The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Bronte's second novel, controversial in its day, was rediscovered by feminists in the seventies. It's probably my favourite of the Bronte's works.
"Unfit for the perusal of the very class of persons to whom it would be most useful (namely, imaginative girls likely to risk their happiness on the forlorn hope of marrying and reforming a captivating rake) owing to the profane expression, inconceivably coarse language, and revealing scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured".
An early review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
What on earth could a young, genteel woman have written to excite her reviewers so much (another critic asked to review the book returned it to the newspaper, saying it was unfit to be read)?
Anne's sister Charlotte also agreed with the critics. Following Anne's death, six months after the publication of the novel, Charlotte acted as Anne's literary executor and told a publisher who was planning on reprinting Anne's two novels that this book "hardly appears to me desirable to preserve". Then, in a biographical preface to an edition of Agnes Grey, Charlotte tried to distance her sister as far as possible from the book, saying that it didn't reflect on her character at all.
The novel suffered from Charlotte's lack of support. A bowdlerised edition was published in the 1850's that destroyed much of the narrative coherence and for a long time, Anne was seen as the lesser Bronte whose talents didn't reach the same heights as her sisters'. Feminists rediscovered the novel in the seventies, but Anne's reputation has only really began to recover in the last twenty years. And yet the book was a runaway success – the first edition sold out within six weeks. Obviously, its first readers responded to something in it, just as contemporary readers do. It's a powerful picture of a marriage gone disasterously wrong, and of the lack of power women in the Regency period had in that situation.
Like Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall features a story within a story. The outer narrative is a letter by Gilbert Markham to his brother-in-law, explaining how Gilbert met and courted his wife, Helen. Embedded within that narrative is Helen's diary, which details her first marriage to a man named Arthur Huntingdon. Some readers have felt that the diary format renders Helen a little distant from them, and they can't fully empathise with her. George Moore felt that "the diary broke the story in halves", and that Anne should have written a long scene in which Helen related her story to Gilbert directly. I disagree. The diary is the prefect format for detailing a marriage that starts off with bright hopes, and in which both party's feelings slowly curdle to contempt. Gilbert goes from calling his wife an "angel" to telling his friends they can have possess her if they want ("I give you leave"), while Helen moves from plans to reform him to writing "I hate him, I hate him" and plotting on how best to leave him.
From Helen's perspective, the laws governing women's rights within marriage at that time complicate the question of leaving. A married women was considered the property of her husband – she had no legal status separate from him, and no right to property or to independent income. Helen and Arthur have a child, also called Arthur, and Helen had no legal right to care for him. So when Helen does leave her husband, taking Arthur with her, and earning an income independently, she's breaking the law.
The complete lack of rights obviously gave men carte blanche to behave as they liked in marriage, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shows the consequences of that. Arthur emotionally abuses Helen and behaves in ways we would now recognise as coercive control. He abandons Helen for months without company on his estate, forbids her from going to her father's funeral, snatches her private diary from her hands and reads it, and when he learns that she's planning to leave, he confiscates her possessions and money, and prevents her from running the household to reduce her possible access to other income. There are no direct scenes of physical abuse in their marriage, but Arthur does injure his dog and, according to some critics, scenes of animal abuse at this time were seen as proxies for scenes of domestic violence against women. Meanwhile, Helen's friend Millicent does suffer physical abuse in her marriage to Arthur's friend Mr Hattersley. There's a scene where Millicent is being pinched and squeezed by Mr Hattersley, and Millicent says to him, "remember now that we are not at home". He also tells Helen that he abuses Millicent because she doesn't fight back.
The topic of sexual consent is also addressed (obliquely) within the text. At the time, rape wasn't considered possible in marriage because it was believed that women gave their consent to all sexual relations with their marriage vows, and that they couldn't withdraw that consent at a later date. There's a very famous scene in the novel where Helen shuts and bolts her bedroom door and tells Arthur that she doesn't want to see him again until morning, thus denying him his conjugal rights. You can see why this assertion of rights that a woman supposedly didn't have might have gone down poorly with conservative critics. (Their point of view is also represented in the novel, with the vicar in Gilbert's village declaring that Helen was absolutely wrong in leaving her husband as it was her wifely duty to cleave to him in all situations, and she had no right to go unless the physical abuse was so bad that her husband could be prosecuted for it.)
I've read this story before, but listened to it as an audio-book this time round through Audrey Audiobooks (they were running a listen-along in March). I loved the book so much this time that I totally ignored the schedule and listened to the full book within about twenty days. Anne's writing style isn't quite as loquacious as other Victorian authors (there are no descriptions that go on for paragraphs), and the conversation, especially when you listen to it, feels surprisingly modern. And as you can see, the themes the novel discusses are still relevant to us today – the conversation that Helen has with her aunt prior to her marriage shows that the dangerous belief that a woman could "change" a bad man was as pernicious then as it is now. The audiobook is narrated by two narrators, the male narrator reading Gilbert's letter, and the female, Helen's diary, and I thought both were excellent readers who brought the individual characters in the narrative fully to life. The notes from the guide to the novel were also really useful – I knew that women had few rights within marriage in the Regency era, but I didn't realise before quite how limited those rights were.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes classic literature, and anyone who is interested in feminist writing. It's definitely one to try if you've liked any of the other Bronte novels, and I think it might be my favourite of all of them.
What I've been reading this week
I have about 90 pages of A Guest at the Feast by Colm Toibin to go. I keep getting interrupted in my reading of an essay on Pope Francis, so I'm skipping that for the moment, reading the rest of the book, and will come back to it (and will quite possibly start the essay again). There's a really interesting piece on Pope John Paul II that highlights his personal qualities such as charisma and ability to captivate an audience, and how the general goodwill towards him created some of the problems his predecessors face. It's one of those essays where Toibin manages to articulate perfectly in a few words perceptions I was dimly aware of but hadn't really brought fully into thought, so reading it was a collection of 'aha' moments for me.
I started and finished Heartstopper vol. 5, which I didn't actually enjoy quite as much as some of the earlier editions. One of the pleasures of Heartstopper is the wide group of friends that Nick and Charlie have, and seeing how their lives play out too, but this book is focused so tightly on the protagonists that there's hardly anything of the other characters in here. The two strands of the plot are about Nick and Charlie's first sexual experiences, and Nick's decisions about what to do with his future (he's about to go into his final year of school and is thinking about university). You would be forgiven for forgetting that Nick is doing his GCSE's – it's barely mentioned in the text, and he doesn't seem to be at all worried about them (lucky him, I wish I had been that calm about exams). There are still some great scenes, and some great jokes, though...
As someone who was single for the whole of my teens and almost the entirety of my twenties, that page made me smile in recognition.
(The comic isn't actually orange, by the way, that's a feature on my phone that supposedly reduces the amount of blue light exposure at night. I'm not convinced by it.)
I also started and finished Art by Yesmina Reza. It's a very simple, very funny, three-handed play. Serge has bought a painting: a white canvas, painted white, with very fine white lines crossing it that you can see if you squint. He paid 200,000 francs for it ("it's AN ANTRIOS", he announces to his friend Marc). Marc thinks the painting is shit and tells him so. Yvan, "the human sponge", hates conflict and tries to mediate between his two friends. It all comes to a head one evening, when the discussion about the painting moves into very personal insults about Yvan's fiancee, Marc's wife, and Serge's replacing of Marc with the Antrios...This play is hilarious – I had a constant smile on my face while reading it – and I would definitely recommend it if you get a chance to go see it.
Have a good week and see you on Wednesday, when I'll be writing about The Idea of You (the Harry Styles fanfic I mentioned). It's been adapted for the screen and is due for release in May, so there's a bit of time if you're interested in reading it first...