SOURCE: “The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in English Studies, Vol. 63, No. 3, June, 1982, pp. 198-206.

[In the following essay, Jackson asserts that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, despite the flaw of its somewhat burdensome narrative structure, avoids melodrama by counter-balancing Helen Huntingdon's psychological realism with the debauched behavior of her husband Arthur.]

Author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë is the least known of the Brontë family, but seems ready for rediscovery in this period of new interest in minor and neglected women writers. Measured against her sisters, Anne becomes the inferior artist, either because her novels lack the passion of a Jane Eyre or Villette, or the ‘other world’ drama of a Wuthering Heights. Without the searing intensity of Charlotte or the dramatic inventiveness of Emily, however, Anne demonstrates through her writing that she has a conscious, perceptive control of her fictional materials. This control gives Anne Brontë a claim to artistic merit in her own right.

George Moore once labeled Agnes Grey the most ‘perfect prose narrative in English letters’,¹ but this judgment today is assuredly a minority opinion, as it certainly was in its own time. But even if Agnes Grey is ‘perfect’ in recreating the moral realism which seems to have been its aim, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the work showing greater artistry, based on a greater understanding of character psychology. Though at times the novel seems to be a replay of the traditional morality theme, complete with moral hierarchies and voiced reminders of eternal damnation for the unrepentant,² it possesses a moral realism which goes beyond the earnestness of content present in the earlier Agnes Grey. Even more important, its greater understanding of character psychology is intrinsically related to narrative technique, particularly in the choice of ‘storyteller’ and in the structuring of plot materials. Both point of view and plot organization, in fact, are used to increase the novel's credibility.

At first, the narrative structure seems extraordinarily cumbersome for what is basically an uncomplicated story. The novel consists of two letters, the first covering an initial ‘explanation’ as well as Chapter One, the second comprising the remainder of the two volume work.³ Within the long second letter is a journal covering six years, letters within letters, and finally the information that the entire story is being told from a retrospective view some twenty to twenty-six years after the events described. Cumbersome though this organization may be, some interesting effects do accrue from this manner of structuring plot materials.

The ‘explanation’ conveys the information, in the voice of gentleman farmer Gilbert Markham, that he has been asked by his friend Jack Halford to give him some information regarding his past life. Markham had not done so at the time and now wishes to atone for his delay by giving ‘a full and faithful account of certain circumstances connected with the most important event of my life …’⁴ Chapter One then relates how Gilbert meets and falls in love with Helen ‘Graham’, a woman who has moved into a neighboring estate with her young son, and who has taken up painting as a means of financial support. When Gilbert professes his love, Helen coldly rebuffs him. When he confronts her with what he believes is evidence that she has compromised her reputation by a clandestine affair with a neighbor (Frederick Lawrence), Helen sends Gilbert off with a journal that she claims will explain her actions. Thus ends the early, ‘framework’ section of the narrative.

The journal recounts how Helen ‘Graham’ fell in love with and married Arthur Huntingdon some few years earlier. (The time span seems much greater, primarily because of the contrast between the youthful, headstrong, and naïve young woman narrating this part of the journal, and the mysterious woman Gilbert Markham knows, but not more than six or seven years have elapsed between these two stages of Helen's life).

As the journal reveals, Arthur Huntingdon turns out to be a classic case of Victorian debauchery⁵—a drunkard who verbally abuses his wife, who prefers the companionship of fellow or even potential debauchees, who prefers to spend more time in London than with his wife on their country estate, and who feels it is his right to have affairs with whatever pretty women come his way. The story of Huntingdon's increasing lack of self-control as he declines into greater dissipation is extraordinarily well done. We hear of his going off to London, even in the very early days of the marriage, and we are kept in Helen's position—not knowing really what it is that Arthur does in London, but gradually coming to believe that it is anything but gentlemanly. By keeping the reader restricted to the diarist's point of view, Anne Brontë makes us believe it is debauchery so great it cannot be described. From the comments later dropped by Huntingdon's ‘friends’, who visit his country estate, we are given support for our belief.

Huntingdon not only leads a dissolute life but is also the leader of his set, and therefore is responsible for drawing others into his debauchery. Helen's realization of this, the confrontations between Arthur and Helen, her refusal to sleep with him, his affair with two women (his young son's governess as well as the wife of one of his ‘friends’) all have considerable shock value. Finally, her suffering is so great that Helen leaves with her child, and with the secret assistance of her brother (the Frederick Lawrence whom Gilbert had thought of as Helen's secret lover), has taken an assumed name and hidden her residence from her angered husband. Here the journal ends. Gilbert Markham is deeply shocked at the experiences Helen has lived through, but her revelations have only made him love her all the more.

The materials following the journal comprise the final section of the novel's framework. Gilbert and Helen admit their love for each other, but both respect her married position (though Gilbert had just been at the point of trying to convince Helen that her marriage to such a scoundrel could not really be considered as a marriage). Gilbert maintains that he will wait for her to be free. Soon after, Helen hears her husband is grievously ill, and she returns to nurse him through his illness. After word of Arthur Huntingdon's death, Gilbert hears nothing from Helen, but does not, himself, correspond with her. Hearing rumours of her approaching marriage, Gilbert is devastated but travels to her estate to discover the truth. The truth, he soon finds out, is that her brother is to be married to a young protégée of Helen's. After one or two false starts, Gilbert proposes to Helen and they marry. Gilbert closes his narrative, revealing that his listener has been his brother-in-law, and that he and Helen have been happily married for some twenty years.

Though the novel ends as a conventional pre-1880 Victorian novel usually does, with troubles resolved and marriage part of that resolution and reward for persevering through trial, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is quite unconventional in its allowing the sinner to remain unrepentant, even on his deathbed, and its revealing a marital discord full of suffering, agony, and even ugliness. As Derek Stanford points out, Anne Brontë ‘exploded’ the myth of marriage and the ‘semi-sacrosanct’ belief in ‘the notion of conjugal obedience’ that a wife owed her husband. ‘The novel shows how continued intimacy with a worthless husband one has come to despise is a most contagious form of degradation’.⁶

These are strong issues for a novel of 1849, and their handling must cope with the danger of letting materials outrun the author's control. Arthur Huntingdon's story poses the particular danger of passing from strong drama into sheer melodrama—a story of a debauched Victorian ‘gentleman’ as told by his naïve, excitable, uninformed wife. Such a story, of course, would have a certain charm all its own—but it would not be Anne Brontë's story. As it is, Arthur's story is so strong that it is sometimes considered the most important, most realistic, the most dramatic—in short, the best part of the novel.⁷ Another potential problem for Miss Brontë's text is the inadequacy of Gilbert Markham—shallow, petulant, certainly not worthy of Helen Huntingdon's love and a puzzling choice as her marriage partner. Helen herself seems to pale before Arthur's excesses, and thus the novel's characterization runs the risk of disproportionately favoring Arthur and, what would be ironic but not unusual in fiction, favoring the ‘sinner theme’. The dissolute character, because of the inherent excitement of his life, often threatens the balance of characterization in fiction or drama. With such a character in this narrative, Helen Huntingdon runs the risk of becoming a mere storyteller, an observer-participant whose own story is subordinate to what she observes of her husband's gradual disintegration.

Other problems exist, as well. Does Helen, because of her inexperience of the world, make Arthur out to be worse than he actually is? Would a man of the world understand Arthur and forgive him his ‘lapses’? Anne Brontë consciously controls Arthur's story, however, and keeps it within the realistic sphere by means of both internal (within the journal) and external (within the framework) sections of her narrative. In a matter-of-fact manner, Helen recounts in her journal how some of Arthur's companions leave him or at least make revealing comments on the dissipation of his life. A second way in which the reader becomes convinced of the journal's accuracy occurs through the medium of the journal itself. Helen's early view of Arthur and her marriage are defined, committed through the language on the journal's pages, as she then perceives things. Through the retrospect of a calmer time, with its chronological and psychological maturity, Helen has the possibility of measuring the journal's early information against later perceptions. The older and wiser Helen, we are to understand, has changed nothing in the journal, nor warns Gilbert of any problems in its ‘reading’ of her marital experiences.

The dissipation of Arthur Huntingdon is sufficiently heinous that it calls for even more measures insuring credibility to the story, thus further removing it from melodrama. Though Gilbert Markham is not very worldly-wise, his basically good nature, his own adherence to truth, and his respect for Helen's truthfulness make him a relatively knowledgeable and objective observer. Gilbert's acceptance of Helen's story with no reservation or doubt of its accuracy is a means through which Anne Brontë increases credibility.⁸

Having Gilbert (a male voice) convey Helen's story to his brother-in-law (a male audience), and then having Gilbert indicate Halford's acceptance of Helen's story are fairly subtle touches in what first seems a heavy-handed use of the epistolary technique. Stereotyped roles of male and female seem to be used here to good effect, though not without some irony. (Helen, for instance, is not prone to hysterics or exaggeration, and neither is Gilbert a paragon of ‘masculine’ virtues of objectivity, wisdom, and silent strength). Yet if such stereotyped roles could be expected, as they certainly would be by part of the Victorian audience, they would only increase the credibility, the audience's impulse to accept Helen's account as truthful, since Gilbert accepts it as such.

Though Gilbert Markham matures almost too rapidly after reading the journal, his change is believable, and it is primarily the journal itself that accounts for the change. Earlier, Gilbert had been seen as self-centered and petulant, but certainly not beyond the capacity to change. Family and friends in his narrow world of farm and village all treat him as a ‘star’ figure. He is a first-born son and an eligible bachelor in a village beset with hopeful maidens, and self-centeredness seems an ordinary result of such attentions—yet his is a good nature, capable of feeling shame as well as expressing generosity.

At first, after reading the journal, Gilbert is disappointed that Helen's account stopped just short of giving her initial opinion of him (an unfavorable one, he is sure). But then he quickly comments: ‘I could readily forgive her prejudice against me, and her hard thoughts of our sex in general, when I saw to what brilliant specimens her experience had been limited’ (III, 130-1). Again, however, Gilbert reverts to thinking of himself: ‘If, at first, her opinion of me had been lower than I deserved I was convinced that now my deserts were lower than her opinion …’ But then he cannot resist thinking: ‘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: all this was too sacred for any eyes but her own, and she had done well to keep it from me’ (III, 131-2). Gilbert thus reveals certain signs of maturity, an honest struggle to be fair and compassionate, but cannot help interpreting Helen's experiences as they affect himself.

Gilbert's letter continues this struggle, as he then confesses to his correspondent Halford that he took pleasure in watching Helen's love for Huntingdon disappear:

not that I was at all insensible to Mrs. Huntingdon's wrongs or unmoved by her sufferings, but I must confess, I felt a kind of selfish gratification in watching her husband's gradual decline in her good graces, and seeing how completely he extinguished all her affection at last. The effect of the whole, however, in spite of all my sympathy for her, and my fury against him, was to relieve my mind of an intolerable burden and fill my heart with joy, as if some friend had roused me from a dreadful nightmare

(III, 133-4).

The journal allows Gilbert to respond in private, to turn over his responses and discover their origin and meaning. With Halford as the recipient of his letter (which traces the responses) Gilbert is aware that someone else is passing judgment on his actions, or that at least someone else is aware that there are actions to be judged. The fact that Gilbert does reveal so much of himself to Halford ought to make the novel's audience aware that his is a public confession, and one that also reveals his essential honesty and generous nature.

From this point to the novel's end, Gilbert rises in our estimation. He sees the shallowness of his village companions, though he is a bit too quick and even snobbish in turning away from them. Yet, in juxtaposition to Helen and her experiences, their lives seem silly and selfish, as was his own. Later, he becomes a friend of Frederick Lawrence and confesses to his own boorish and unpleasant attitudes toward him earlier, when Gilbert had physically attacked him in his frustration over believing Lawrence and Helen were in love with one another. Again, he shows signs of selfishness as he is tempted to try to convince Helen she might love him in freedom, since her marriage would not be recognized as such by ‘Heaven’. Yet, Gilbert immediately asks her forgiveness for his suggestion. Arthur Huntingdon and Gilbert Markham are pointed contrasts, though Gilbert is not so perfect that he is idealized. Gilbert's self-centeredness and petulance are never completely eradicated, but when he recognizes his faults, he readily admits them and he feels ashamed or asks Helen's forgiveness. Gilbert is considerably matured over the course of his love for Helen Huntingdon and ends the novel by becoming not an ideal but a believable marriage partner.

Though Gilbert's characterization has some nice touches, and Arthur Huntingdon's presentation makes him a strong dramatic figure, Helen Huntingdon is the most psychologically interesting and important character. In a very real sense, Helen's own story (and not the story of Arthur's dissipation she recounts in her journal) is the novel's raison d'être, yet it is often overlooked because of Arthur's more dominant and dramatic story. The novel's framework and its journal sections, in fact provide a special kind of insight into Helen Huntingdon's psyche as it reacts to the stress of an unhappy marriage. This insight includes not only immediate stress but also the effect of stress felt over several years.

Because of the novel's organization, the older Helen is presented first, and she is clearly presented as a psychologically distressed and troubled woman. In three early episodes in the framework section, the reader sees the externals of Helen as Gilbert Markham does, though the astute reader might suspect that the author is being ironic when she has Gilbert declare to himself that he would not care to know such a woman. This, at least, is his initial reaction when he catches his first glimpse of ‘Mrs. Graham's’ face during a church service. But this brief reference to a cold, hard, severe face gives special insight into the effects of distress, and should not be dismissed merely as an ironic handling of the ‘reluctant lover’ theme, as it appears on the surface.

A second episode occurs when Gilbert tries to befriend ‘Mrs. Graham's’ young son, Arthur, only to have the mother grab her child away from him, an impulsive action born of paranoia about her son's safety. Again, Gilbert notes a look of ‘repellent scorn’ on Helen's face—‘it seemed like the natural expression of the face …’ (I, 37-8).

Finally, in the third episode, Helen warms toward Gilbert, enough at any rate that he believes he has fallen in love with her. At this point, to explain her sternness and inaccessibility, she gives to Gilbert the journal detailing her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon. What these three episodes do, then, is delineate an apparently cold, stern woman—an effect whose cause waits to be revealed. As much as Anne Brontë tries to provoke suspense in the reader by using Gilbert's curiosity as a lead, her main emphasis in this framing section is clearly on Helen's pain and suffering, marked by agitation, disdain, and the pinched, dry features she first presents for public view. The framing section with its gradual unfolding of ‘Mrs. Graham’ to an unsuspecting Gilbert prepares the reader to discover the psychological causation of her cold, scornful demeanor and her mysterious life-style as well, surely, as to discover the ‘facts’ of her story.

As mentioned earlier, Arthur's story is prominent because it is dramatic, obvious yet fascinating in its grandiose way. Its moral function is clear: beware of an undisciplined life—with its neglect of duties, it leads to great tragedies. But, more than this, Anne Brontë also answers a question that other novels of her time do not ask: what happens to a marriage and to the innocent partner when one partner (specifically, the male) leads a solipsistic life, where personal pleasures are seen as deserved, where maleness and the role of husband is tied to the freedom to do as one wants, and femaleness and the role of wife is linked to providing service and pleasure not necessarily sexual, but including daily praise and ego-boosting and, quite simply, constant attention.

Neither Charlotte nor Emily deal with the female half of an unhappy marriage, particularly marriage with such a one as an Arthur Huntingdon. Both sisters, however, indicate they are well aware of long-suffering wives in the admittedly quite different situation surrounding Isabella Linton as Heathcliff's wife, and the potential awaiting Jane if she were to marry either Rochester (as bigamist) or St. John Rivers (as missionary). Neither author handles the issue as Anne Brontë does: she concentrates her energies on Helen's story, and through the means of framework and journal, we are able to study causation and development of stress. Significantly, the journal allows the subject to comment on and analyze the reactions and changes in her own personality.

The journal details a young Helen—an impulsive, headstrong girl who decides on Arthur as a husband because she is genuinely attracted to him and because, in contrast to the suitors her aunt encourages, Arthur appears more attractive. Clearly, Helen responds to Arthur's sexual charm—but it is real, and the journal makes the reader understand that Helen has physical desires that older people are not taking into account in their very Victorian way of managing her future. This physical attraction seems also to be recognized by Helen herself in the first part of her journal.

Helen is married in December of 1821, but as early as two months before her marriage, her fears reveal she has already gained some unpleasant knowledge about Arthur's less-than-generous instincts. Her response to their wedding trip continues to demonstrate the unhappy realization of the kind of marriage she has made: ‘When I had expressed a particular interest in anything that I saw or desired to see, it had been displeasing to him in as much as it proved that I could take delight in anything disconnected with himself’ (II, 69).

By February of 1822, Helen admits that if she had known earlier what she now realizes, she would not have fallen in love with Arthur and would not, therefore, have married him. At first, such a comment seems naïve, but then she continues to clarify her point: Helen admits she still loves Arthur, but sees he is not the person she ought to have married, since he will not share with her his life, nor does he show any sympathetic concern for her own needs. Later she discovers all too well why he cannot let her into his world. These early distinctions and understandings, however, demonstrate how rapidly Helen Huntingdon has matured over approximately a four month period.

Helen's journal insights into the early months of her marriage continue until the Fall of 1824 and reveal how rapidly she continues to mature—but most of the changes are caused by unpleasant experiences. She and Arthur, as she painfully realizes, have two very different ideas of what marriage and love are. Anne Brontë's point here is not as simplistic as it might appear on the surface. This is no sentimental treatment of a wronged, long-suffering wife. While this section of the journal traces Arthur's increasing debauchery and neglect of Helen, it also traces the gradual hardening of Helen's personality. She describes, for instance, how she starts to nag Arthur, and how nagging turns into lecturing. She begins to manifest a superior attitude, a moral righteousness that increasingly alienates what remains of Arthur's good intentions. Helen is aware of how she is changing, but cannot stop herself; when she feels how much Arthur has wronged her, she ‘was determined he should feel it too’ (II, 178). Helpless to change the situation for the better, she decides to strike back. Again, the journal reveals she is well aware of how much the situation is changing her own personality.

The breakdown in communications becomes complete when Helen discovers Arthur has arranged a lover's tryst with Annabella Lowborough, one of their Autumn house guests, and the wife of one of Arthur's ‘friends’. After this event, and in the last months of her life with Arthur Huntingdon, Helen becomes very cold towards him and reveals he is not allowed into her bedroom. Her love is now ‘crushed and withered’ (II, 333), but so is her personality. More suffering occurs when Arthur tries to interfere with the education of his son, and Helen becomes deeply worried over the effect of Arthur's example on the child. Plans to leave Arthur are made and abandoned because he discovers and destroys the paintings Helen has carefully worked on—paintings which were to be sold as a means of financial support in her future refuge. In one of his drunken fits, finally, Arthur offers his wife to the highest bidder among his friends. After Helen discovers that the governess Arthur has installed in their home for the ostensible purpose of educating their son is actually his mistress, her desperation becomes so great that she takes her child and leaves Arthur: ‘My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can’ (III, 39). After some six years of marriage, Helen cries: ‘Thank Heaven, I am free and safe at last’ (III, 114).

Admittedly, there are some melodramatic touches here as Hargrave offers his assistance in Helen's escape plans, but then reveals he desires her to be his mistress, and as Helen discovers the depravity of Arthur's friends, and his own outrageous actions. These actions become more outrageous, systematically following one another so that the reader shares Helen's growing pain and the hardening of her heart towards Arthur. And there are other important insights into Helen's reactions as well: she admits that she has ‘unamiable feelings against my fellow-mortals—the male part of them especially’ (III, 75). She perceives that men are free, where women are not, and the bitterness of this perception finally leads her to give succinct advice to her young friend Esther Hargrave: ‘[You] must, indeed, be careful whom you marry—or rather, you must avoid it altogether’ (III, 85).

The misogamist theme here is clearly Helen's own, and not Anne Brontë's. Esther Hargrave eventually marries Helen's brother Frederick Lawrence; Lord Lowborough divorces the unfaithful Annabella and remarries; Mary Millward marries Richard Wilson; Hattersley reforms and realizes his wife loves him. All these turn out to be happy marriages. Helen herself does believe such happiness is possible when she defines for the Victorian audience what marriage ought to be: ‘The greatest worldly distinctions and discrepancies of rank, birth, and fortune are as dust in the balance compared with the unity of accordant thoughts and feelings, and truly loving, sympathizing hearts and souls’ (III, 333).

This recognition explains why Helen loves and marries Gilbert, a man who on the surface seems shallow and all too prone to faults of pride and petulance, yet who is basically good and, significantly, recognizes and respects Helen's ‘personhood’. After that year of waiting, between Arthur's death and Gilbert's proposal, Helen is still reserved and even distant, again a sign of Anne Brontë's understanding the character she has created. And though Gilbert twenty years after these events tells Halford of his happiness in marriage, we really hear nothing of the later Helen—rightly so, I believe, since this ‘shadow’ future suggests that Helen has been irrevocably touched by the sufferings of her earlier life. Even so many years of marital happiness with Gilbert seem not quite enough to right the past wrongs done to Helen's psychic life.

Anne Brontë's understanding of psychological stress and its long term effects, as well as a certain understanding of women's vulnerable position in marriage, emerges through her creation of Helen Huntingdon. The drama of Arthur's debauchery is counterpointed, not so much by the moral earnestness of Brontë's theme, but by the psychological realism of Helen Huntingdon. The framework device utilizing the male voice of Gilbert Markham and the male reader-listener in Halford, as well as Helen's acceptance of her journal's accuracy, even with the advantage of retrospective judgment—all these show considerable control of her materials. Though the journal and letter devices are not very subtle means of story-telling, Anne Brontë's handling of her narrative does increase the credibility of both the male and female characters. A potential Victorian melodrama thus becomes a perceptive and realistic reading of men, women, and marriage.

Notes

1. As quoted in Derek Stanford, Anne Brontë: Her Life and Work, by Derek Stanford and Ada Harrison (New York: 1959), p. 227.

2. Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists (Cambridge: 1968), pp. 73-4.

3. Significant changes occur between the first and second editions of the novel. The first omits a Preface, in which Anne Brontë presents her claim for realism: ‘My object in writing … was not simply to amuse the Reader; neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth …’ (Second Edition)

   Though the second edition contains this Preface, it omits the ‘Explanation’ and, instead, opens immediately with Chapter one, thus depriving the reader of knowing why the material is presented. See G. D. Hargreaves, ‘Incomplete Texts of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Brontë Society Transactions (1972), pp. 113-17.

4. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 3 Vols. (London: 1848), pp. 1-4.

5. Arthur Huntingdon is usually considered to have been based on Branwell Brontë. See Stanford, pp. 223-4.

6. Stanford, p. 232.

7. W. A. Craik, The Brontë Novels (London: 1971), p. 232.

8. Craik briefly treats the issue of Gilbert's contribution to the novel's credibility. See p. 231.