I’ve learned I really love the writing of both Charlotte and Anne Brontë. It just slides through my mind like silk threads. Though I was a bit caught up by the questionable comma usage throughout The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I’m not sure if that’s a Brontë issue or a Wordsworth edition issue), the language and the syntax are perfectly suited to my taste.
This novel is structured with an embedded narrative of Helen’s diary within the present-day narrative, which is written in epistolary form. So it’s a diary within a letter within a novel. Very similar to how Wuthering Heights has a distantly removed POV, but while I had a lot of complaints about that structure in Emily Brontë’s novel, it didn’t bother me so much in Tenant. I think because both the diary and letters are written down directly by the main protagonists instead of by an observer.
When I got to Helen’s diary part (it takes up a large chunk from the middle to near the end of the novel), I felt a bit apprehensive over leaving the present-day romance between Helen and Gilbert for so long. I was worried it would muddle the pace, destroy the tension, and dampen my enjoyment. But that diary part might be what remains strongest in my memory.
Even obeying the social delicacies of the time (though the public still raised a significant, sanctimonious fuss), the book is still quite scandalous. Helen fled from a vice-filled, pleasure-seeking, unfaithful, drunken party-thrower of a man and took her son with her (which was illegal and effectively a kidnapping at the time), made her own living through her paintings, and was proudly outspoken about her feminist views. All this at a time when the most progressive popular opinion was that a woman should only leave her husband under the most dire physical abuse.
I had previously written that I was shocked that something so scandalous was written at this time, but then I had to remind myself of Wuthering Heights. But Tenant is shocking in such a realistic way while that novel was shocking in an idealistic, wildly romanticized way. That might be why Charlotte refused to publish it under Anne’s name after her sisters’ deaths like she did with their other works. Apparently, Anne was heavily influenced by her brother’s descent into alcoholism, drugs, and vice when she wrote Tenant. According to Charlotte:
“The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid. She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others.”
But according to Anne:
“I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”
So Anne being lesser known of the sisters might be the result of that repressing action of Charlotte herself. Which is unfortunate since this is the boldest of the novels written by the sisters that I’ve read so far. And the most revealing about societal limitations placed on married women at that time and how the family unit was expected to function.
I came to the conclusion while reading that it was the most feminist classic I’ve ever read, especially when considering Helen’s own arguments on female strength of mind and will, by comparison of the differing attitudes towards domesticity of Helen and Gilbert’s mother, through how Helen negated her husband’s idea of a complacent wife, and how Ralph Hattersley wasn’t as satisfied with a submissive Millicent as he thought he’d be, but then…Helen made a decision that had me questioning that conclusion. And it wasn’t her decision to settle with another man. This might get spoilery, but it was her decision to return to her ailing husband. He was not dying at that point, but she felt it was her duty to go nurse him back to health. Did she feel it was her Christian duty or her duty as a wife? It could only be a strong mix of both, and the latter part of it is what bothers me. Why attempt reconciliation? It felt like a step back, conceding that the truths she had discovered weren’t actually true: that not all men can be reformed through marriage, and not all marriages can last if they are abusive and ill-advised. It was too risky to bring her child under that roof again. Of course, Arthur Huntingdon then died, and Helen was fueled by her religion to attempt a reformation for the sake of his soul, which I’m sure is very noble. I would not consider her decision as questionable if she went only after she found out he was dying and went purely out of Christian duty, and thus not putting herself and her son at such risk, but these are probably my own uninteresting and nitpicky scruples.
But continuing down the spoiler train, I do find myself wondering about another decision of hers: to marry Gilbert. (And, by the way, it might have been too narratively convenient for Mr. Huntingdon to die so soon so they could get married, just as how it was a bit narratively convenient for Jane Eyre to return to Mr. Rochester after his wife’s death.) While Gilbert was a lot less coarse, had less vices, and was more morally and intellectually aligned with Helen than Mr. Huntingdon, he didn’t strike me as a particularly remarkable character. He did exhibit a highly questionable temper in a certain violent interaction with Mr. Lawrence, and he wasn’t entirely gracious to his family or friends when he was down, but he could be pleasant on the whole, and that’s about the most I can say about him. Gilbert and Helen’s romantic attachment seemed to grow in the background, only conveyed through Gilbert’s relentless seeking of her on the moors. I don’t remember seeing a lot of reasons for Helen to be attached. That might be inherently a fault of the epistolary form; I suppose it would be hard for Gilbert to conjecture in a letter how Helen would be feeling during this time.
But on the whole, I very much respect the novel. It perfectly echoed my own fears (healthy to have to some extent but perhaps unhealthily manifested too anxiously in me) of deciding too hastily and being trapped in a toxic marriage: “though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least, will not be more than you can bear,” and I was anxious along with Helen for her boy to avoid the awful influence of his father: “How shall I teach him, hereafter, to respect his father, and yet to avoid his example?”
And reading this book so soon after rereading Jane Eyre has given me the hunger to finish all of the Brontës’ works. I have already since read Villette and ordered the rest of the repertoire. So now I have an exciting winter reading project!
