Classics Considered

It has taken me about 22 years (counting from the time I first read Jane Eyre) to get around to finally reading this novel. I don’t know why I avoided it so long, other than that my obsession with the Brontës had been replaced with an obsession with other authors, and Agnes’s second novel just didn’t make it onto my radar in time. What I will say is—reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a somewhat wiser, married 30-something hits very different than it would have when I was a naive, trusting tween, and the timing really feels right for this particular novel.

The frame story is Gilbert Markham’s fascination with the new widow who moves into his neighborhood. Gilbert is a gentleman farmer, and Mrs Helen Graham is a painter and mother of a little boy named Arthur. Her aloof elegance attracts him, even while she holds him well at bay from confessing his attachment. Things get complicated when the town gossips seek to expose Helen’s suspected wrongdoings. Gilbert must find it in himself to learn the truth of her past, at the risk of breaking his heart and losing his best friend.

I found the first 100 pages or so to be the slowest of slow burns, but once the perspective changes to Helen’s POV, the drama unfolds rapidly. Anne Brontë is a methodical writer and takes great pains to show us how the pious, optimistic Helen comes to be married to an alcoholic rake. Mr Huntingdon must join the ranks of Collins’s Count Fosco or Dostoyevsky’s Totsky as one of the most sadistic characters in classic literature. Yet unlike Fosco or Totsky, he does not burst upon the reader in all of his villainy. Rather, his dark side is revealed slowly, like some kind of water torture upon poor Helen.

In this way, Anne’s novel takes a detour from the Dark Romanticism of her sisters’ books (or The Woman in White, with which it shares many surface qualities). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is best viewed as the starkest realism, easily holding its own alongside a work by Zola or Hardy. Helen’s fervent Christian faith is the main foil to her hardships, but Anne wisely resists from making her heroine flawless. Helen is a little too preachy and holds some questionable doctrines, both of which contribute to her making a major misstep in marriage. Still, there is something particularly profound about a pious heroine misled by her own idealism into making the biggest mistake of her life.

This was an excellent read, if not a perfect read. I felt the frame story dragged on way too long, and it seemed Anne was trying so hard to make Mrs Graham’s story palatable to her reader. To be sure, “Acton Bell” had no choice but to craft her story for a critical, male-dominated audience, and the fact that the book was still condemned for being too “brutal” is telling of how necessary her painstaking approach was. It also seems unfair to critique a Victorian novel for slowness, as so many were. However, I can only relate my own reading experience, and I do feel the novel, even with all of the above caveats, could have been a bit more succinct.