Brontës loved their home in Yorkshire and almost never left it. Anne Brontë became quite fond of Scarborough and the seaside in northeast Yorkshire during her five-year tenure as governess with the Robinson family. This region was likely the inspiration for the setting of Wildfell Hall, which was only four miles inland from the seacoast.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Brontë celebrates the virtues of county life over the corruption of life in the city. Country life is quiet, safe, religious, clean, beautiful, and family-oriented. City life is crowded, dirty, smelly, noisy, secular, and full of vice and distraction. Brontë does not just treat London as having a potential for evil but as the source of evil because everything that emerges from or willingly enters into London is tainted. Helen ultimately finds happiness with Gilbert Markham, a farmer who helps to cleanse Helen of her former woes. Markham’s profession puts him in intimate connection with the land. He and Helen deepen their admiration of each other through a quiet portion of the novel where they find each other out on the moors and take long rambles together.

Brontë links as positive the inside and urban as bad and the outside and rural as good. After all, Helen catches Huntington at his infidelity outside. But at Wildfell Hall, Helen supports herself with paintings of the landscape that surrounds her (although the income comes from London). The roses grow outside that Helen gives to Gilbert, twice. The one activity with which Huntington restores his health (other than rest) is hunting. Huntington, to his credit, wants only to be outdoors hunting and sporting when he is at Grassdale. All of the indoor parties, which Helen attends, come to no good.

Brontë uses the names of the different homes in this book to add character to the various locations. Wildfell is the most remote manor in the novel and, as it says in the name, the surrounding countryside is wild and rough. Fell is a Middle English word that means hill. Grassdale is the opposite of Wildfell. Grass gives the impression of civilization and cultivation; dale is another world for a valley. Gilbert and his neighbors live in the district of Lindenhope. Linden is a type of deciduous tree with heart shaped leaves and in mythology it is a symbol of peace for Freyja, goddess of love and fortune. Hope is a word for valley in the northern English dialect. These meanings reflect the roles each landscape plays in the story. Grassdale Manor is Helen’s gilded prison and when she escapes, she hides out at Wildfell Hall, beyond the reach of civilization and all the norms that she once knew. Lindenhope is a valley of peace and the place where Helen not only heals but also has the good fortune to fall in love again.

Source: Carol Ullmann , Critical Essay on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2008.

Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has been singled out most frequently for two elements: (1) its unusually complicated framing device (Gilbert Markham’s epistolary account of his relationship with Helen Huntingdon surrounds her much lengthier diary account of her first marriage and flight from her husband) and (2) its strikingly frank and detailed description of a woman’s experience in an abusive marriage. These two features of the text, one formal and one thematic, are intertwined in the experience of reading the novel. For, in proceeding through the multi-layered narrative and remaining for a surprisingly protracted time in Helen’s painful account of her nightmarish marriage, the reader experiences a sensation that might be labeled narrative claustrophobia. The text thus produces an effect on the reader that mimics the entrapment Helen experiences in her marriage.

‘‘The book is painful,’’ Charles Kingsley declared in his unsigned review in Fraser’s Magazine, sounding a note that would be echoed by many contemporary critics. A notice in the North American Review complained that the reader ‘‘is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of [Huntingdon’s] nature literally and logically set forth.’’ This language invokes the claustrophobic sensation that I have suggested is exacerbated by the narrative from. The reader’s discomfort is likely to extend beyond Helen’s diary account of her hellish first marriage, however. The events recounted in the framing narrative—Helen’s courtship by and eventual marriage to Gilbert Markham—purportedly provide a happy ending for Helen, released from her disastrous first marriage and free to choose a better mate. But Gilbert is an oddly unsuitable partner for Helen. Though it may be tempting to read the events in the framing narrative as representing a recovery from the events recounted in the embedded one, such a meliorist view is challenged by the fact that the framing narrative finds Helen remarried to a man who, while not the rake that Arthur Huntingdon was, is capable, like Arthur, of violence and cowardice (as evidenced by his vicious attack on Frederick Lawrence, which he does not publicly acknowledge). Gilbert, like Arthur, has been spoiled by his mother and has an inflated ego, and he subscribes to all the standard Victorian stereotypes about female nature and female merit (as evidenced by his behavior toward and descriptions of both the ‘‘demon’’ Eliza Millward, his first flame, and the ‘‘angel’’ Helen).

Gilbert’s shortcomings become less critical, however, when attention is shifted from the relationship he describes in his letters to Halford to the one whose forging Helen narrates in her diary—the relationship with her brother Frederick, whom Gilbert perceives as his antagonist and who is his opposite in character. The formal displacement that occurs when Helen’s narrative undermines Gilbert’s, exceeding it in both length and power, is thus echoed in a displacement of the exogamous romantic plot articulated in his account by the endogamous brother-sister plot contained within hers. The architecture of Brontë’s narrative calls attention to alternate forms of domestic containment, one deriving from courtship and marriage, the other from the natal family. Rather than representing these two forms of domesticity as continuous or overlapping, as nineteenth-century novels of family life commonly do, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall stresses their disjunctions, an approach that is complemented by the narrative format.

Treatments of Tenant as domestic fiction have tended to focus on marital relationships, and hence, when examining the relationship of the framing to the framed narrative, to focus on the differences between Gilbert and Arthur as spouses. The critics I will discuss below, for instance, have suggested that the agenda Helen pursues unsuccessfully in her first marriage, an agenda consistent with prevailing domestic ideology, is realized in her second. It must be acknowledged, however, that the novel’s relationship to domestic ideology is an unusually vexed one. In presenting Helen’s attraction to her first husband, Brontë daringly implies that her heroine’s culturally sanctioned role as the would-be reformer of a sinful man serves as a cover for her sexual attraction to him, but a hellish marriage punishes Helen for succumbing to her desire for Arthur. The novel makes a heroine out of a woman who runs away from her husband; but this transgressive act is sanctioned by a conservative motive: Helen wants to save her son from his father’s corrupting influence. The more subversive kind of rebellion enacted by Arthur’s mistress,Annabella—a rebellion that does not have a selfless motivation—is severely punished by her society and by the text: ‘‘she [sinks], at length, in difficulty and debt, disgrace and misery; and die[s] at last . . . in penury, neglect and utter wretchedness.’’ But if Annabella’s fate suggests that the novel’s critique of domestic ideology has its limits, her role in Brontë’s treatment of domestic reform also indicates the limited efficacy of that ideology.

Helen displays the ironic naivety of a young woman who, subscribing to the ideas about woman’s moral influence articulated by Sarah Ellis and others, ardently believes that as her husband’s ‘‘angel monitress’’ she can redeem him. While Helen’s surveillance of her home and husband accords with the function of the domestic woman posited by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction, Helen is not nearly so effective as that powerful creature. The futility of her efforts are underscored by Annabella; while Arthur finds his wife’s moralizing tedious, he can be kept in line by his mistress’s strategy, which depends on his physical desire for her. Annabella’s brand of sexual management, ironically, has more pragmatic reach than domestic authority. In this way, Brontë’s novel exposes rather than reproduces the myth of power embedded in cultural constructions of the domestic woman. Helen’s friend Millicent may be criticized for failing to provide the sort of moral management her husband needs, but the example of Helen and Arthur suggests that there is a problem with the entire notion of the wife as agent of reform.

The authorial preface to the second edition reiterates on a figural level Helen’s frustrated efforts at domestic purification. Just before asserting, ‘‘if I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense,’’ Brontë compares herself to a cleaning woman who, ‘‘undertaking the cleansing of a careless bachelor’s apartment will be liable to more abuse for the dust she raises, than commendation for the clearance she effects.’’ If her commitment to acknowledging unpleasant truths links her to Helen, so too does this indication of the limits of her own success, since Helen’s wifely attempts at cleaning up Arthur’s act are met with obdurate resistance.

This essay stresses the novel’s ambivalent relationship to domestic ideology because some of the best readings of this novel become entwined with it when treating the relationship between Helen’s and Gilbert’s narratives. Inspired by Brontë’s eloquent and compelling defense of a wronged woman, and her invention of a heroine who heroically fights back, N.M. Jacobs, Linda Shires, and Elizabeth Langland have all provided insightful readings of Tenant as a proto-feminist text. Each of these critics, however, credits Brontë’s heroine with the successful moral education of her second husband, maintaining that Gilbert is reformed by his exposure to Helen’s text and that their union redeems Helen’s disastrous first marriage; in so doing, they risk reinscribing the domestic ideology that it is a part of the novel’s accomplishment to problematize. Moreover, each has at some point to ignore, minimize, or recast elements in Gilbert’s narrative that qualify a positive account of Helen’s second marriage. It is my contention that these elements are linked to a narrative strategy that contrasts Gilbert the suitor, would-be hero of the framing narrative, and Frederick the brother, hero of the framed narrative. The strategy behind the narrative layering is not to show Gilbert’s reform and to celebrate a restored conjugal ideal, but to juxtapose siblings and suitors, to poise natal domesticity against nuptial domesticity.

In ‘‘Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ’’ Jacobs initially seems set to view Gilbert’s framing narrative as part of a continuing critique of the domestic, rather than as the site of its recuperation. She notes that the enclosure of Helen’s diary narrative within Gilbert’s epistolary one mimics not just the division of male and female into separate spheres but also the law of couverture. The fact that Helen’s diary has become her husband’s possession and that he has the power to bargain with it in a bid to recover his friend’s favor reinforces this point, but Jacobs does not pursue that tack. Instead, she sees the relationship between Helen’s story and Gilbert’s as one that works not to contain her but to educate him. According to Jacobs, the ‘‘effect on Gilbert of reading this document—of being admitted into the reality hidden within and behind the conventional consciousness in which he participates—is revolutionary, and absolutely instrumental to the partnership of equals their marriage will become. Its revelations force him outside the restricted boundaries of an ego that defines itself through its difference from and superiority to someone else.’’

If this were the case, however, then the access to Helen’s consciousness which Gilbert’s reading of her diary gives him should have altered his behavior and assumptions. Jacobs, however, provides no evidence in support of Gilbert’s moral growth. And far from demonstrating any such alteration, Brontë’s novel shows us that in the events following upon his reading of the diary, Gilbert is as egotistical and as sexist as he appears in the opening chapters. His immediate response when he has concluded the account of Helen’s harrowing domestic drama is pique that the pages detailing her initial impressions of him have been ripped out. While the diary might have restored Helen to his good graces, rendering her once again ‘‘all I wished to think her . . . her character shone bright, and clear, and stainless as that sun I could not bear to look on’’, it has not touched his tendency to demonize all attractive women who are not the exalted Helen, as his continued shabby treatment and vilification of Eliza make clear. His unreasonable resentment of Frederick continues, and his egotism is still intact; his pride almost leads him to lose Helen, as he refuses to make himself vulnerable to learn whether she still loves him. Most disturbing, the violence he exhibited in his attack on Frederick is still manifest in his behavior toward Eliza, the former object of his sexual interest; when she says something that angers him, he responds: ‘‘I seized her arm and gave it, I think, a pretty severe squeeze, for she shrank into herself with a faint cry of pain or terror.’’ Thus, there does not seem to be any significant revision in Gilbert’s character that would encourage us to disagree with Helen’s aunt when she says, ‘‘Could [Helen] have been contented to remain single, I own I should have been better satisfied.’’ The absence of growth on Gilbert’s part was commented upon by Kingsley, who questioned Brontë’s agenda: ‘‘If the author had intended to work the noble old Cymon and Iphigenia myths, she ought to have let us see the gradual growth of the clown’s mind under the influence of the accomplished woman, and this is just what she has not done.’’ Precisely. We can only assume that Brontë knew what she was about when she chose to include details suggesting Gilbert’s persistent limitations.

While Shires concedes those limitations, she maintains that Gilbert and his correspondent Jack Halford are both educated by their reading of Helen’s diary: ‘‘[The novel] counsels an inscribed male friend that what he may perceive as overly independent female behavior is a strong woman’s only way to maintain integrity in a world where aristocratic male dominance can easily slip into abusiveness. It is important that the text addresses a man, for the counter-hegemonic project of the text is not merely to expose a bad marriage but to teach patriarchy the value of female rebellion.’’ Like Shires, Langland views the framing male narrative as one that serves a feminist agenda, though in different terms. Writing in part in response to Jacobs’s description of the relationship between Gilbert’s narrative and Helen’s as one of enclosure, Langland argues in ‘‘The Voicing of Female Desire in . . . The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’’ that ‘‘[a] traditional analysis that speaks of nested narratives is already contaminated by the patriarchal ideology of prior and latter and so cannot effectively question what I wish to question . . . the transgressive nature of narrative exchange.’’ Thus she proposes viewing the ‘‘narrative within a narrative not as hierarchical or detachable parts, but as interacting functions within a transgressive economy that allows for the paradoxic voicing of feminine desire.’’ Central to her argument is the fact that the text as a whole is structured around an exchange of letters, and that the epistolary exchange is the prelude for an exchange of visits (Halford and Rose to Gilbert and Helen). She argues that an exchange structure is inherently destabilizing and thus can serve a feminist agenda. She does not allow the gender implications built into this particular exchange to give her pause. However, it is surely not irrelevant that the exchange of letters is an exchange between two men, nor that the material exchanged is a woman’s story, though this is a point Langland’s reading must ignore. It strikes the reader as curious at best that Gilbert would transcribe for another man the contents of his wife’s intimate diary, and disturbing at worst that Helen’s hellish experience is used for a homo-social end.

The transaction between Gilbert and Halford accords with the model outlined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men, which describes how women are used as instruments with which those economic and affective bonds between men that structure society are forged. Gilbert’s revelation of Helen’s story to Halford is an act of debt paying. He has fallen out of Halford’s favor because he did not respond to his friend’s sharing of confidences with equal candor; the story he is telling him now, which is actually his wife’s story, will acquit his debt. He instructs Halford: ‘‘If the coin suits you, tell me so, and I’ll send you the rest at my leisure: if you would rather remain my creditor than stuff your purse with such ungainly heavy pieces,—tell me still, and I’ll pardon your bad taste, and willingly keep the treasure to myself.’’ The exchange between Gilbert and Halford is not only an economic one, it is also an emotional one, geared toward a restoration of affection. It is clear that Halford has replaced the women in Gilbert’s life for the top spot in his affections. Halford is Gilbert’s brother-in-law, and he has taken his sister’s place in his affections. When in Gilbert’s account he first refers to his sister Rose, he pauses to comment: ‘‘Nothing told me then, that she, a few years hence, would be the wife of one—entirely unknown to me as yet, but destined hereafter to become a closer friend than even herself.’’ More intriguingly, Markham refers to his marriage to Helen Huntingdon as ‘‘the most important event of my life—previous to my acquaintance with Jack Halford at least.’’ The story wins Gilbert his friend’s love again, renewing the affective bond between the two men that was in danger of dissolving: ‘‘I perceive, with joy, my most valued friend, that the cloud of your displeasure has past away; the light of your countenance blesses me once more.’’

At one point Gilbert contrasts his warm friendship with Halford to his inability to feel that same kind of bond with Frederick Lawrence, Helen’s brother: ‘‘[U]pon the whole, our intimacy was rather a mutual predilection than a deep and solid friendship, such as since has arisen between myself and you, Halford.’’ His jealousy of Frederick, whom he mistakenly assumes to be Helen’s lover, leads to Gilbert’s resentment of him and to his violent attack on him. But even after he learns of Frederick’s kinship with Helen and of how instrumental he has been in Helen’s escape from Huntingdon, Gilbert is unable to forge a connection with him or even to appreciate his merit. The antipathy between the two, much more virulent on Gilbert’s side, is significant, for Frederick is a man who will not engage in the sort of transactions over women that Gilbert wishes him to conduct. Frederick, while placing no impediments between Gilbert and his sister, is not willing to play the active role of go-between that Gilbert expects him to play. Gilbert resents Frederick and even considers him morally culpable for not intervening with his sister on his behalf: ‘‘[H]e had wronged us . . . He had not attempted to check the course of our love by actually damming up the streams in their passage, but he had passively watched the two currents wandering through life’s arid wilderness, declining to clear away the obstructions that divided them, and secretly hoping that both would lose themselves in the sand before they could be joined in one.’’ Though Helen sees her relationship to her brother as an end in itself, Gilbert wants the brother to serve as their mediator, to channel the passion whose object and destination is himself.

Such a structure of channeling and mediation is embodied in the novel by gossip, whose central and suspect role in this novel has been elucidated by Jan Gordon: ‘‘[G]ossip always appears as a threat to value: it either ‘speculates’ or exaggerates by ‘inflating’ . . . In short gossip devalues because it has nothing standing behind it. Lacking the authenticity of a definable source, it is simultaneously financially, theologically, and narratively unredeemable.’’ (It is in fact gossip, with Frederick as its unwitting subject, that brings Gilbert and Helen together; gossip’s misconstrual of Frederick’s wedding as Helen’s causes Gilbert to rush to the scene, a trip which ends in his engagement to Helen.) Gilbert implicitly links Frederick’s refusal to play go-between with his refusal to gossip when he complains to Halford that ‘‘[h]e provoked me at times . . . by his evident reluctance to talk to me about his sister.’’ When Helen, on the verge of rejoining her husband, had suggested to Gilbert that he might know of her through her brother, she had specified: ‘‘I did not mean that Frederick should be the means of transmitting messages between us, only that each might know, through him, of the other’s welfare.’’ In her formulation of the triangle, Frederick is less a mediating term than an apex. Gilbert’s contrasting expectation that Frederick will serve as an intermediary is thwarted by the literalism and lack of expansiveness with which Frederick imparts news of Helen: ‘‘I would still pursue my habitual enquiries after his sister—if he had lately heard from her, and how she was, but nothing more. I did so, and the answers I received were always provokingly limited to the letter of the enquiry.’’ Significantly, Frederick is a character who resists transmitting gossip. He does not, for example, let the community know it was Gilbert who attacked him. He is most reluctant to gossip about women, a reluctance that baffles and aggravates Gilbert.

Gilbert’s conversation with Frederick about Jane Wilson is especially revealing in this regard. His narrative has painted Jane as a social climber who wished to ensnare Frederick. Gilbert takes it upon himself to warn Frederick of the danger Gilbert believes he faces from this predatory woman. Frederick checks Gilbert’s desire to gossip about the woman and to slander her: ‘‘‘I never told you, Markham, that I intended to marry Miss Wilson’ . . . ‘No, but whether you do or not, she intends to marry you.’ ‘Did she tell you so?’ ‘No, but—’ ‘Then you have no right to make such an assertion respecting her.’’’ As Gilbert continues to press his point, Frederick, who is not interested in Jane, responds with gentle sarcasm to Gilbert’s diatribe. While Gilbert is miffed by Frederick’s refusal to join him in maligning Jane’s character, to engage in this particular kind of male bonding, he comforts himself by reflecting: ‘‘I believe . . . that he soon learned to contemplate with secret amazement his former predilection, and to congratulate himself on the lucky escape he had made; but he never confessed it to me . . . As for Jane Wilson . . . [h]ad I done wrong to blight her cherished hopes? I think not; and certainly my conscience has never accused me, from that day to this.’’ The assumption of his own correct insight into Frederick’s attitude, steadfastly maintained in the face of a lack of evidence, and the callous indifference toward the unhappy Jane Wilson are both powerful indicators of Gilbert’s self-satisfied nature and the limits of his imagination and his empathy. Significantly, this smug reflection is made by the older Gilbert who has been married to Helen for many years; it thus cautions us not to assume too much about Gilbert’s improvement under Helen’s tutelage.

Frederick’s refusal to gossip about women is in contrast not only to Gilbert’s eagerness to gossip about Jane Wilson, but also to Gilbert’s sharing of his wife’s intimate diary with his male friend. As we have seen, attempts to read Helen’s second marriage as an event which redeems the domestic ideal compromised by her first marriage must ignore evidence about Gilbert’s shortcomings and the troubling implications of his transfer of the contents of her diary to his friend. It is significant that many of Gilbert’s flaws are made visible through interactions with Helen’s brother Frederick; this fact should encourage us to think further about the latter’s role. For all the famous violence of the domestic scenes in this novel, the most violent moment in the novel is the one in which Gilbert attacks Frederick:

I had seized my whip by the small end, and— swift and sudden as a flash of lightning— brought the other down upon his head. It was not without a feeling of strange satisfaction that I beheld the instant, deadly pallor that overspread his face, and the few red drops that trickled down his forehead, while he reeled a moment in his saddle, and then fell backward to the ground. . . Had I killed him? . . . [N]o; he moved his eyelids and uttered a slight groan. I breathed again—he was only stunned by the fall. It served him right—it would teach him better manners in future. Should I help him to his horse? No. For any other combination of offenses I would; but his were too unpardonable.

Gilbert’s physical attack on Frederick makes particularly vivid and concrete an opposition between Helen’s suitor and her brother that is visible throughout the novel, yet Frederick’s importance has been largely overlooked by critics.

Frederick plays an instrumental role in the recuperation of Helen’s unhappy history; it is he, not Gilbert, who redeems Helen’s faith in humanity after her disillusioning experience with Arthur. She writes in her diary: ‘‘I was beginning insensibly to cherish very unamiable feelings against my fellow mortals—the male part of them especially; but it is a comfort to see that there is at least one among them worthy to be trusted and esteemed.’’ Curiously, Frederick is exactly the sort of man the reader who wants a happier, more appropriate second marriage for Helen would expect her to marry. He, not Gilbert, is the gentle, sensitive, and supportive male that Helen has sought. If we are to look for an optimistic, meliorist plot in the novel, it is more likely to be found in the brother-sister relationship than in the husband-wife one. The opportunity for revision and recuperation lies not in the undeniably disappointing Gilbert, so curiously less mature than his bride, but in the brother. Improvement is effected not so much by Gilbert as a replacement for Helen’s first husband as it is by her brother as a replacement for her father. Juliet McMaster notes a pattern of generational improvement in the novel’s juxtaposition of characters who embody Regency values with those who embody Victorian values. She discusses this distinction primarily with reference to the replacement of the dissolute Arthur, with his aristocratic associations, by the gentlemen farmer Gilbert (elevated to the squirearchy by his marriage to the newly propertied Helen). But that pattern is most marked in the contrast between Helen’s irresponsible father and his virtuous son. The framing story is the wrong place to look for a positive alternative to Helen’s marriage with Arthur; we must look instead to her diary, to the account of her relationship with Frederick. By shifting attention from the suitor to the brother, we can account for the dissatisfactions of the courtship narrative while revealing Brontë’s display of alternate forms of domestic containment. It is Helen’s growing relationship with her brother, rather than the burgeoning relationship with Gilbert, that receives the privileged place in her diary after she leaves her husband. The containment of the brother-sister plot within the embedded narrative reflects the turn inward, toward the natal family. The claustrophobic narrative structure, originally linked to an imprisoning marriage, finds an alternate thematic corollary in a potentially incestuous relationship.

II

Poised between Helen’s first marriage and her second is the relationship she forges with her brother during her exile. As the person to whom Helen turns for help when she makes her escape, Frederick serves as a buffer between her and the world during her period of disguise. Helen and Frederick’s relationship is peculiar for a brother-sister one because they have been raised having only minimal contact with each other. Helen’s father, an alcoholic with no interest in daughters, abnegated his responsibility toward her, turning her over to relatives after the death of his wife, while keeping charge of his son. Helen’s flight from her husband provides the occasion for building a relationship with her brother that they have thus far not enjoyed. Becoming better acquainted as adults, their relationship is in some ways structurally closer to a courtship relationship than to a brother-sister one. The townspeople, ignorant of Helen’s true identity, construe their relationship as a sexual one, and Gilbert sees him as a romantic rival, suggesting, perhaps, the novel’s own flirtation with an incest motif. Helen, after all, is fixated on her son’s resemblance to the brother she loves. She reconceives her son as the progeny not of her husband Arthur but of her brother Frederick; she says to him: ‘‘He is like you, Frederick . . . in some of his moods: I sometimes think he resembles you more than his father; and I am glad of it.’’ Helen’s flight from her husband’s to her brother’s house is followed, then, by the realignment of her son’s lineage in relation to her natal family. Previously, the son’s physical likeness to his father was stressed, and Helen has kept Arthur senior’s portrait (which had symbolized her physical desire for him) in order to compare the child to it as he grows. In raising her son, she seeks to instill the character she would create into the body she desired. Finding the embodiment of manly virtue in her brother, she re-designates her son’s person as ‘‘like Frederick’s.’’

Rather than exploring sexual overtones in the sibling relationship, however, Brontë’s novel foregrounds its relationship to domestic reform; Frederick’s virtue compensates for their father’s neglectful treatment of Helen, and their comfortable relationship, defined by mutual respect, contrasts with Helen’s problematic relationships with her husband and her suitor. The implication that the brother-sister relationship has the potential to redeem a compromised domestic sphere bears some resemblance to Jane Austen’s employment of the sibling model of relationships as described by Glenda A. Hudson in Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Emphasizing the non-salacious nature of Austen’s treatment of incestuous relationships— ‘‘In her novels, the in-family marriages between the cousins and in-laws are successful because they do not grow out of sexual longing but are rooted in a deeper, more abiding domestic love which merges spiritual, intellectual and physical affinities’’—Hudson argues that for Austen, ‘‘the incestuous marriages of Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, and Elinor and Edward Ferrars are therapeutic and restorative; the endogamous unions safeguard the family circle and its values . . . Incest in Austen’s novels creates a loving and enclosed family circle.’’ The idea of closing family ranks for protective and restorative purposes can be applied to Helen’s turn to her brother. Unlike what we would find in an Austen novel, however, no warm relationship is effected between Frederick and Gilbert through the latter’s marriage to Frederick’s sister. The brother-in-law whose visit Gilbert eagerly anticipates at the end of the novel is Jack Halford, not Frederick Lawrence. The alternate domestic relationships of siblings and spouses remain quite distinct in Helen’s experience, rather than the former fostering marital exchange.

The endogamous quality of the brother-sister relationship is exaggerated in the case of Helenand Frederick: formed during her time in hiding, it is necessarily an insular one which cannot incorporate outsiders. And it coexists with a regressive project in which Helen engages upon her flight from her marital home, for Helen’s retreat from her husband is followed by a return to her natal family origins, symbolized by her adoption of her mother’s maiden name as her alias and her return to the home in which her mother died. Wildfell Hall, though ‘‘no[t] yet quite sunk into decay,’’ is a previous family home that has been exchanged for a more upto- date one, so she is not only symbolically returning to her family, but returning to a prior stage in the family history.

Together, Helen and Frederick revise their family history. Enjoying frequent contact with her brother, helen reconstructs the family life she was denied as a child. Frederick’s supportive and responsible fraternal behavior compensates for the poor behavior of Helen’s father. The contrast between Helen’s relationship with her father and the relationship she enjoys with her brother bears out claims made by Joseph P. Boone and Deborah E. Nord about Victorian brother-sister plots. They argue that the ‘‘[sister’s] investment in the brother figure . . . originates as a means to combat her own devaluation within the family and society,’’ frequently making up for paternal neglect in particular. They also note that the brother-sister relationship might be used to circumvent problems inherent in a conjugal relationship: ‘‘[I]n some cases, the sibling ideal becomes a utopian basis for figuring heterosexual relationships not based on traditional conceptions of gender polarity as the basis of romantic attraction. Theoretically, at least, the idealized union of brother and sister rests on a more egalitarian, less threatening mode of male-female relationship, precisely because the bond is one in which gender difference is rendered secondary to the tie of blood-likeness, familiarity and friendship.’’ While one might question the assumption that there is something more inherently benign about brother-sister relations than other male-female ones, Helen and Frederick’s relationship does seem intended to provide an alternative to the violence and power plays that contaminate the conjugal relationship. Frederick gives her both emotional and practical support and appears to be the only male in the novel who embodies the virtues she seeks in a mate.

Contrary to the case of the brothers and sisters Boone and Nord describe, however, the intimacy of Frederick and Helen is not born and nurtured in the nursery; it is not itself, therefore, cultivated by domestic arrangements. It is, we must suspect, precisely because Frederick and Helen have not been raised together that their sibling relationship presents a strong contrast to the others in the novel, such as that between Gilbert and his sister Rose, who complains of the favoritism with which the sons of the family are treated, and that of Esther Hargrave and her brother, who attempts to pressure her into an unsuitable match. The problem of triangulation within the nuclear family is called to our attention from the first page, when Gilbert commences his account of himself with reference to the competing agendas his mother and father had regarding their son; this is swiftly followed by an exposure to the sibling rivalry between Gilbert and his younger brother as well as that between Rose and her brothers. (The fact that Helen’s son is conceived alternately as an improved version of her husband and a younger version of her brother suggests that her family will not be exempt from the kind of triangulation that plagues the Markham family.) Because Helen and Frederick come together as adults, there is no parental mediation to promote rivalry or jealousy. Moreover, due to the early death of his mother, Frederick has not been spoiled by maternal indulgence in the way that both Arthur and Gilbert are said to have been. Thus, their exemplary sibling relationship is also exceptional. While Helen and Frederick’s relationship seems to present a model for domestic relations, it is a somewhat utopian one, and its strength, paradoxically, derives from the absence of domestic structures in its formation. Therefore, that model is unable to provide the basis for its own reproduction.

In this respect, Brontë’s treatment of the brother-sister motif differs from that of many other nineteenth-century novelists who privilege sibling bonds. Austen and Charles Dickens, for example, both use the sibling relationship as a model for the marital one by having the spouse metonymically connected to the brother (either by being him, as in Mansfield Park, or by having a special connection to him, as in Dombey and Son). In Tenant, this approach is visible only on the margins of the central plot, as, for example, when Helen arranges for Frederick’s marriage to Esther Hargrave, the young woman whom she has called her ‘‘sister in heart and affection.’’ The marriage of Arthur Jr. and Helen Hattersly, a second ‘‘Helen and Arthur’’ marriage, is also a sort of fraternal/sororal match, since their mothers’ closeness has caused them often to play and take lessons together from childhood, as siblings would do. Gilbert and Helen’s marriage, however, does not adhere to the sibling paradigm. In the central plot, Brontë keeps the suitor and the brother steadfastly segregated: they are antithetical types and are, consequently, antipathetic to each other. Moreover, Gilbert is rendered analogous not to Helen’s brother, but to her son. Using his friendship with little Arthur as a way of accessing the mother, the petulant and immature Gilbert is, as Shires describes him, the ‘‘boy child who wants to take possession of the mother.’’ It is Frederick, not Gilbert, whom Helen perceives as Arthur’s ideal imaginary parent. This fact reinforces the extent to which Frederick appears to be Helen’s only male equal in the novel as well as the only exemplar of manly domestic virtue. Though it is incest that is traditionally associated with the disruption of normal generational sequence, Brontë reverses this association by figuring generational imbalance in the exogamous relationship.

Brontë’s treatment of the sibling motif contrasts not only with Dickens’s and Austen’s, but, closer to home, with her own sister’s. Numerous critics have traced the lines of kinship between Tenant and Wuthering Heights, which contains the more famous representation of sibling love. Paradoxically, while the incest motif appears less transgressive in Tenant than in Wuthering Heights—it is where family values are housed— it is less translatable into the social sphere. In Emily Brontë’s novel (as in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), the notion of kinship is used to figure the romantic love whose promise is a cornerstone of the domestic ideal. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong alludes to the strategy behind the kind of romantic identification often associated with incest in the novels of the other Brontë sisters: ‘‘In the face of the essential incompatibility of the social roles they attempt to couple [Emily and Charlotte Brontë] endow their lovers with absolute identity on an entirely different ontological plane.’’ Working against a critical tradition that ‘‘has turned the Brontës’ novels into sublimating strategies that conceal forbidden desires, including incest,’’ Armstrong associates Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s fiction with a development whereby ‘‘sexuality . . . become[s] the instrument of, and not the resistance to, conventional morality.’’ It is not surprising that Armstrong’s account does not include Anne Brontë, for, unlike Emily and Charlotte, Anne seems to juxtapose rather than to collapse kinship relations and sexual ones in Tenant. This makes Tenant a most unusual example of nineteenth- century domestic fiction, a fact that may account for the relative marginalization of Anne’s masterpiece within the Brontë corpus.

Helen’s relationship to her brother Frederick cannot ultimately solve the problems of contradictions that cluster around the concept of the domestic, for it apparently cannot be brought to bear on other familial relationships, or on anything outside its own circuit. While in Wuthering Heights the incestuous longing of Cathy and Heathcliff is replaced by the more socially acceptable (but, as William Goetz points out, sanguinally more affined) marriage of Catherine and Hareton, in Tenant, the sibling relationship seems to exist as an end in itself. The sense of narrative claustrophobia described above is the formal corollary of this self-containment. Helen and Frederick’s relationship remains insular, and it remains locked within the field of Helen’s diary.

Helen’s narrative itself is ‘‘locked,’’ for, once her diary is turned over to Gilbert, she never again narrates. This means that we have only his word for the success of their marriage. That he is satisfied is clear, but the reader has no firsthand access to Helen’s subsequent experience. It also means that in Helen’s diary the strongest affective relationship with a man that she describes after leaving Arthur is with her brother, in keeping with Brontë’s use of the brother-sister plot to cast a dubious light on Gilbert and his courtship. It is no doubt because the novel privileges Helen’s relationship to her brother, the record of which is confined to the embedded narrative, that Gilbert’s framing narrative strikes many readers as perfunctory.

But it is more than perfunctory; it is part of a sustained critique of marital domesticity and part of an oppositional structure that segregates the nuptial and the natal forms of domestic containment. Tenant is distinctive in its brilliant use of compartmentalized narratives to reflect this thematic opposition. It is even more distinctive in its refusal to reconcile sexual and kinship relations, and in its willingness to sustain the resulting note of unease.

Source: Tess O’Toole, ‘‘Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,’’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 39, No. 4, Autumn 1999, pp. 715–31.