SOURCE: “The Tenant of Patriarchal Culture: Anne Brontë's Problematic Female Artist,” in Michigan Academician, Vol. 28, No. 2, March, 1996, pp. 113-22.

[In the following essay, Clapp evaluates Helen Huntingdon as a marginalized, and hence paradigmatic, Victorian female artist.]

Unlike many writers in history, Anne Brontë has had the misfortune not to be unknown by literary critics but to be ignored. We know that she was the youngest sister of Charlotte and Emily, and even that she was a writer, but we rarely look at what she wrote. Even scholarship devoted to “the Brontë sisters” often fails to include the work of the youngest.¹

Scholars suggest that much of Anne Brontë's obscurity derives from Charlotte herself, whose written “apologies” for Anne's novels and her obstruction of a reprint edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall hurt Anne's reputation both then and now. Many Brontë biographers followed Charlotte's lead in pronouncing Anne's work to be inconsequential, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Lane, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford who brought the Brontë juvenile literary works to light.² Anne Brontë scholars of this century—Will Hale, Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford—have revived interest in her work so that it could be re-evaluated, but the result has usually been criticism that compares her work to her sisters'. Other Anne Brontë criticism tends either to interpret her novels merely biographically (e.g., Winifred Gérin) or judgmentally (e.g., P. J. M. Scott).³

Yet in this age of textual recovery, criticism would profit greatly by re-examining Anne Brontë's two novels.⁴ Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), is an astonishingly feminist novel, with few counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. After all, what other Victorian novel actually recounts an oppressed wife's escape—not through death or suicide, the closure that many feminist writers use—but by defying her husband, packing her bags, and leaving? As May Sinclair has written, “the slamming of [Helen's] bedroom door” against her husband resounded throughout the novel and, as others add, “throughout Victorian England.”⁵

Unfortunately, that reverberation was too often muffled by the shouts and swearing of Arthur Huntingdon, which attracted many nineteenth-century critics' negative comments.⁶ But twentieth-century scholars have been deaf to this slamming door as well. Though critics have begun to examine Helen Huntingdon's marital struggles,⁷ little has been written about her artistic struggles.⁸ It is her art that betrays her attraction to Arthur Huntingdon, reflects her frustrations during her marriage, and provides financial freedom so she may eventually leave Arthur.

Helen's “art” is the form of aesthetic self-expression—the music, the journal-writing, and the painting—in which she is engaged. The struggle she faces, however, is that her society fails to respect these forms of self-expression as “true art.” Indeed, art by women was often evaluated by different standards than art by men. While male art was typically valued in aesthetic or financial terms—both relying on audience appreciation—women's art was often valued only in terms relating back to the artist as a person, as merely self-expressive of the artist's emotions or as highlighting only the artist's sexual attributes which could lead, ironically, to financial security in marriage.⁹ Helen experiences the full range of these values: men trivialize her musical and literary self-expression and emphasizes its marginal, stereotypical nature. They also re-appropriate her private moments of music and painting to private, sexual displays on their own behalf. However, Helen successfully enters the realm of male artistry when she sells her paintings as aesthetic items and receives a financial reward which procures her freedom from her husband. If all of her artistic struggles are not completely successful by the world's standards, still, her artistic endeavors become a vital form of self-expression for her. The novel in many ways, then, mirrors the unstable nature of women's art of which Anne Brontë's own artistic marginalization is a symptom.

The narrative of The Tenant is divided into three parts. The first and third are told by Gilbert Markham, gentleman farmer, who falls in love with the beautiful young new tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen. When rumors fly about her past, however, Helen gives Markham her diary to explain her story. This forms the middle portion of the novel—detailing her marriage to the rake, Arthur Huntingdon, who eventually falls back into his old habits of drinking, carousing, and womanizing. Helen leaves him, but then Arthur sickens and Helen feels it her duty to nurse him. She describes his gradual death through letters to her brother back at Wildfell Hall. In the concluding section, through Markham's eyes again, we are told of his and Helen's espousal and marriage.

This story-within-a-story structure has frequently been the focus of critical attention.¹⁰ George Moore, Anne Brontë's earliest champion, criticized this structure by suggesting that the middle portion would have been even more powerful had Helen told Markham her painful story:

the presence of your heroine, her voice, her gestures, the questions that would arise and the answers that would be given to them, would preserve the atmosphere of a passionate and original love story.”¹¹

Yet this typical Victorian response represents the entire problem that Brontë is confronting; it implies that a woman artist must be defined by her physical presence, and then her chosen art form, her diary, is reduced to a conventional love story.

One of Helen's first aesthetic experiences is to witness how a woman's musical art is used and perceived as sexual luring as in the case of the caprices of Annabella Wilmot when she is at the piano with Huntingdon. Annabella who “never likes to waste her musical efforts on ladies' ears alone” (180) complies when Huntingdon flirtatiously requests her to sing during a musical soiree: “She exultantly seated herself at the piano, and favoured [Arthur] with two of his favourite songs, in such superior style … that [his] eye and brow lighted up with keen enthusiasm” (181). So Arthur is charmed with her singing in sexual, not artistic, terms. Annabella is conscious of the situation and offers her music as if it were kisses: “What shall I give you next?” she asks another man in the room (181).

Music forms the back-drop to Arthur and Annabella's affair; on several occasions, Helen catches her husband “[hanging] over the instrument” as Annabella sings (242) and “ardently [pressing] the unresisting hand to his lips” as Annabella sits at the piano (245). Music-making now proves to be a superficial entertainment and a seductive game of power where attention is focused on the artist, not the art.

Helen witnesses and understands this model of seductive art, yet resists it. She plays the piano for herself and her female friends, but avoids being seen by men. She leaves the piano as soon as the men enter the room. After all, her visibility before the male gaze could provoke the same sexual feelings as Annabella arouses in her male voyeurs. However, Helen does allow music to be the backdrop for her own display of passion when she is overcome during Miss Wilmot's sad air, “Farewell to thee!”¹² Applying the words of the song to her own situation with Huntingdon, Helen cannot hold back her tears and hides her face in the sofa-pillow (181-2). By now Huntingdon interprets Helen's emotive expression as seduction. Hearing her sob, he follows her out of the room and flirts with her. He is forced to propose to her when her aunt discovers them. What is so disturbing is how well Arthur has read Helen. He does not respect her private outpouring of emotion but egotistically assumes that she is crying only to charm him.

As Huntingdon's wife, Helen continues with her music; however, its value is, if not seductive, still to humor the male auditor rather than personally fulfilling as she enjoyed it before: “I play and sing to him for hours together … I fear I am spoiling him; but this once, I will forgive him …” (237). Her artistic self-expression becomes slave to what her husband wants. She also learns to keep her deeper passionate response to music in check. When Huntingdon's next mistress, Miss Meyers, appears as governess, Helen describes her singing: “She had a fine voice, and could sing like a nightingale … [but] there was a look of guile and subtlety in her face, a sound of it in her voice” (388). But rather than allow her jealousy to be a response to the beautiful music and arouse Huntingdon's egotism, Helen has learned to temper her emotions and recognize the guile associated with music. She may not be playing the piano any more but she has learned how to play gender politics. She must learn to conceal her vulnerable, emotive outpouring.

Through her journal-writing, Helen attempts emotive art once again, exulting in the privacy of such expression: “This paper will serve instead of a confidential friend into whose ear I might pour forth the overflowings of my heart” (169). On various occasions she finds comfort in her written outpourings; before leaving Huntingdon, she writes: “I have found relief in describing the very circumstances that have destroyed my peace, as well as the little trivial details attendant upon their discovery” (317). The last clause is vital to her conception of self-expression: unlike Moore, who defined feminine aesthetic expression in terms of drama and passion, she considers even the mundane occurrences in a woman's life to be worthy of language.¹³ Brontë thus redefines “art” to include the ordinary, daily expressions of life.

Yet even personal self-expression can come under a man's scrutiny, and its written form makes it even more vulnerable than temporal speech. About to leave Arthur the following day, Helen must stand by as he discovers her journal, reads of her plans, and tears her painting supplies—her means of support—to shreds. He articulates the “danger” of women's writing:

“It's well these women must be blabbing—if they haven't a friend to talk to, they must whisper their secrets to the fishes, or write them on the sand or something; and it's well too I wasn't overfull to-night … or I might have lacked the sense or the power to carry my point like a man, as I have done”

(372-3).

Speaking in terms as if of a gendered power struggle, Huntingdon belittles woman's self-expression as instinctive, irrational, and incriminating. Yet it is threatening enough that the man must exercise his power to extinguish it. Revoking her self-definition of “free woman” and substituting his own label of “wife”—an act condoned by society—Arthur successfully obliterates her as a person with self-expression and free agency. It is a violation of her innermost secrets, little less than rape.

If Helen does eventually escape from Arthur's home and domination and continue to write her own story, the success of this accomplishment is diminished by a second violation of her diary. When Markham reads her diary, he alters it when copying it down in his narrative. As he says, he has omitted “a few passages here and there of merely temporal interest to the writer, or such as would serve to encumber the story rather than elucidate it” (147). So even those journal entries which are available to us have been tampered with by a male editor.¹⁴

Markham's desire to control Helen through her writing becomes more obvious in his obsessive attempts to possess the letters she later writes to her brother Lawrence. Asking to keep a letter, he says “Were not these characters written by her hand? and were not these words conceived in her mind … ?” (436). Markham thus conflates Helen's texts with her sexual identity and fails to see their aesthetic value. To possess them is to possess her.

But this is not the last word on the subject. Helen has first controlled her own diary since she consents to make it public this time. Further, before giving it to Markham, she “hastily tore away a few leaves from the end,” deleting those pages which chronicle their acquaintance (146). Not giving him the satisfaction of knowing her true feelings for him, as she had done with Arthur, Helen keeps Markham's egotism in check. When completing her diary, he fumes that she has torn away those pages discussing her feelings about him:

How cruel—just when she was going to mention me! … I would have given much to have seen it all—to have witnessed the gradual change, and watched the progress of her esteem and friendship for me … but no, I had no right to see it …

(401)

Markham can only half-heartedly recognize Helen's protection of her privacy. He therefore attempts to “write” himself back into the story; indeed, the last glimpse of Helen is through his eyes, as his wife. Helen the artist has once again been reduced to conventional status as wife. However, her writing cannot be totally controlled as she will always possess those ripped pages.¹⁵

Helen is learning the sexual power play inherent in women's art, of when to hide and when to publicize art. She is therefore able to adapt her own chosen art form—painting—by both revealing conventional paintings on one side and concealing self-expressive art on the back. She succeeds in producing art that is expressive as well as aesthetically pleasing and thus economically valuable. Yet this is not without struggle in a patriarchal society which defines her art, again, as simple and sexual. Early in the novel, she is working on a painting of “an amorous pair of turtle doves” with a young girl kneeling below (175), a simple, natural subject encouraged by society.¹⁶ As Huntingdon notes, gazing at it: “a very fitting study for a young lady … girlhood just ripening into womanhood … she's thinking there will come a time when she will be wooed and won like that pretty hen-dove …” (175). He immediately trivializes the art work into something fitting for a young woman to draw—a scene of love. He also glories in the sexual implications of the scene, viewing art much as he does Annabella's music—a spring-board merely for his own wooing.

No doubt unsatisfied with the socially approved yet shallow subject matter of her paintings, Helen paints those things which truly inspire her imagination, specifically portraits of Arthur, on the back: “there is one face I am always trying to paint or to sketch, and always without success; and that vexes me” (148). Her art becomes an emotional outlet as well as an aesthetic challenge. In the Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar revel in this “wonderfully useful paradigm of the female artist” (81). Since “she draws on the backs of her paintings, she must make the paintings themselves work as public masks to hide her private dreams … Thus she produces a public art which she herself rejects as inadequate but which she secretly uses to discover a new aesthetic space for herself” (81). Indeed, these portraits of Arthur are the more challenging type of art form—over birds and trees, for instance—and the more rebellious since she is putting her innermost desires in tangible form in a most unladylike manner.

Like her outpouring of feelings during Annabella's song, however, Helen's feelings are also discovered by Arthur when he turns her paintings over (171). Arthur gloats over his discovery: “I perceive, the backs of young ladies' drawings, like the post-scripts of their letters, are the most important and interesting part of the concern” (172). Again he makes light of Helen's art, putting it in terms of a supposed cliché about women. Then, having the “audacity to put his arm round my neck and kiss me,” Arthur betrays that his real interest is not in the art, but the sexuality of the artist and her secret feelings about himself (173). Helen must burn her art in order to deflate his ego: “To show him how I valued it [the portrait], I tore it in two, and threw it into the fire. He was not prepared for this. His merriment suddenly ceasing, he stared in mute amazement at the consuming treasure” (177). But, ultimately, like her earlier self-expression in the music room, Helen has betrayed her true feelings and cannot retract them.

Helen later seeks to turn her art into money in order to escape from Huntingdon. Her plan is to sell her paintings in order to become self-sufficient: “the palette and the easel, my darling playmates once, must be my sober toil-fellows now” (358). The catch is that she cannot take personal credit for the art but, rather, sells them under an assumed name to elude Arthur.¹⁷ Seeking financial security and not fame, however, Helen transforms a position of anonymity and an art constructed as mere feminine pastime into financial power: “Brilliant success, of course, I did not look for, but some degree of security from positive failure was indispensable—I must not take my son to starve” (358).¹⁸

What is so disturbing about her renewed interest in painting, nevertheless, is the response this elicits from other men, as they translate its financial power back into sexual allurement. Mr. Hargrave, for instance, steals in when she is working at her easel and takes the occasion to declare his love to her, entreating her to run away with him. His passions aroused, a literal rape might have occurred had Helen not protected herself, ironically, with a tool of her art—her palette-knife. Markham, also, sees her art as merely the context for love-making. His conflation of the painting with the painter is clear: as Helen paints one day on the cliffs, Markham “could not help stealing a glance, now and then, from the splendid view at our feet to the elegant white hand that held the pencil, and the graceful neck and glossy raven curls that drooped over the paper” (88). Thus, to all three men, the image of the artist is more alluring than the art which she creates; the artist becomes the art. It is astonishing that, despite the obstacles, Helen is able to find both personal and material fulfillment in her painting and ultimately self-sufficiency and freedom from the male gaze.

This is especially true in the case of those emblems of true self-expression—her portraits of Huntingdon—over which she has ultimate victory. She burns one in front of Huntingdon's face and, finding another one after she has escaped, she keeps the frame to sell and muses on the picture itself:

I have put it aside; not, I think, from any lurking tenderness for the memory of past affection, not yet to remind me of my former folly, but chiefly that I may compare my son's features and countenance with this, as he grows up, and thus be enabled to judge how much or how little he resembles his father. …

(398)

Not bound to Huntingdon emotionally or financially, Helen extols this freedom evident in her decisions about the painting. She will disclose this emblem of hidden self-expression, utilize the picture in her role as mother, and even sell its parts for financial gain. Helen's artistic independence from the man in the painting is symbolically complete.

In the end, Helen has achieved personal and material self-fulfillment, yet it is not from her art as much as from her new marriage; Brontë's nod to the happy ending problematizes woman's artistic endeavor. So does Helen's rescue of her ultimate creation, her son, since many of her artistic endeavors are eclipsed or justified by her conventional motherly duties. Helen will never enter the professional male world of art again, and the one time she ventures, Brontë justifies it as an outgrowth of her maternal role.

Ultimately, then, what does Helen achieve as an artist? She learns the necessity of controlling her expressions, and of concealing them as well. Yet she also learns to fight for them and to reclaim them. She possesses the missing pages which leave Markham's reconstruction of her story permanently incomplete. She has the final victory over Huntingdon's portraits, retaining them even after their original is dead. Her transformation of art into financial security allows her a freedom most nineteenth-century heroines never find. Finally, she has redefined artistic self-expression to include the ordinary and the feminine, an impressive feat.

Helen partially reclaims her emotive art from the patriarchal world and, moreover, becomes a paradigm by which to understand other women artists' struggles. For instance, Brontë herself attempted to find both personal and financial fulfillment from her art. Like Helen, she also hid her art, behind a male pseudonym, but she was ultimately forced to use her own surname in order to distinguish Currer (her sister, Charlotte Brontë) and Acton Bell (her own pseudonym) for the critics. Condemned by people of the mid-nineteenth century as too harsh and “immoral” for a lady novelist, Anne Brontë, even in this century, is still judged in relation to her sex. Now she is considered too “moral,”¹⁹ a criticism often made of nineteenth-century women writers.²⁰

Anne Brontë the novelist faced and continues to face an artistic double standard. Thus, Helen's confrontations with patriarchy are relevant to those of many actual Victorian women artists. Their victories are as problematic as their struggles. In many ways, the woman artist becomes merely a tenant, lodging only temporarily in a world of patriarchal language and art.

Notes

1. One such omission, among many examples, is The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), edited by Ian Gregor, which contains no essays on Anne Brontë's works.

2. See Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857; Margaret Lane, The Brontë Story: A Reconsideration of Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1953); and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford, The Brontës' Web of Childhood (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964).

3. See Will Hale, Anne Brontë: Her Life and Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1929); Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford, Anne Brontë: Her Life and Work (New York: John Day, 1959); Winifred Gérin, Anne Brontë (London: Thomas Nelson, 1959); P. J. M. Scott, Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment (Totowa, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983).

4. Fortunately, a few critical approaches have appeared. See, for example, Juliet McMaster, “‘Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Modern Language Quarterly 43.4 (Dec. 1982): 352-70; and Marianne Thormahlen, “The Villain of Wildfell Hall: Aspects and Prospects of Arthur Huntingdon,” Modern Language Quarterly 88.4 (Oct. 1993): 831-41, which historically contextualize Arthur Huntingdon. Jan B. Gordon, “Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë's Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel,” Journal of English Literary History 51.4 (Winter 1984): 719-45; and N. M. Jacobs, “Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 16.3 (Fall 1986): 204-19, consider the multiple narrators and narratives of the novel.

5. May Sinclair, The Three Brontës (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, 1939 & 1967), 48. For the second quote, see the Penguin edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, edited by G. D. Hargreaves and introduced by Winifred Gérin; the cover goes on to call the novel “the first sustained feminist novel.” All references to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall will be to this edition (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979).

6. Undergoing a second edition within a month after its publication, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was extremely popular but as a succes de scandale; most critics were quick to fault its coarse depictions of Huntingdon's carousing and swearing. A typical review, from Sharpe's London Magazine (Vol. VII, September 1848), reads: “So revolting are many of the scenes, so coarse and disgusting the language put into the mouths of some of the characters … that our object in the present paper is to warn our readers, and more especially our lady-readers, against being induced to peruse it, either by the powerful interest of the story, or the talent with which it is written” (quoted in Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973, 118).

7. See Edith A. Kostka, “Narrative Experience as a Means to Maturity in Anne Brontë's Victorian Novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Connecticut Review 14.2 (Fall 1992): 41-47, and Elizabeth Langland, Anne Brontë: The Other One (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1989) for some feminist approaches which consider Helen's marital struggles.

8. For some brief discussions of the female artist in Anne Brontë's work, see Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 80-2; and Jane Sellars' “Art and the Artist as Heroine in the Novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë,” Brontë Society Transactions 20.2 (1990): 70-74.

9. As Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock write, in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (NY: Pantheon, 1981): “Victorian writers found a way of recognizing women's art compatible with their bourgeois patriarchal ideology. They contained women's activities, imposing their own limiting definitions and notions of a separate sphere … [which] precipitated women artists into historical oblivion …”(12). See also 8, 54, 83, 99, & 116 for discussions of the artistic double standard in nineteenth-century ideology. I am grateful to Rosalie Riegle who urged me to reevaluate women's art along these lines.

10. For instance, Inga-Stina Ewbank argues that “the frame fails to support the powerful middle portion. The Helen that paints pictures … has lost the stature of Helen, the wife of Arthur Huntingdon” (Their Proper Sphere, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966), 84, while Phyllis Bentley writes that “Helen's diary … proves less interesting than Gilbert Markham's account of his love for the mysterious new ‘tenant’” (The Brontë Sisters, London: Longmans, Green, 1959), 37. The debate continues in a recent article, where Lori A. Paige argues that “the device of the diary is defensible in the larger context of the written word's role in the novel” (226). See “Helen's Diary Freshly Considered,” Brontë Society Transactions 20:4 (1991), 224-7.

11. Conversations on Ebury Street (NY: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 254. Moore refers to Anne Brontë as a “sort of literary Cinderella” who, had she “lived ten years longer … would have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even higher” (253-60).

12. This poem was written by Brontë herself, though not published until 1920. Brontë thus concealed her poetry within a more traditional literary form for women—the novel—while still making it public, much as Helen later does with her painting.

13. As Langland argues, Helen is well aware of the aesthetic subjectivity of her diary entries. Of this moment Langland writes, “It is a telling moment. Helen describes the ‘very circumstances’, really a process of interpreting and fixing those circumstances in an interpretative framework; she amasses ‘trivial details’ to lend conviction to the interpretation” (125).

14. Langland points out that Gilbert edits Helen's account in another way, reinterpreting “the Fallen Woman and runaway wife of Victorian convention as the model of excellent womanhood that the novel proposes” (123). She praises how “Gilbert's perspectives merge with Helen's as he incorporates her letters into his narrative—sometimes the literal words, sometimes a paraphrase—until the reader cannot distinguish between them” (135). However, she does not comment on the power that Gilbert holds in this act of interpretation and editing.

15. Not recognizing the power in this moment of incompleteness, Jan B. Gordon argues that Helen's fragmented diary, among other “failed” writings, suggests “a world of proliferating ‘texts’ which cannot be contained, except by a desperate and arbitrary act of enclosure” (719-20).

16. Parker and Pollock discuss the popularity of nature subjects for amateur women artists in which “[p]aintings of flowers and the women who painted them became mere reflections of each other. Fused into the prevailing notion of femininity, the painting becomes solely an extension of womanliness and the artist becomes a woman only fulfilling her nature” (58).

17. See Gilbert and Gubar, 81.

18. Sellars discusses some of the struggles of actual nineteenth-century women artists who, like Helen, tried to sell their paintings for money (71).

19. Consider merely the titles of the following approaches to Anne Brontë which emphasize only the moral issues of The Tenant: “Anne Brontë: The Woman Writer as Moralist” in Their Proper Sphere by Inga-Stina Ewbank (1966); “Moralising in ‘Wildfell Hall’” in Emily and Anne Brontë by W. H. Stevenson (1968); and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Morality as Art” by T. K. Meier (1973).

20. Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977, 10-11) and Nina Baym (Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women, 1820-70, 2nd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993, 14-15) remind us of the bias which has existed against “female” literary characteristics, such as moral-religious themes.