Tennant of WildFell Hall part 1

Anne Bronté's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "might be said to be the first manifesto for 'Women's Lib'." Winifred Gárin,introduction to Penguin Classics Edition, 1979.

This comment by Winifred Gárin needs to be considered from three positions : the placement of the comment in a contemporary social context; the literal truth of the comment; the extent to which Anne Bronté's novel can be interpreted as having feminist content actively forwarded as a social/political alternative to contemporary beliefs. Before begining a consideration of Tenant of Wildfell Hall itself, I will deal with the issue of social placement and literal truth in order to create a more fully substantiated context for Anne Bronté's feminist ideas to be placed in.

Perhaps the most immediately disconcerting and dismissive aspect of Gárin's comment is her use of the diminuted form of Women's Liberation. In 1979, the use of this form, Women's Lib, comes close to being pejorative as well as dismissive. It certainly would not be expected to be used by an individual with any degree of respect for the ideas of feminism. The use of this comment at the begining of the introduction to the Penguin Classics Edition of Tenant, in fact more indicates an attempt to use feminism as an awkwardly set selling hook to the book's publication in a time when feminism might be viewed as a selling point: "the first sustained feminist novel." (jacket comment, Penguin Classics Ed., The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This is borne out to a certain extent by Gárin's subsequent failure to explore more fully the feminist content of Tenant in the body of the introduction, dealing more extensively with the autobiographical source of Bronté's material, the driving theology and her flawed plot structure. Given this emphasis in her introductory discussion it is significant that she has not identified or labelled the novel as being a theological novel, or an autobiographical novel or even a flawed novel. As the first manifesto of women's lib, all other aspects of the novel can be assumed to be shaped in terms of it's social/political propositions. It can subsequently be read less as a novel of any description and more as a declaration of social/political intent. A further diminution of the women's movement and hence any ideas responsive to that movement that might be contained within Tenant seems to be achieved in the comment's declaration that this work might be considered the first manifesto of "women's lib". A diminution because while giving the work a position of primacy, it effectively denies the active growth of the women's movement leading up to Bronté's publication of Tenant and further denies the extent to which this activity had grown out of the work of previous generations of women. In addition to this, the firstness of the novel can become, with it's women's libness, a further categorization of the Tenant away from being treated as a novel to be considered as a novel, so that this novel joins those "works or authors (that) are belittled by assigning them to the 'wrong' category, denying them entry to the 'right' category" (Russ,49).

Gárin's comment is difficult to construe in a positive light. If she believes there is such a strong feminist content to the novel she is decidedly dismissive of that content in her discussion. Her choice of language is certainly inappropriate for the contemporary political attitudes and her placement of the novel seems more diminishing than enlarging in it's categorization.

In 1848, the year of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's publication the Seneca Falls women's rights convention, in the U.S.A. "pressed for suffrage and an array of liberties - education, jobs, marital and property rights,'voluntary motherhood, health and dress reform." (Faludi,69). In a Declaration issued from the Convention, Elizabeth Cady "set out the injustices visited on women by man : He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has made her, if married, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property... He has framed the laws of divorce...as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education. He has created a false public sentiment by giving the world a different code of morals for men an women." (Miles,223) Tenant addresses all but one of these issues in some form or other, so the existence of a feminist content to the novel is clearly established. However, given the timing of these two events it would seem to be more a reflection of a wide spread attitude, an upward turning of Faludi's woman's movement as progressive cork screw showing another rising expectation of women's rights.(Faludi,66,67). Anne Bronté's writing of Tenant was not some great trigger of consciousness which alerted the nation to a challenging new social/political reality. It does, however, show her aware of feminist issues in her society (essentially the same issues as exist today) and active in promoting these ideas within her work. Amongst the incidents highlighting these issues, which Bronté must have been aware of, was the case of Cecilia Maria Cochrane who left her husband to live in France with her mother. Tricked into returning she was locked up to prevent any further escape attempts. The court's decision : "Women were born to live in a state of perpetual wardship to father or husband" (Miles,221). This is the reality of marriage that faces Helen in Tenant, a reality which enforced the rights of husbands over wives even to the point of violence as the 1848 case of Mrs Dawson showed(ibid) and the reality which helped to shape the resurgence of the women's rights movement in the mid nineteenth century and surely Anne Bronté's attitude to the value of that movement.

But this was a resurgence of the ideas of women's rights, not the generation of fresh and new ideas in response to conditions suddenly made unbearable. It is in the ignoring of the place of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's feminist ideas in a tradition of such thought that most does the tradition and the novel's value in it, a disservice. Mary Wollstonecraft, before the turn of the century, wrote in assertion of "the autonomy of women , the right of women to define themselves and their world from their own position, and to place men in relation to ."(Spender,1982: 144) in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and explored these ideas in her fiction Mary and The Wrongs of Woman,(1788)(Spender,1986: 246f). In 1793 Mary Hays offered the manuscript of Essays Moral and Miscellaneous to Wollstonecraft for her considered opinion; "She commented - and edited - and advised Mary Hays to delete the reference to women's weakness in her preface. There was by now room for a plea for women's disability or inferiority in Mary Wollstonecraft's book, and Mary Hays readily followed the example and advice of her friend" (Spender,1986,265). Half a century prior to the publication of Tenant these two writers were producing novels, essays and treatises, which challenged the subjection of women, and even they were not coming from a vacuum. As Dale Spender notes "To label A Vindication of the Right(sic) of Woman ...as the first major feminist treatise is to do Mary Astell a serious injustice." (Spender,1982,52). In the century before Wollstonecraft and Hays, Mary Astell and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were producing "clear and caustic criticisms of male power"(Spender,1982,51). Spender credits them with the generation of the concept of patriarchy. And in the year of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's birth, 1689, another contributor to the tradition of women's writing died. Aphra Behn, of whom Virginia Woolf said "All women together should let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds" (Woolf,66). Behn produced a huge quantity of writing, including thirteen novels and numerous plays. A range of writing which explored the world through the perspectives of women rather than that of men, raising questions about the value of a permissive society for women who "could hardly be delighted by the prospect of being required to be available to more men, and they certainly didn't gain in stature by repeatedly being 'conquered' (Spender,1986: 54). A rich field of ideas for the growth and fruition of Brontń's novel.

The tradition of women writing their dissatisfaction of patriarchal society has another major proponent I would like to draw attention to. Christine de Pizan is significant not because she would have been an influence on the thinking of Anne Brontń, she almost certainly would not have, she is significant as a further indication of the depth of the tradition of feminist ideas in european literature. In the late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century de Pizan wrote more than twenty works. In many of these she "sought to demonstrate that women possessed natural affinities for all areas of cultural and social activity."(Richards,translators introduction to de Pizan, xxi), a position most strongly defended in The Book of the City of Ladies, which provides a very early attempt to rewrite history from the perspective of women. Anne Brontń wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not as a lone pioneering voice but supported in a tradition of women writing with what can be viewed as feminist ideas. This placement gives Anne Bronté's work greater substance than any limiting categorizations offered by Gárin.

Categorization, though, of both author and work, has been the fate of women writers in a patriarchally dominated literary world and Anne Bronté has been severely imposed upon by this process. In considering The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gárin, in 1979, constructs her as a proto feminist manifesto writer and then avoids a discussion of feminist content; in 1966, Ewbank constructs her as a moralist and dismisses her feminist content as being essentially moralist: "It's central concern has nothing to do with Women's Rights; Helen does not complain of her legal position in marriage, although it means that her husband has charge of all her money... and she cannot divorce him. These points have hardly occurred to Anne Brontń,"(Ewbank,84), while she allows Anne a 'deeper' feminism in her moral challenge of things beyond the properly accepted sphere of women writing (ibid); and at the novels publication she was constructed as being unwomanly in the choice of her matter, ultimately dismissing any value the novel might have.

Proto-feminist, moralist, and unwomanly; beyond these limiting categories, let us consider the extent to which Anne Brontń is a novelist, writing a novel, which contains as part of it's construction a consideration of feminist thought and point of view, "it is as fearless and affirmative in it's assumption and declaration of the independence of woman as any of Charlotte's " (Evans,323) or indeed of any other novelist exploring the same ground. While by no means a manifesto, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall confronts many issues of importance to the women's movement : the position of women in marriage, the 'civil death' referred to by Cady in the Seneca Falls declaration; the control of women's property by the men in their lives; the construction of divorce laws to suit the needs of men; the inequitable treatment of education between the genders; and the different standards set in society for the acceptable behaviour of men and women. In fact, the only issue from the Seneca Declaration which Brontń fails to address is that of the elective franchise. But the exploration of these issues is not conducted in a polemical fashion, but is rather worked into the fabric of the novel.

The protagonist of Tenant, Helen Graham/Huntingdon, presents the strongest expression of these ideas early in the novel, a scene in which she is not only introduced to the Markham family but to the reader. Here, Helen and the narrator of the frame story, Gilbert Markham appear as antagonists in the debate over the differential treatment of boys and girls and the implied outcomes. At the heart of the argument is Helen's protective treatment of her son Arthur. Gilbert's response to this is to declare "..by such means ... you will never render him virtuous" (Bronté,54). This view is based on the premise that in order to prepare boys to be men it is necessary for them to be exposed to the rigors of the world as a means of developing a strong moral character. It is counterbalanced by the view that girls and women must be protected from the harsh realities of the world in order to protect them from moral distress or tainting. It is this contradiction that Helen addresses, challenging the value of exposure to vice as a strengthening of moral fibre, and the value of keeping girls in complete ignorance of the world's vice to prevent their corruption. Helen's position, very much for a balance, a respect for the moral character of the female and concern for the development of boys, is reflected in Bronté's own thoughts in her preface, "Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers"(Bronté,30) Helen's passion on this topic seems to the Markhams out of proportion to what might be expected in the setting of a polite conversation. But it is a passion drawn from her own experience of the "race of mankind...stumbling and blundering along the path of life" (ibid), experience which the Markhams and the reader are ignorant of.

Through the first part of the novel, narrated by Gilbert Markham, the reader learns nothing of Helen beyond that which Gilbert is able to observe, and after this encounter his observations are not flattering "I cannot say that I like her much...a woman liable to take strong prejudices...twisting everything into conformity with her own preconceived opinions - too hard, too sharp, too bitter for my taste."(Bronté,65) As he becomes more deeply involved with Helen, this attitude becomes much warmer, but still the reader will not understand the character of Helen until she speaks through her own voice, no matter how much Gilbert struggles to explain her. However, the reader learns much of Gilbert, not through any active self description on his part, but through his own reporting of the world ordered around him.

This exploration of Gilbert's world, as the relationship between he and Helen develops, provides an important preamble to the central section of the novel. Anne Bront, through Gilbert's narrative voice, allows the reader to become acquainted with the degree to which men do have their world ordered around them. Gilbert is the 'head' of his family, a concept which draws moral support from Paul's Letters to the Ephesians "Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church...so is a husband the head of his wife."(Eph.5:22-23). For Gilbert, the authority he holds is not drawn from marriage but in an implied 'in loco husband' situation : his mother widowed and he the eldest son. Within this household, Gilbert's wishes take precedence, a pre-suggestion of the power that Helen's brother holds in her flight from marriage. In his mother's distress over the stolen kiss from Eliza Milward, for example, Gilbert agrees "to think twice before I take any important step you seriously disapprove of" (Brontń,65), not commiting himself to consider, or consult her at all, merely to think twice - and then it is assumed, carry on regardless. There is no obligation to the wishes of a parent here, his mother as a female cannot command such obligation, merely a condescension to one effectively under his own moral authority. More significant to the reading of Gilbert's character in this interchange is the presentation of him as a willfully self-centred individual, not in some grand darkly gothic sense, but in an every day petty minded sense : in the face of his mother's distress, it is not concern for her that moves him most but the frustration of his good spirits; "I was doomed to a very serious remonstrance, which unpleasantly checked the galloping course of my spirits, and made a disagreeable close to the evening." (Bronté,66); and "I...went to bed, considerably quenched in spirit." (Bronté,67) It is not until Gilbert is well and truly fascinated by Helen that his mother's concerns about his relationship with Eliza become important to him. "I ought not to marry Eliza since my mother so strongly objects to it," is the beginning of his intent to pursue Helen's interest, which becomes equally distressing to his mother.

Through the development of the 'pursuit' of Helen the reader also discovers the capability for violence that is in Gilbert, and by extension in the whole gender. His jealousy provoked attack on Lawrence (Bronté,134f) is not a surprise to the reader; he has already suggested the possibility of such an attack when he 'brutally' seizes the bridle of Lawrence's pony to detain him for questioning "'Will you take your hand off the bridle...you're hurting my pony's mouth.' 'You and your pony be-'"(Bronté,111). It is Gilbert's demands that the world around him be ordered to his own expectations that precipitates the crisis ending the first section of the novel.

As a grounding to the reading of the central section of the novel we have seen Helen passionately challenging ideas such as the extreme sheltering of girls, and the extreme exposure of boys, to the harshness of the world. We have seen her, apparently, independently making her own living and raising her son; and we have seen her take a great deal of control over the growth of the relationship between herself and Gilbert. But, all of this has been seen through the filter of Gilberts narrative. What we have learned of Helen and her views is at this point superficial and largely lacking in substance. In the central section of the novel we at last hear Helen's voice.

However, the division of the novel, structurally, by the insertion of journal material between Gilbert's epistolary narrative, is one of the points which some critics have taken exception to, Gárin included. She draws from, as her own support for this position, Gary Moore "the critic, who rated Anne's works very high at a time of their eclipse"(Gárin, introduction to Bronté,13,14). Moore's opinion was that Bronté's "heroine must tell the young farmer her story..."(Moore in Gárin's introduction to Bronté,24) and Gárin concurs "Helen's life is seen at one remove, not in the heat of action,"(Gárin, introduction to Brontń,24). How Gárin, holding this view, expects Anne Brontá to have written a novel of feminist ideas in the absence of a female narrative is a puzzle; how she could believe that Gilbert's retelling of Helen's story in his letters to the reader could be more immediate, or passionate, is equally puzzling, as Ewbank notes "the letters are written twenty years after the events related-against the immediacy of direct experiences in the diary chapters"(Ewbank,72). But this was not an option which Bronté explored, her intent in the journal is clear, to provide us with, at last, a proper understanding of Helen, after the disjointed and self serving image making of Gilbert, and to provide a direct consideration of the issues which confront women.

Tennant of Wildfell Hall part 2
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