The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (74 page)

16
.
will in the fulness of time… things in heaven
: conflates Ephesians 1:10, Hebrews 2:9, Colossians 1:20.

17
.
might signify either ‘endless’ or ‘long-enduring’
: Hargreaves identifies this as New Testament Greek
alwvios
, Old Testament examples of which might be interpreted as ‘lasting for a long time’ but which, when used in relation to God, signifies a literal eternity (Ch. 20, n. 10). Anne Brontë here lays bare her own excruciated struggle to secure a face-saving formula for God, as well as the proudly Protestant self-assurance with which she plunges into a theological and philosophical debate for which she is not formally qualified, given her ignorance of Greek and Hebrew. The speech is not quite in character for Helen, who is never shown as a deep student or thinker.

18
.
a glorious thought to cherish in one’s own heart
: here Helen confronts the difficulty that had struck Anne Brontë that the fear of hell-fire acts as a deterrent, and that to withdraw it may remove a social and spiritual control. Helen therefore compromises by advancing her doctrine as essentially a private rather than public article of faith.

19
.
ludicrous, if it bad not been too provoking
: Huntingdon’s pantomime seems to be a close representation of Branwell Brontë’s travesty of church behaviour, e.g., his novel fragment,
And The Weary Are At Rest
(1845) records his irreverent view of Wesleyanism.

20
.
a caricature of the preacher
: in
Wuthering Heights
, Cathy defaces her pious books with ‘an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph’ (Ch. 3) and rebellious marginalia. She and Heathcliff hurl their tracts ‘into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book’. What in
Wutbering Heights
is presented with detached amusement and sympathy is condemned in
Wildfell Hall
but
not without
transmitting a certain amusement to the reader.

21
.
it’s love that rules the roast
: this form of the expression was current from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (
OED
). See Byron’s letter of 1820 to Mr Murray, reminiscing about the male clubs at Cambridge: ‘while he [William Bankes] stayed, he ruled the roast – or rather the
roasting –
and was father of all mischiefs’ (Moore’s
Byron
, p. 97).

1
.
all the Sir Herberts and Valentines
: Helen dismisses the fabricated ideal knights of courtly romance, e.g., in the French medieval romance
Valentine and Orson
.

2
.
all for love or the world well lost
: title of John Dryden’s play of 1678, which had passed into common usage as a romantic formula.

1
.
amused
: in the archaic sense of’beguiled, deluded’ (
OED
).

2
.
blackleg
: swindlers at gambling (
OED
).

3
.
bedlamites
: lunatics (from ‘Bedlam’, or Bethlehem Hospital, the first English lunatic asylum).

4
.
felo-de-se
: suicide.

5
.
the poor devil, with a ghastly smile
: Anne Brontë constantly salvages casual phrases such as ‘poor devil’ from the colourless neutrality into which common usage has trodden them, and awakens our consciousness of their original meanings. Lowborough is indeed in a ‘hell’ more appalling than a mere ‘gambling hell’. His smile is ‘ghastly’ (from ‘ghostly’) because he is playing away his soul: he has diminished to the spectre of himself.

6
.
home – that is, to our club
: another piercing irony. As ministering demon, Huntingdon leads his ‘noble’ fellow deeper into the den of degradation and despair, by feeding Lowborough’s thirst with alcohol. The
club may be reminiscent of the infamous Hell-fire Club at Medmenham Abbey, described in Charles Johnstone’s
Chrysal: or the Adventures of a Guinea
(1760–65). Another source may be Moore’s
Byron
, whose accounts of Regency club antics had enlivened the Brontës’ childhood: e.g., ‘We were a company of some seven or eight, and used to sit up late in our friars’ dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the
skull-cup
and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning around the house in our conventual garments… The harmony of these our symposia was somewhat interrupted… by Matthew’s threatening to throw Hobhouse out of a
window
, in consequence of I know not what commerce of jokes’. Nearer home, Anne Brontë had witnessed the orgies of Branwell and his cronies, with their self-dramatizing ‘hellfire’ camaraderie. In the Lowborough inset story she focuses on the poignancy of what may be spiritually lost when control and self-esteem are forfeited: he is essentially a Byronic figure, with the Calvinist dread which Byron saw as having darkened his childhood.

7
.
because you’re a peer
: hereditary peers were immune from arrest for debt, though their property could be confiscated.

8
.
What can’t be cured must be endured
: proverbial.

9
.
Then, they were demons themselves
: Helen brings to the surface of attention the movement from buried metaphor (‘demons of drink… as black as the demon of play’) to literal morality drama. The mutually reinforcing behaviour of male bondings is emphasized: the group polices its individuals (here, the disaffected Lowborough) when it feels its narcissistic code threatened. Anne Brontë shows the infantile character of debauch, with its machismo dependent on a mass act of sucking on the equivalent of babies’ bottles.

10
.
Stop poor sinner, stop and think
: perhaps composed by Anne Brontë herself in emulation of Methodist or Baptist admonitory hymns – possibly a ‘temperance’ hymn.

11
.
providentially
: the narcissistic Huntingdon presents his crowning glory as a parody of the biblical ‘helmet of salvation’ (Ephesians 6:17), with authorial irony on the word ‘providentially’ which equates him with the ‘elect’.

12
.
a skeleton at a feast
: proverbial, after the Ancient Egyptian tradition of the
memento mori
at a feast Lowborough as a
memento mort
disturbs the group’s capacity to surrender to its customary mindless mirth: there follows a discussion of club rules so as to protect the group against this intrusion of reality.

13
.
glided in, like the ghost in Macbeth
: Shakespeare,
Macbeth
III. iv. Lowborough’s very mode of locomotion appears sinister to the fraternity, since, like Banquo’s ghost, he disrupts the complacency of the feast by threatening to arouse guilt and unease.

14
.
a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation!
: Hebrews 10:27. Inga-Stina Ewbank’s suggested emendation of ‘for’ to ‘forth’ is not accurate
(Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists
(Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 73): but the fact that Anne Brontë’s language can present difficulties to the modern reader points up the roots of her English in the Authorized Version of the Bible, i.e., in early seventeenth-century usage.

15
.
followed by a rather severe brain fever
: the Lowborough episode allows Anne Brontë to plot the downward curve of drug-abuse, which is not an aspect of Huntingdon’s psychology. She illustrates the manic-depressive fluctuations of the combination of opium and alcohol, which she had observed at close quarters, together with the physical breakdown such a combination can entail.

16
.
I tenderly brought him back to the fold
: Huntingdon viciously parodies the solicitude of the Good Shepherd who restored the one sheep that was lost, in the parable (‘he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray’ (Matthew 18:13)). The shepherd stands for Christ’s love of the human soul.

17
.
a little wine for his stomach’s sake
:I Timothy 5:23.

18
.
media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours
: ‘the middle way’ (Latin); ‘neither never nor always’ (French).

19
.
castaway
: one of the most emotive words in Anne Brontë’s vocabulary, this word represented the predicament of the reprobated soul, God’s reject, in Calvinist theology. In her poem, ‘To Cowper’, Anne Brontë answers the famous last verse of the eighteenth-century poet’s ‘The Cast-Away’ (‘… we perish’d, each alone, / But I, beneath a rougher sea / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he’ (64–6)) with her own self-doubt ‘Yet should thy darkest fears be true, / If Heaven be so severe / That such a soul as thine is lost, / O! how shall I appear?’ (41–4). The 1850 version of her beautiful ‘Prayer’ reads ‘Unless Thou hasten to relieve, / Thy suppliant is a castaway’ (8–9). Fear of reprobation haunts Nancy Brown in
Agnes Grey
: she too fears to be abandoned (Ch. 11). The younger Cathy in
Wutbering Heights
mocks the Calvinistic Joseph by calling him ‘reprobate! you are a castaway’ (Ch. 2).

20
.
flirting her gold-mounted whip
: flicking or waving the whip. Annabella, who has the whip-hand in the relationship with the deluded Lowborough, preens her own powerfully sexual image in the mirror. She is now for the second time admired as ‘a magnificent creature’, where ‘creature’ carries the sense of the alien and animal. She lacks the susceptibilities of Lowborough and of Helen, and it is this absence of human sympathy and moral sense that places her beneath the fully human.

21
.
what shall I do with the serious part of myself
?: one of the most brilliant, sombre touches of apprehension, the more impressive for its placement at the end of a chapter – intimating the awareness that Helen’s intended husband has something catastrophically missing from his nature.

1
.
Grassdale Manor
: Hargreaves emends to ‘Grass-dale’ on the grounds that this is the form ‘in the vast majority of cases in the Newby edition’. This is true, but the first and second instances are given as ‘Grassdale’ and subsequently the name recurs broken between one line and the next, which I surmise gave currency to the ‘Grass-dale’ which latterly emerges. I therefore print ‘Grassdale’.

2
.
to love him and to cleave to him
: echoing the Marriage Service in the Book of Common Prayer.

3
.
you don’t love me with all your heart
: playing on Jesus’ first commandment: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ (Matthew 22:37).

4
.
not one atom more of it to you than He allows
: the Christian-feminist insistence on the priority of the allegiance to God over one’s husband is as forcefully expressed in Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
: ‘I could not, in those days, see God for his creature – of whom I had made an idol’ (Ch. 24). Huntingdon is tempting Helen to commit idolatry.

5
.
a sweet enthusiast
: ‘enthusiast’ derives from the Greek, ‘filled with the god’: pejorative in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the sense of ‘religious fanatic’; reclaimed in the Romantic period and by Dissenters because of renewed esteem for divine inspiration. Gondal was a theatre of ‘enthusiasm’, e.g., Emily’s poem of 1839, ‘Sleep not, dream not’ addresses a child as ‘Darling enthusiast, holy child’ (11), predicting his fall from grace; Anne’s poem of 1838, ‘The North Wind’, addresses ‘a young enthusiast’, ‘wild and free’ as the mountains (12–13).

6
.
organ of veneration
: in phrenology, the pseudo-science which equated shape of skull with an individual’s moral, intellectual and emotional qualities, the area at the top centre of the skull was held to denote the capacity for reverence or worship.

7
.
gathering where he had not strawed
: Matthew 25:24 ‘Strawed’ means ‘strewed’ or ‘scattered’.

8
.
who can eat… more than I
?: Ecclesiastes 2:25. Huntingdon’s five-part parody discourse whacks his pious wife with a text pillaged from the book of human vanity, written reputedly by Solomon.

9
.
and to be merry
: Ecclesiastes 8:15.

10
.
Rejoice… into judgment
: Ecclesiastes 11:9.

1
.
locked myself up in my own chamber
: this gesture of angry exclusion of Helen’s husband from her bedroom as having no moral right to her person defies the law which appropriated wife to husband as sexual property. See Introduction, p. xviii.

2
.
dumbfoundered
: a variant of’dumbfound’ or ‘dumbfounded’ (
OED
).

3
.
He struck it off with a smart blow
: behaviour toward animals was always a litmus test of character for Anne Brontë. In
Agnes Grey
, the curate Mr Weston’s care for Nancy Brown’s cat (Chs. 11,12) stands in contrast to the minister Mr Hatfield’s casual brutality as he ‘kicked my poor cat right across th’ floor’ (Ch. 11) and hits the Murrays’ dog ‘a resounding thwack’ upon its skull (Ch. 14).

4
.
are you going to be a good girl
: the infantile male attempts to assert control by infantilizing in turn, bringing his grown-up wife into the dependent relationship custom expects. The verbal demotion of grown woman to ‘good girl’ is a mode of subjection through role-play, whose greatest literary exponent is Elizabeth von Arnim in her characterization of Everard Wemyss in
Vera
(1921): ‘“Now what has the little thing got into its head this time?”’; ‘“Sh-sh, now. Go to sleep again like a good little girl”…“Who’s my very own baby?”’.

1
.
rakish
: haggard, off-colour (from ‘rake’) – an ironic description from the mouth of the rake, Huntingdon.