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

with himself (p. 203). Objecting to her religious devotion, he explains that ‘“it is enough to make one jealous of one’s Maker – which is very wrong, you know; so don’t excite such wicked passions again, for my soul’s sake” ‘ (p. 204). Helen’s locking of her door against her spouse is a memorable act of feminist defiance; it is also an episode in a banal household row, which reflects credit on neither party. The next morning Huntingdon seethes with malign sulks; it rains; he yawns, fidgets, drinks, bangs doors and strikes the cocker spaniel off ‘with a smart blow’. The dog retreats and, when its master wants to pet it again, cleaves to Helen and will not come. ‘Enraged at this, hismaster snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at his head’ (p. 212). Helen lets it out Such minor fracas are proleptic. Helen will love; be abused; recoil in anger and hurt; and, for her recoil (interpreted as rejection) be rejected; then she will reject in earnest. The particular quarrel is resolved within the chapter, in which the tension is broken by her yielding to his not very abject penitence and caresses. But it sets up a pattern of deterioration which is mercilessly inexorable, for Helen’s very character in its forthrightness and integrity have the ironic effect of alienating her husband. The narrative moves in a rhythm of mounting misery with pauses and reprieves; chapters end on upbeats of hope or downbeats of apprehension as skilfully managed dynamic scenes of quarrel are played out, in which both manoeuvre for advantage. ‘What shall I do with the serious part of myself?’ ends Chapter 22 ominously. ‘I trust we shall be happy yet,’ Chapter 24 falteringly concludes.
    Long before Helen has consciously recognized her bad bargain, the reader has understood that there is nothing to Arthur Huntingdon. It is not that he is an intrinsically evil person. He is a brat. The centre is painfully hollow. Even Huntingdon seems conscious of this absence of something vital in his human make-up: gentle when ill after his first major debauch, he turns thankfully to Helen, as though her resources could serve for them both. A real pathos surrounds him. But he must fill his emptiness with excitement and intrigue, and in the measure that Helen withdraws from this compulsion, she helps to empty him further, so that he must have more gratification. He pours drink into himself; fills his house with the roaring fraternity; courts that fine animal, Annabella; abuses Helen. Helen’s tenderness is hard to kill; its durability is expressed when she sees a letter in Hargrave’s hand, ‘with Arthur’s still beloved hand on the address’ (p. 251). The author does not allow us to forget how sexually attractive and childishly appealing Huntingdon is: how puzzled (when he can be bothered to think) by the circumstances he is creating. But Huntingdon’s behaviour is not an isolated instance; it belongs to a social norm for élite males. In the confraternity, Anne Brontë studies the dynamics of group mentality, the mutual reinforcement of male ‘club’ behaviour. The melancholy and Byronic Lord Lowborough’sbetrayal to drink, drugs and suicidal despair, taunted with unmanliness by his ‘friends’ and his adulterous wife; Hattersley’s abuse of his ‘invitingly meek and mim’ wife, the timorous Milicent; the cynicism of Hargrave’s sexual approaches and Grimsby’s squalid antics represent a group code which not only legitimates but authorizes infantilism as a norm. Hattersley is redeemed; Hargrave repelled; Lowborough divorces, to begin a new life: only Huntingdon is entirely destitute of hope. Anne Brontë focuses the nihilism attendant on terminal weakness and self-indulgence; spoilt in this life, he is spoilt for the next world. We smile at his Branwellian antics in church, perusing his Prayer Book upside down, adopting a ‘puritanical air of mock solemnity’: ‘“I’ll come home sighing like a furnace, and full of the