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

savour and unction of dear Mr Blatant’s discourse –”’ (p. 174). Bran well too had monkeyed about in his pew and had a running joke about how ‘two fireballs’ (brandy with egg) make the tippler ‘a brand plucked from the burning’ 23 – Wesley’s favourite text for his own conversion. Branwell too had been spoilt, and lost. As his friend Grundy put it, ‘he was just a man moving in a mist who lost his way’. 24 The reality of such loss and such burning are borne out in Huntingdon’s death-scene, an evasion of ‘repentance’ by one who has misplaced his soul and now, in extreme need, cannot lay claim to it: ‘“I’m not going to die yet. – I can’t and won’t.” ’ He clings to the person who has kept hers (‘“Helen, you
must
save me!” ’) and tries to grapple her down into the grave with him, to answer for him. His last words are ‘“Don’t leave me!’” (pp. 441–7). He dies, indeed, without being weaned.
    Helen’s testament is a story of double temptation and double failure: Huntingdon’s and her own. The diary throws the mature woman of 1828 back to her susceptible, needy and spirited girlhood at the beginning of the decade, the pert niece of a severe aunt whose anxious piety is counter-productive in provoking mischievous answers. When Aunt Maxwell points out the horror of finding your husband ‘“a worthless reprobate, or even an impractical fool”’, Helen flightily wonders, ‘“But what are all the poor fools and reprobates to do, aunt?”’ and mentions the danger of depopulation (p. 132). The levity in Helen is evidently fair game for Huntingdon’ssparkling flightiness: but Helen is a complex, deep, and deepening character. The notion she boasts of ‘saving’ her irresponsible spouse – a favourite female myth of the mid-nineteenth century – is exposed as rash arrogance, the tragic flaw of pride which brings her falling headlong. It unleashes in Huntingdon a Nemesis whose black taunts she has herself invited: ‘“Yes,
now
, my immaculate angel…”’ (p. 441). Helen’s diary plots her downward course into disillusion, hurt, rage, moral petrification and embitterment. To her alarm, she begins to adapt to the debased norms of Grassdale,
    till I am familiarized with vice and almost a partaker in his sins. Things that formerly shocked and disgusted me now seem only natural… Fool that I was to dream that I had strength and purity enough to save myself and him! (p. 262)
    Her temper sours; her tongue lashes out, for ‘I am no angel’ (p. 267). Helen wrestles not only against her husband but against herself, for her own soul. The two climaxes of action come in Chapter 33, the anguished scene in the shrubbery in which she comes face to face with her husband’s adultery; and Chapter 40, the centre of violation, in which Huntingdon rakes through her diary, discovers her savings and has her paintings burned, a spiritual rape. Huntingdon’s early proposal to ‘“Let me have its bowels then”’, as he eviscerates her portfolio, and rifles the contents (p. 160), proleptically foreshadows the vandalizing of Helen’s inner and private world and the destruction of her means of subsistence.
    Helen’s life is centred in her child, the second Arthur Huntingdon – bidding fair to become a second edition of the first as the father and his peers ‘“make a man of him” ‘ by teaching him ‘to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man’ (p. 350). Cursing his mother as Heathcliff teaches Hareton to curse his family, ‘the infant profligate’ (p. 351) terrifies Helen with the success of the experiment to alienate him from her loving, principled education, reconstituting him in the image of the patriarchy which has in turn reproduced and authorized its damaged pattern in father and son from generation to generation. Shocking as this perversion is, Anne Brontë presents it as an extreme version of a norm familiar to all of