The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)

Genre: Classic fiction
Year Published: 1848

Sorry it's been so long, dear readers, but Victoriana is a trifle . . . bog-tastic. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is only about 400 pages long, but in terms of how long it took to read, it felt like about double that length.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did, surprisingly so. (I read it out of sympathy for my little sister, who has to read it for a college English class.) The narrative was far more engaging than I could've hoped. Sure, it suffers from the same malady that I think most classic literature does, that is, it could've really used an editor to prune some of the most overblown passages, but that's not too much a problem here. Brontë, thankfully, has a higher proportion of dialogue to description than Austen does (don't get me wrong, I love me some Austen, but girlfriend needed to trim down some of that prose), but there are still some places that could be cut to the betterment of the novel.

Wildfell Hall is the first feminist novel, or one of the first. But it's hardly about a strong woman kicking ass; it's about a dutiful woman whose horrible husband emotionally and spiritually tortures her. He's a dissolute, hateful drunkard, as are his friends, and the poor wife is stuck in the marriage because of a woman's inability to file for divorce. Now, everyone says that Brontë was arguing in favor of a change to that law, but I have to say, I didn't see it. Wildfell Hall is so imperturbably Victorian that it doesn't seem like any sort of instrument for social change.

Incidentally, its sheer didactic Victorian-ness is where I feel the real fault of the book lies. Obviously, the author was a product of her time, but there is an inherent contradiction in the values Brontë seems to espouse and the place that her narrative ends up: on the one hand, her heroine is extremely religious, in the old Protestant God-fearing way, and seems to endure all her suffering with the calm knowledge that she will win Heaven at the end of her life. On the other hand, everyone in the book gets exactly what they deserve: the pious achieve happiness, while the sinners are mired in the unpleasant aftereffects of various vices.

It seems to me you can't have it both ways. Either Heaven really is the only thing that matters, and thus (if Brontë were to be honest with her readers) sometimes, while on Earth, the sinners gain while the pious lose out. Or, if you'd rather, life on Earth is in fact very important, and characters (both religious and not) must act in ways that will win them the greatest happiness, even if their actions are not as scrupulously moralistic as perhaps they'd like to be. To have people act in precise accordance with such strict moral codes and then achieve earthly happiness seems like a terrible cop-out to me. If Brontë is making any sort of radical statement, I would venture to guess that it's less about a woman's right to divorce and more about the absurdity of a religious/moral system that would order a woman be subjugated to her husband (even if she eventually extricates her own heroine from those chains). But then again, I may be reading my own displeasure onto her narrative. It's very tough to tell.

Recommended? It's certainly good for its time period. Pick it up, read a chapter or two; if you're not driven crazy by the description, you'll make it through just fine.