Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has been singled out most frequently for two elements: (1) its unusually complicated framing device (Gilbert Markham’s epistolary account of his relationship with Helen Huntingdon surrounds her much lengthier diary account of her first marriage and flight from her husband) and (2) its strikingly frank and detailed description of a woman’s experience in an abusive marriage. These two features of the text, one formal and one thematic, are intertwined in the experience of reading the novel. For, in proceeding through the multilayered narrative and remaining for a surprisingly protracted time in Helen’s painful account of her nightmarish marriage, the reader experiences a sensation that might be labeled narrative claustrophobia. The text thus produces an effect on the reader that mimics the entrapment Helen experiences in her marriage.

“The book is painful,” Charles Kingsley declared in his unsigned review in Fraser’s Magazine, sounding a note that would be echoed by many contemporary critics. A notice in the North American Review complained that the reader “is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of [Huntingdon’s] nature literally and logically set forth.” ¹ This language invokes the claustrophobic sensation that I have suggested is exacerbated by the narrative form. The reader’s discomfort is likely to extend beyond Helen’s diary account of her hellish first marriage, however. The events recounted in the framing narrative—Helen’s courtship by and eventual marriage to Gilbert Markham—purportedly provide a happy ending for Helen, released from her disastrous first marriage and free to choose a better mate. But Gilbert is an oddly unsuitable partner for Helen. Though it may be tempting to read the events in the framing narrative as representing a recovery from the events recounted in the embedded one, such a meliorist view is challenged by the fact that the framing narrative finds Helen remarried to a man who, while not the rake that Arthur Huntingdon was, is capable, like Arthur, of violence and cowardice (as evidenced by his vicious attack on Frederick Lawrence, which he does not publicly acknowledge). Gilbert, like Arthur, has been spoiled by his mother and has an inflated ego, and he subscribes to all the standard Victorian stereotypes about female nature and female merit (as evidenced by his behavior toward and descriptions of both the “demon” Eliza Millward, his first flame, and the “angel” Helen).

Gilbert’s shortcomings become less critical, however, when attention is shifted from the relationship he describes in his letters to Halford to the one whose forging Helen narrates in her diary—the relationship with her brother Frederick, whom Gilbert perceives as his antagonist and who is his opposite in character. The formal displacement that occurs when Helen’s narrative undermines Gilbert’s, exceeding it in both length and power, is thus echoed in a displacement of the exogamous romantic plot articulated in his account by the endogamous brother-sister plot contained within hers. The architecture of Brontë’s narrative calls attention to alternate forms of domestic containment, one deriving from courtship and marriage, the other from the natal family. Rather than representing these two forms of domesticity as continuous or overlapping, as nineteenth-century novels of family life commonly do, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall stresses their disjunctions, an approach that is complemented by the narrative format.

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Treatments of Tenant as domestic fiction have tended to focus on marital relationships, and hence, when examining the relationship of the framing to the framed narrative, to focus on the differences between Gilbert and Arthur as spouses. The critics I will discuss below, for instance, have suggested that the agenda Helen pursues unsuccessfully in her first marriage, an agenda consistent with prevailing domestic ideology, is realized in her second. It must be acknowledged, however, that the novel’s relationship to domestic ideology is an unusually vexed one. In presenting Helen’s attraction to her first husband, Brontë daringly implies that her heroine’s culturally sanctioned role as the...