Abstract
In the previous chapter I argued that certain established narratives concerning the structure and meaning of Jane Austen’s Persuasion can be disrupted through returning to a reading of the child that has been neglected within the existing critical response. This chapter will repeat and develop this return in relation to Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that has not received the kind of critical attention afforded to work by her sisters, and one in which the question of the child has often been wholly neglected. Thus, for example, significant essays by Garrett Stewart, Antonia Lasano, Elizabeth Langland and Carol A. Senf make no mention of the child, nor do the contributions of Stewart, Marianne Thormählen, Andrés G. López and Andrea Westcott to New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë that is the most recent major work on Brontë, and whose index contains no reference to childhood.1 Two essays in this collection offer fleeting references. Deborah Denenholz Morse makes a single connection between childrearing debates in the novel and Anne Brontë’s life, following the critic Marion Shaw’s claim that ‘it was Anne’s intimate exposure to Branwell’s alcoholism and tragic demise that most influenced her portrayal of the destructive effects’ of the ‘“upbringing of children, particularly the upbringing of boys’”,2 whilst Melody J. Kemp briefly links the same to Methodist discourses of ‘“powers of association’” and ‘genetic predisposition’.3
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Notes
G. Stewart (2009) Novel Violence, A Narratology of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago);
A. Lasano (2003) ‘The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 57/ 4, 1–41;
E. Langland (1992) ‘The Voicing of Female Desire in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ in Antony Harrison and Beverley Taylor (eds.) Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University), pp. 111–23;
C. A. Senf (1990) ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Narrative Silences and Questions of Gender’, College English, 52/4, 446–56;
J. McMaster (1982) ‘“Imbecile Laughter” and “Desperate Earnest” in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Modern Language Quarterly, 43/4, 352–68.
See also the following in J. Nash and B. Suess (eds.) (1991) New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë (Aldershot: Ashgate). G. Stewart, ‘Narrative Economies in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, pp. 75–102; M. Thormählen ‘Aspects of Love in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, pp. 153–72; A. G. Lopez ‘Wildfell Hall as satire: Brontë’s domestic Vanity Fair’ pp. 173–94; A. Westcott ‘A Matter of Strong Prejudice: Gilbert Markham’s Self Portrait’, pp. 213–26.
D. D. Morse (1991) ‘“I speak of those I do know”: Witnessing as Radical Gesture in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, in J. Nash and B. Suess (eds.) New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 111.
M. J. Kemp (1991) ‘Helen’s Diary and the Method (ism) of Character Formation in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ , in J. Nash and B. Suess (eds.) New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 195–212, p. 204, quoting Brontë.
M. Thormählen (2009) The Brontës and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 42–3;
R. Poole (1993) ‘Cultural Reformation and Cultural Reproduction in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 33/4, 859–73;
T. O’Toole (1999) ‘Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, SEL, 39/4, 715–31;
E. R. Gruner (1997) ‘Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon and Isabel Vane’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 6/2, 303–25. Gruner’s essay was published within a year of Berry’s work, and is rooted in shared research: ‘Laura C. Berry has generously shared her work on custody with me while in manuscript’ (p. 322). For Gruner, her essay is not concerned with childhood but motherhood. Gruner notes, for example, that ‘Berry’s work, while focusing on the child instead of the mother, has been very helpful to my thinking through my own argument’ (p. 322). Tess O’Toole’s essay reads The Tenant in terms of an opposition between brother and lover rather than one lover and another. Although offering a comparable argument to Berry’s, O’Toole states that ‘Berry […] does not address the role of Frederick and the sibling relationship’, arguing rather that Brontë ‘“abandon[s] hope in marital pedagogy in favour of child rearing”’ (p. 729). Childhood is thus not understood to be the focus of the essay. Although the child is not read in detail, O’Toole’s comments seem to me to have the potential to impact on any reading of childhood in The Tenant. As this chapter focuses on the work of Laura Berry and Jan B. Gordon, I will limit myself to two comments on O’Toole’s essay. Firstly, it conforms to the structure of criticism outlined above, in which readings of The Tenant point out the text’s disruptive structure before ultimately understanding the text in terms of containment and stability. Thus O’Toole’s conclusion is that, ‘unlike Emily and Charlotte, Anne seems to juxtapose rather than collapse kinship relations and sexual ones in Tenant’ (p. 728), the text understood to resist the problematization of categories. Secondly, and more complexly, this stability rests on what I take to be a disinclination to read through its own ideas of incest. For O’Toole, Helen Huntingdon has only one successful relationship with an adult male, that with her brother Frederick, this typifying a move that validates the natal and domestic over the nuptial. Yet compare the suggestion that ‘Gilbert [Helen’s lover] is rendered analogous not to Helen’s brother, but to her son […] It is Frederick not Gilbert, whom Helen perceives as Arthur’s imaginary parent’ to the comment that Helen ‘reconceives her son as the progeny not of her husband Arthur but her brother Frederick; she says to him: “He is like you Frederick … in some of his moods: I sometimes think he resembles you more than his father; and I am glad of it”’ (p. 727). Within this argument, Frederick is diametrically opposed to Gilbert, yet Gilbert is ‘analogous’ to the son, and Frederick is ‘like’ the son. Gilbert is so because he is ‘petulant and immature’, and Frederick because of his ‘moods’. Why does this result in one man constructed as the son and the other the father? The child, it would seem, is not as stable as O’Toole requires it to be. 6.
L. Berry (1996) ‘Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ Novel, 30, 32–55. This was published in an edited form as ‘Tender Tyranny: The 1839 Custody of Infants Act and Custodial Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ in L. Berry (2000) The Child, pp. 93–126.
J. B. Gordon (1984) ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’, ELH, 1/4, 719–45.
Sent, ‘Narrative Silences’, and T. Eagleton (1975) Myths of Power, A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: Macmillan) can also be understood as reading the text as finally resolving potential subversion. In my reading, other texts offer a comparable, if perhaps less obvious resolution, for example.
R. Poole (1993) ‘Cultural Reformation’, 859–873. This reads ‘conflicts and contradictions’ comparable to those discussed by Laura Berry above, ‘Acts’ (p. 871). Yet the issue of an unresolved contradiction that can, nevertheless by identified and thus stabilised, is repeated here in what I take to be increasingly problematic terms: Poole reads the text as a ‘manifestation’ of a particular contradiction, one that is ‘systematic’ in its narrative, rather than random. This notion of an intentional, schematic, stable structure is joined by an appeal to spatial metaphor, in which what is underneath a narrative is less false than what is on top: ‘excavating beneath the surface illusionism of its [The Tenant’s] characterisation we may interpret the male characters as a projection of female impulses […] they inhabit a fantasy narrative, a sort of Proppian wonderland’, Poole, ‘Cultural Reformation’, p. 865.
A. Brontë (2008 [1847]) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 344.
An analogy could be made to the reading of the appeal to horticultural education in R. A. Barney (2000) Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in C18th England (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press), where the gardening metaphor is understood not resolve tensions so much as allow them to be articulated in a way that cannot be finally worked through. Indeed, there are other points of agreement between Berry and Barney, not least the desire to escape from what they understand to be a Foucauldian determinism.
See E. Langland (2002) Telling Tales: Gender and Narration in Victorian Literature and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002), p. 135. See also, for example, Stewart, Novel Violence; O’Toole, ‘Siblings’; Berry, ‘Acts’; Poole, ‘Cultural Reformation’.
B. Johnson (1998 [1977]) ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in J. P. Muller and W. J. Richardson (eds.) The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins), pp. 213–51, quoted in Gordon, ‘Gossip’, 743.
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Cocks, N. (2014). The Child and the Letter. In: The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452450_3
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