The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

of Rochester’s atonement, to sanctuary at Ferndene. But Helen’s journey, from Staningley to Grassdale, escaping to Wildfell, only to return via Grassdale to Staningley, ultimate sole heir to both, is viewed both retrospectively and prospectively from the way-stage of Wildfell. The ‘progress’ is therefore not as clearly marked. The struggling, implicated quality of human life is more evident in
Wildfell Hall
as Helen is tainted by the corruption she cannot escape: ‘I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him – I hate him!’ (p. 308); ‘Instead of being humbled and purified by my afflictions, I feel that they are turning my nature into gall’ (p. 313). Grassdale bears a weight of symbolic meaning comparable with the pilgrim’s sojourns in
Jane Eyre
: at first it is a fool’s paradise, then a false paradise. Lush and tender descriptions of its natural beauty are blighted not only by the loneliness of Huntingdon’s absence but by the lurking of a snake in the grass, Hargrave, a cold comment upon the intemperately warm-hearted attempt to master Jane by Rochester. Insinuating himself into Helen’s good graces in a scene of wistfully Edenic beauty, Hargrave resembles Milton’s Satan’s slyly ingratiating approaches to Eve in
Paradise Lost
. The sense of paradisal innocence is conveyed by a tenderly observed scene of play between mother, nurse and child in the grace of a ‘sweet, warm evening’ in the park:
    I was standing with Rachel beside the water, amusing the laughing baby in her arms with a twig of willow laden with golden catkins, when greatly to my surprise, he entered the park, mounted on his costly black hunter, and crossed over the grass to meet me. (pp. 246–7)
    This sinister figure again penetrates the lyrical scene of Helen kneeling before her baby, ‘having gathered a handful of bluebells and wild roses… and presenting them, one by one, to the grasp of his tiny fingers’ (p. 250). Hargrave, the dark mounted figure on the ‘costly black hunter’ hunts Helen with sexual threat which culminates in the chess-game of Chapter 33, so reminiscent of the chess-scene in Middleton’s tragedy,
Women Beware Women
. 22 Grassdale represents a paradise already lost in the moment of enjoyment: Helen mustsubstitute for its idyll the Miltonic ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ (XII. 587) in her flight from its bounds. The house becomes a hell on earth, and the repeated ‘hell’ chimes with Helen’s name. Her sufferings culminate in the detection of Huntingdon and his mistress in sexual play in the shrubbery, where Helen’s husband swears ‘“by all that’s sacred”’ that he no longer loves his wife (p. 303). In this moment of absolute affliction, the prose deepens to a throbbing biblical intensity reminiscent
of Jane Eyre
: in the extremity of need is vouchsafed a breathing of grace and the fellowship of the creation in a vision of the stars: ‘I knew their God was mine, and He was strong to save and swift to hear’ (p. 303).
    One of the novel’s triumphs is to make Arthur Huntingdon not a fiend incarnate but an immature, boyish figure, with real gaiety, some warmth and charm, who feels as deep a tenderness for his wife as he knows how to feel. Possessive and despotic in his initial affection for Helen, he lavishes affectionate attention on her, and craves total attention in return. Jealous of all that distracts her from him (‘when he sees me occupied with a book, he won’t let me rest till I close it’ (p. 208), Huntingdon has no inner resources and hence is easily bored, filling the time when Helen runs out of amusements for him by ‘lolling’ beside her on the sofa trying to arouse her jealousy by spinning tales of former amours. Their honeymoon is a bizarre scamper round Europe, which is no novelty to him and whose fascinations he begrudges to his wife ‘in as much as it proved that I could take delight in anything disconnected