Abstract
This chapter examines Anne Brontë’s proto-feminist critique of the “angel in the house” in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). It argues that Brontë’s novel offers a twofold critique of angelic femininity. Firstly, she “tests” the feasibility of angelic womanhood when situated in impossible domestic circumstances, and secondly, she highlights the forms of violence that angelic femininity is often subjected to. In doing so, the chapter argues that Anne Brontë exposes the pervasive nature of victim-blaming in mid-nineteenth-century culture and anticipates recent legislative changes in the twenty-first century that now recognises emotional and psychological abuse in definitions of domestic violence.
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Notes
- 1.
John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” Sesame and Lilies, Unto This Last and the Political Economy of Art (London: Cassell, 1909), 73–74; first published in 1865.
- 2.
Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life (London: Penguin, 1993), 102.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (London: IB Tauris, 2013), 83.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 102 (see note 2).
- 8.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 1966), 88, first published in 1963; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Pashley (London: Picador, 1988), 473, first published in 1949; Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Flamingo Modern Classic, 1993), 327, first published in 1970. See also Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 83 (see note 5).
- 9.
See Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (London: Virago, 2010);
Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture (see note 5).
- 10.
Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 83 (see note 5).
- 11.
For more on these issues, see Veena Meetoo and Heidi Safia Mirza, “‘There is nothing “honourable” about honour killings’: Gender, Violence and the Limits of Multiculturalism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 30, no. 3 (2007): 187–200, and Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth (Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2010).
- 12.
In their study, Sharon Bryant and Gayle Spencer asked perpetrators of violence against women to identify the conflict tactics they had used in instances involving victim-blaming. For a full summary of their survey, see “University Students’ Attitudes about Attributing Blame in Domestic Violence,” Journal of Family Violence 18, no. 6 (2003): 373.
- 13.
Siv Jansson, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Rejecting the Angel’s Influence,” in Women of Faith in Victorian Culture, ed. A. Hogan and A. Bradstock (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 31–47.
- 14.
The Spectator, “Acton Bell’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” July 8, 1848, 19, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/8th-july-1848/19/actof-bells-tenant-orwildfell-hall.co.uk (accessed April 11, 2018); Rambler, “From an Unsigned Review: ‘Mr Bell’s New Novel’,” in The Brontës: A Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allot (London: Routledge, 1974), 267.
- 15.
E. P. Whipple, “Novels of the Season,” The North American Review 67, no. 141 (1848), 360.
- 16.
Sharpe’s London Magazine, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” 1848, 181–82.
- 17.
Charlotte Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in Allot, The Brontës: A Critical Heritage, 274 (see note 14).
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Catherine Paula Han, “The Myth of Anne Brontë,” Brontë Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 50. As Han notes, the publisher Thomas Newby “respected [Charlotte’s] wishes during her lifetime, but Thomas Hodgson issued a cheaply printed edition of the novel in 1854” (Ibid.).
- 20.
Anne Brontë, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 1996), 3, first published in 1848.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Brontë, The Tenant, 58 (see note 20).
- 25.
Sarah Stickney Ellis, “The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits,” reproduced in Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (London: Routledge, 1998), 498.
- 26.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (see note 8).
- 27.
Brontë, The Tenant, 34 (see note 20).
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 374–75.
- 30.
Ibid., 34.
- 31.
Ibid., 131.
- 32.
Ibid., 133. See Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London: Cassell & Company, 1891), 74.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Brontë, The Tenant, 148 (see note 20).
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid., 149.
- 38.
Ibid., 199.
- 39.
Ibid., see pp. 143–50.
- 40.
Ibid., 150.
- 41.
Ibid., 4.
- 42.
Ibid., 152.
- 43.
Ibid., 246.
- 44.
Ibid., 132.
- 45.
Ibid. Aunt Maxwell’s concerns are also echoed by Helen’s friend, Millicent Hargrave.
- 46.
Brontë, The Tenant, 132–33, 147 (see note 20).
- 47.
Ibid., 169.
- 48.
Elaine Showalter, “Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Woman Writers,” The Antioch Review 32, no. 3 (1972): 340.
- 49.
Brontë, The Tenant, 132 (see note 20).
- 50.
Ibid., 150.
- 51.
Ibid., 232.
- 52.
See Elisabeth Rose Gruner, “Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16, no. 2 (1997): 303–32, and Joan Bellamy, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: What Anne Brontë Knew and What Modern Readers Don’t,” Brontë Studies 30, no. 3 (2005): 255–57.
- 53.
Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix, 1995), 341.
- 54.
Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 63.
- 55.
World Health Organisation, “Factsheet: Violence against Women,” November 2016, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/ (accessed May 20, 2017).
- 56.
Home Office, Guidance: Domestic Abuse and Violence, Gov. UK, March 8, 2016, https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-violence-and-abuse (accessed May 29, 2017).
- 57.
Ibid., n.p.
- 58.
Ibid., n.p.
- 59.
These statistics are reported by Kat Banyard in The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Men and Women Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 124.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Brontë, The Tenant, 208 (see note 20).
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
For more on this, see Philippa Levine, “Marriage and Morality,” in Victorian Feminism 1850–1900, by P. Levine (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987), 128–55.
- 64.
Brontë, The Tenant, 220 (see note 20).
- 65.
Ibid., 208.
- 66.
Ibid., 220.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid., 245.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
See Diana C. Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
- 74.
Brontë, The Tenant, 268 (see note 20).
- 75.
Ibid., 267.
- 76.
Ibid., 213.
- 77.
Ibid., 212.
- 78.
Ibid., 213.
- 79.
Ibid., 160.
- 80.
Ibid., 162.
- 81.
Stevie Davies, Note to The Tenant, by Anne Brontë, ed. Davies, 507–08 (see note 20).
- 82.
Brontë, The Tenant, 301 (see note 20).
- 83.
Ibid.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Ibid., 147.
- 86.
Ibid., 202.
- 87.
Ibid., 209.
- 88.
Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 103 (see note 2).
- 89.
Brontë, The Tenant, 267 (see note 20).
- 90.
Showalter, “Killing the Angel in the House,” 342 (see note 48) cites Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as exemplary of women’s fight against repressive stereotypes and for emotional independence. For further discussion on pre-twentieth-century instances of women’s resistance to dominant female stereotypes, see Nina Auerbach, The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock, eds, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).
- 91.
May Sinclair, “Introduction,” in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey (London & Toronto; New York: J. M. Dent & sons; E. P. Dutton & Co, 1921), vi.
- 92.
Winifred Gérin, “Introduction,” in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (London: Penguin Classics, 1979), 9.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 83 (see note 5).
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O’Callaghan, C. (2018). Killing the “Angel in the House”: Violence and Victim-Blaming in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_13
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