The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (72 page)

6
.
never know how much I owe you
: by using the male character to
present a serious objection to the family’s pampering of sons and the undervaluation of womenfolk, Anne Brontë manoeuvres the reader to consider the harm occasioned to both sexes by the double standard. The good-humoured conservatism of the mother, evidently herself never more than a chattel, is a realistic appraisal of the status quo, and Markham ends the letter by opening out the question to the reader’s (Halford’s – but also our) experience.

1
.
smoking about: OED
under snoke: dialect ‘to snuff or smell; to go snuffing or smelling (at)’.

2
.
with wonderful fluency
: Arthur’s prodigious literacy is a tribute to Helen’s educational methods.

3
. –
Cliffs, full five miles distant
: Chitham (
Life
, p. 145) locates the source in cliffs north of Scarborough which Anne Brontë would have visited whilst accompanying her employers, the Robinsons, on their summer holidays.

4
.
the blue sea burst upon our sight
: these passages, as Helen and Markham reach the sea, to which Helen rhapsodically responds, reflect Anne Brontë’s own ecstasy at the vision of the sea.
Agnes Grey
ends with a comparable vision of union ‘at the edge of the precipice where we stood together watching the splendid sunset mirrored on the restless world of waters at our feet’ (Ch. 25). A drawing dated 13 November 1839 shows a young woman looking out to sea against the sunlight which is either fiercely rising or setting. Anne Brontë went to Scarborough in her terminal illness, to die within sight of the sea, which she associated with revival and (twice repeated in the description of Helen’s response) ‘exhilaration’.

5
.
an electric start
: Helen’s galvanized reaction expresses her traumatized fear of the penetration of her cover by her husband (though we do not know this yet). Her chosen position at the cliff-edge expresses the danger of her situation and her outstanding courage in meeting it The two signs (of alarm and strength) are superficially contradictory, heightening the suspense of her as yet untold story.

6
.
Miss Mill-ward bas many estimable qualities
: Anne Brontë, like George Eliot in the portrait of Mary Garth in
Middlemarcb,
reclaims the unglamorous ‘Marys’ of literature and life, as the salt of the earth, undervalued and exploited by society for their plain usefulness. Markham’s recurrently slighting remarks in this chapter reflect poorly on the narrator’s taste and judgement.

1
.
Marmion
: Sir Walter Scott’s
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
(1808), a long balladic narrative poem, beloved by the Brontës as children, which is read and quoted by Jane in Ch. 33 of
Jane Eyre
, and competes with St John Rivers for Jane’s attention. Its romantic appeal is anodyne against bad weather ‘I soon forgot storm in music’. Pocket editions were not in fact available in 1828, pointing up Anne Brontë’s lack of real concern for historical verisimilitude.

2
.
old buck
: ‘gay, dashing fellow’, from the male of any species, especially deer. This jocose back-slapping idiom represents Anne Brontë’s idea of how gentlemen address one another. The author awakens intermittently to the memory of the epistolary device.

1
.
like bricks
: with gusto and attack.

2
.
don’t leave her one stone upon another
: superficially frivolous allusion to Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Mark 13:2, extending the brick-hurling metaphor. However, Eliza’s stoning of her rival’s reputation, which is read as a serious attack upon Helen’s honour, is satirically placed by the Gospel text, which insists on the integrity of the temple not built with hands – the faith of the individual.

3
.
as it was
: confusingly placed clause, indicating ‘even so’ (i.e., despite the fact that Markham manifests himself at the last minute).

4
.
over head and ears
: the first and second editions have ‘head of ears’: amended here in conformity with standard usage (
OED
: ‘completely immersed’).

5
.
no good given or received
: the extended objection to ‘small talk’ and scandal is not simply related to Helen’s role as victim of tittle-tattle but the expression of a profound Brontë aversion to vapid small talk without subject-matter. This is satirized in Lockwood’s tea-party treat on his first visit to Wuthering Heights (Ch. 1), where surly bad manners are the norm and his attempts to observe etiquette and make polite conversation are violently repulsed.

6
.
mere vanity and vexation of spirit
: trivial reference to Ecclesiastes 1:14. However, the ‘vanity’ theme in relation to social activities and values is central to the novel and to Anne Brontë’s didactic poetry (see ‘Vanitas Vanitatis’ (1845)).

7
.
so much pleasure in their toil as I do
: Helen speaks in a very modern-sounding way, as an independent person who expects to have to work for
her living, to another working person – against the bias of a society in which women’s work was socially suspect for anyone with pretensions to gentility.

1
.
I was not indifferent to her
: not as novelistic a circumlocution as Markham implies. The straightforward heroine-narrator of the realistic
Agnes Grey
uses it of Rosalie Murray: ‘she is not so indifferent to him as she believes herself to be’ (Ch. 14).

2
.
she would not be living there by herself
: Anne Brontë exposes the social prejudice against women living independently: the presence of a male ‘head of household’, whether father, brother or husband, legitimates the woman, placing her in a position of legal or informal ‘coverture’.

3
.
in the bitterness of my soul
: casual reference to Job 7:11, 10:1.

1
.
a torrent of tears
: Markham is unlike the conventional male represented by Halford and Lawrence, in having his emotions very close to the surface. In his present paroxysms he echoes Heathcliff in
Wutbering Heights
, reacting emotionally on what Lyndall Gordon calls ‘the Brontë scale’ (
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
, (Chatto & Windus) p. 281).

2
.
my angel not my angel, and my friend a fiend incarnate
: this religious phrasing, produced by Markham’s inflamed brain under the influence of misconstruction, opens the hellfire theme pursued with bitter irony by the diary section of the novel.

1
.
“Shall I because a woman’s fair,’ etc
: a version of George Wither’s seventeenth-century lyric, ‘Shall I, wasting in despair, / Die, because a woman’s fair?’

2
.
vengeably
: ‘vengibly’ in the first edition. Rare archaic word, used in
Agnes Grey
: ‘Miss Matilda, having… vengeably thumped the piano for an hour’ (Ch. 14) – the only instance recorded by
OED
after 1586.

1
.
chewing the cud of – bitter fancies
: a rueful variant on Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, IV. iii. 102, ‘chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy’.

2
.
savage satisfaction
: the preposterous violence characterizing Markham’s behaviour and language to his imagined rival is analogous to the violence staple to
Wutbering Heights
, and the source of the objection taken by reviewers to
Wildfell Hall’s
narrator as one who ‘would serve as the ruffian of any other novelist’ (E. P. Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’,
American Review 66
, October 1848, in
CH
, p. 262), to whose ‘brutal temper’ Charles Kingsley objected (‘Recent Novels’,
Fraser’s Magazine
39, April 1849, in
CH
, p. 272).

3
.
execrations not loud but deep: Macbeth
, V. iii. 27: ‘Curses, not loud, but deep’.

4
.
taking his rest on the sofa at home
: Markham’s emotionally neutral attitude to his deed has a quality of mindless and infantile sadism in common with, e.g., Ch. 17 of
Wuthering Heights
, where, having slit Hindley’s artery, Heathcliff kicks, tramples and dashes his enemy’s head against the flagstones and then binds his wound ‘with brutal roughness, spitting and cursing’. I conjecture a common Gondal source for such material.

1
.
bluebells
: Anne Brontë used this word for ‘harebells’.

2
.
Because, I happened… I imagine
: this sentence represents an extreme instance of Anne Brontë’s idiosyncratic excess and defect in the use of commas. I have not deleted the formally intrusive comma after ‘Because’, because I have chosen to read it as an emotional notation indicating the staccato breathlessness of speech under high stress; neither have I inserted a comma between ‘a trifle more’ and ‘I imagine’, which may therefore represent the outpouring of indignation Anne Brontë intended.

3
.
Sir Humphrey Davy’s ‘Last days of a Philosopher’
: anachronistic, for Humphry Davy’s
Consolations in Travel: or The Last Days of a Philosopher
was not published until 1830 – after this fictional event in
Wildfell Hall
(August, 1828).

4
.
tore away a few leaves from the end
: i.e., the portion of the diary that would have revealed her feelings for Markham.

1
.
June 1st, 1821
: Anne Brontë takes the primary events of the inset diary back to a period within eighteen months of her own birth on 17 January 1820, and within three months of her mother’s death on 15 September 1821. This epoch-making period of Anne’s entrance into the world of loss becomes the period of her heroine’s initiation into the tumult of a world of
corruption. In her late twenties, Anne Brontë is looking back to origins from the position of experience.

2
.
till you were asked
: Helen’s aunt’s statements of the social pieties represent the extreme of conservative dogma concerning female passivity and acquiescence. She is a well-meaning member of the thought-police whose cautionary remarks cannot govern her niece, in part because the prudent good sense they offer is presented in terms bordering on the absurd.

3
.
Remember Peter, Helen! Don’t boast, but watch
: a reminder of the disciple Peter’s frailty, unable to follow Christ’s counsel at Gethsemane: ‘Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:41). The sermonical manner of Helen’s aunt’s speech, touched off by Helen’s pert answers, is least calculated to appeal to an eighteen year old. But it is implicitly recognized as a serious and important piece of instruction in which marriage is considered as a spiritual life-or-death issue – as it turns out to be for Helen. This is pointed up by the chapter-title, ‘The Warnings of Experience’, which focuses on the immemorial incapacity of the young to profit by the experience of the older generation, and the older either to communicate sympathetically with the young or to choose appropriately for them: witness the aunt’s pushing of the deadly bore, Mr Boarham.

4
.
a worthless reprobate
: a key-word in
Wildfell Hall
, with a double implication, both worldly (a rake, a high-living scoundrel) and spiritual (rejected by God, hardened in sin). From the outset the diary shows itself as a spiritual testament, in which moral and social concerns are also theological issues, of eternal consequence. Helen’s light-hearted response shows her to be unaware of the serious drama in which she participates, in which nothing less than the immortal soul is at stake: ‘But what are all the poor fools and reprobates to do, aunt?’

5
.
Mr Boarham, by name
: it is important to register the low quality of the rival suitors against whose repulsiveness (rendered in Dickensian caricature) Arthur Huntingdon’s beguiling youth and light-heartedness must seem to Helen irresistible. The loathsome Solmes to whom the Harlowes attempt to marry the heroine of
Clarissa
is a comparable figure, supplied to demonstrate the motivation of virtuous young women drawn to such frivolous but attractive males as Huntingdon and Lovelace. Solmes is ‘a very narrow mind, and no great capacity… coarse and indelicate… rough in his manners… covetous’ (
Clarissa
, Letter 32).

6
.
I am an excellent physiognomist
: the Brontës were familiar with theories of physiognomy and phrenology, methods of reading character by study of facial features and head shape. See Ian Jack, ‘Phrenology, Physiognomy,
and Characterisation in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë’,
Bronte Society Transactions 15
, Part 80 (1970), pp. 377–91. Anne Brontë shows small respect for such ‘scientific’ methods of interpretation, considering them as a sophisticated way of judging by appearances.

7
.
Mr Wilmot
: another ‘reprobate’, perhaps suggested, as was Charlotte’s Mr Rochester, by the Restoration libertine poet, John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester.

8
.
grow, live and die in single blessedness
: remembers Theseus’s insistence in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that Hermia marry Demetrius or enter a cloister, like the rose which ‘withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness’ (I. i. 77–8). Like Hermia, Helen prefers such privation to her detested wooers, and as with Hermia the reader is entirely in sympathy with the girl in her dilemma.

1
.
I could not away with
: elliptical use of ‘away’ as a verb representing a plain-spoken idiom corresponding with the modern ‘I could not be doing with him’.