“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”

It’s my third novel by the Brontë sisters I’ve read. And as it was with Jane Eyre and with Wuthering Heights, I am surprised with so many things. Do you know this feeling when somebody’s style and somebody’s tropes are familiar and alien at once? Old-fashioned and still relatable at the same time—literally? That’s me reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

It’s a novel set in the English countryside in the 1820s. Gilbert Markham, a not-so-wealthy gentryman, meets Helen Graham, a mysterious tenant of the nearby Wildfell Hall. Helen lives there with her little son, Arthur. She is presumed to be a widow, and she makes her living as a painter. Soon, a certain misunderstanding of her situation occurs, which makes her giving Gilbert her diary to read. Only on those pages the tragic story of her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon unfolds.

I’ve read various opinions on this book, critics included. Generally, it is praised. But it’s also presumed to be imperfect when it comes to pace and construction. Honestly? I don’t mind the “novel in a novel” structure. It was popular, it was an obvious way to introduce another part of narration. To my mind, Gilbert’s parts and Helen’s part are both well-written and moving, but some differences are obvious. Contrasts between them are striking, and I believe that Anne Brontë made them so on purpose. The quiet countryside, a welcoming local man who falls in love with a mysterious woman whose past is even more secretive… It was Anne Bronte’s idea, the idea to appear again in so many books and movies and TV series to follow. Which is, of course, quite similar to her sister Charlotte and her case—The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Jane Eyre, respectively, are like the founding mothers of particular genres. And when you know some tropes by heart, it’s refreshing and inspiring to see them in their original form.

After a way, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall surprised me more than the most famous novel by Charlotte Brontë. One may think that Anne Brontë played against some expectations very consciously, and she does it even nowadays, as her female characters openly admit how little freedom they have as women. We often complain on characters from the past talking like some second wave feminists, but I think that we should criticize the language, not the message. The proto-feminist message is there, in so many old texts. The language speaking literally about patriarchy —not necessarily. And the second novel of Anne Brontë is a good example of such proto-feminism, expressed the way it could have been expressed in a 1840s novel taking place in the 1820s. That’s why the most important thing is the marriage question, and how it could create an institutional abuse of every kind, economic abuse included. Helen is at her husband’s mercy in this novel, and has to think twice before finding any way to escape. How do you think, how many women are still in this terrible situation?

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is surprising not only because of the clear protofeminist message. It’s also subversive when it comes to our expectations on love and romance.

How many times have you read of love as of something powerful and omnipotent, something changing a morally grey character for better? Hey, even The Fifty Shades of Grey are about this as a series! Nothing like that happens in Anne Brontë’s novel though. Arthur Huntingdon isn’t portrayed in an over-sketched way, as an utter villain: He is forgiven by his wife in the very end. But his flaws are obvious to the reader, and we are constantly reminded how illusional is the trope of I can change him, Mama! And i am so glad to read about it because life is often like that, and people are what they are. They don’t change in a miraculous way. Anne Brontë went against our fantasies. She went against what we would later see in so many romance novels. But she also introduced the tropes of mystery and unresolved past, something which we would enjoy for decades and centuries old.

I find it interesting. I find it still resonating. And I think that we don’t need to agree on everything with the Brontë sisters to enjoy their novels.