I opened the flood-gates of my soul, and poured out the dammed-up fury that was foaming and swelling within.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
Genre: Period Romance
About: A widow and her young son become the tenants of Wildfell Hall - a place that had long been abandoned and so causes a stir within the quiet neighbourhood. Especially as the widow shows herself to be unsociable, mysterious and so peculiar in her ways. Gilbert, her closest neighbour, determines to make friends with her, even as rumours about her begin to be whispered.
The Good
Anne Brontë was impressive to want to write this story. Mrs Graham (aka Helen Huntington) is a fierce character who must have appeared pretty shocking for the time in which this was written. Helen is a woman who doesn't allow herself to be persuaded by others, who stays true to herself throughout and actively protects herself and her son from the harm of others. She's direct, calm, and forceful and confronts her bad marriage head-on. She doesn't expect or want another man to save her: she is the active saviour of herself and never submits to another's will. That had to have been really powerful to read in a time where women had to obey their husbands in all things. The sin of the man was not to be stare at and confronted, it was to be overlooked and excused. Anne Brontë doesn't shy away from showing the faults of men, and of women too, who otherwise are supposed to be part of Polite Society.
The Bad
Although I have a lot of respect for Helen's strength of character, she and Gilbert are often unbearable to read. They preach endlessly. Both of them have flaws (Helen is narrow-minded, too quick to judge and refuses to listen to advice; Gilbert is rash, violent and proud), but they spend most of the novel either praising each other or self-congratulating themselves. They don't learn anything or grow as people. Helen especially has this way of acting as though she never does anything wrong. Her thinking and feelings are always superior and if she considers arguing with someone she, happily, restrains herself or else puts them in their place. While that's awesome that she's so strong-minded, the way it's shown to the reader is through her telling us why she's right or dialogue overloaded with bible quotes and long-winded sermons. I've nothing against the morality of the main characters, but the way they speak and how characters react to them just didn't feel real. Instead, it felt like Helen and Gilbert became gods in their world, telling others how to live their lives - such as when Helen desires Frederick to marry Esther, or Gilbert warns Frederick off Jane, or Helen 'corrects' Ralph's ways. Their sense of morality defines the ending for every character. The ones they like get happy endings, the ones they don't get bad ones.
We are told who the good characters are and who the bad ones are with absolutely no grey area allowed or even for the reader to see and judge for themselves. Gilbert flirts with and kisses Eliza, but as soon as she's shown to be jealous of Helen she becomes the worst kind of woman to him. Jane likewise is not allowed to gossip about Helen. Maybe these two women are terrible, but the hatred shown to them from Gilbert is completely out of proportion to what the reader is shown. At least with Annabella we're shown her actively lying and cheating. With Hargrave it's also hard to think of him as a villain when he acts and thinks so similarly to Gilbert (after Gilbert discovers Helen's married, he suggests Arthur isn't truly her husband, just the same as Hargrave tried to). Helen and Gilbert are so extreme in their judgements of people that they force their views on the readers regardless of reality.
The Somewhat Iffy
Every man seemed to fall in love with Helen and I can't understand it. At the beginning her suitors are a bit more believable but she has so many and (apart from Arthur) she hates them all and supposedly doesn't encourage them. In fact she acts as though every one of her suitors annoy her, and yet they can't seem to do anything but follow her around and devise ways to get her alone. Hargrave was the most unbelievable one. He devotes so much time on her when she clearly isn't interested.
Not the smartest move to put your running away plan in a diary your husband sees you writing in. And then when it's found out, to continue writing your escape dreams in the same diary. I also thought where she runs to wasn't the hardest place for Arthur to find if he'd tried. I know there's no internet but he knew she had a brother, finding out that brother was renting a property to a widow and a young son (she even took her mother's maiden name, another not super hard thing to discover) was do-able I think.
Overall
The ideas of this novel are great, but the lens in which we see the story play out is far too narrow. A more objective POV or perhaps if the novel wasn't epistolary, I could have found myself more attached to the characters or believe them.
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