Helen doesn’t even consider it for Christian reasons Arthur in order to save face. They both come to realize they are mis-matched, but in their society divorce is a painful embarrassment to both parties. Helen refuses to do these things out of piety and nags Arthur not to do them. He has been told the ideal wife is a highly pious one, so he marries Helen thinking she will save him when, in fact, they are the most mis-matched couple ever.Īrthur enjoys cavorting, playing cards, and drinking. To a certain extent Arthur makes the same mistake.
This belief leads Helen to make her foolish, egotistical mistake of thinking that marrying Arthur is alright for she can change him after they are married. Men may behave however they desire as long as they settle down after marriage. Although single men may go cavorting about she must sit respectably at home or go out to supervised dances. Society tells Helen that it is her job as a woman to be the pious one. This book does hold value for the modern feminist though if we re-position ourselves to look at it through the lens of how society at the time has messed up both Helen and her husband, Arthur. I would find that cold and calculating as well. Well all she ever talks about is living piously now to be joyous in heaven after death. For me though her severeness sometimes had me siding with her tyrant of a husband in my mind. Given the fact that Helen behaves quite willfully and controversially for the time period by leaving her husband’s home to live separately from him, this was probably quite necessary for Bronte’s contemporaries to find Helen a sympathetic character. What held The Tenant of Wildfell Hall back was the relentless presentation of Helen as the picture of Christian piety. I felt this opened the door to many possibilities, but perhaps I was thinking about this with too much of a 21st century brain. I heard of it simply as the one of the earlier feminist novels written in response to such works as Austen’s.
I came to this book with high expectations. There he learns her travails and sufferings at the hands of her still very much alive husband. When he confronts her about her conduct, she shows him her diary. Gilbert Markham becomes infatuated with the widow Helen Graham who has moved into his neighborhood with her son, but rumors soon start to spark up around her. Cited as the feminist antithesis to her contemporary Austen’s romantic 19th century ramblings, Anne Bronte’s best-known novel presents the much more dire image of the very real risk of marriage in a time where the wife loses all her human rights to her husband.
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