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lee_foust 's review for:
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
And then, at the age of 53, it occurs to you you've never read and know almost nothing about the third Bronte sister even though you've been carting an old orange Penguin classic edition of one of her two novels from habitation to habitation for years...
Picking it up, you remember why: The title and cover painting recall a thrilling female Gothic story with a scary, Byronic hero-villain and an abandoned old (don't forget crumbling!) manor on the moors... and then the blurb on the back dashes all of your hopes. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall isn't Gothic at all; this novel's horrors are real.
But this winter I braved it anyway and have been happily rewarded. It may well be the smoothest read of the three Bronte sister's big novels--although it's been some time since I last read the sisters from Yorkshire and was just in the mood/inundated with Victorian prose at the moment. Interestingly, both the mixing of male and female narrative voices as well as the Chinese Box form of the narrative (exactly like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in fact, a series of letters recounting a narrative with a written MS in the middle as a kind of flashback) worked fine for me and my casual reader and reality-checker were well satisfied at the author's level of craft--that is to say, I found the artistic techniques to blend smoothly with the reality of the narrative presented. Although interesting, the form didn't get in the way of the story and both the male and the female voice were perfectly convincing, again to yours truly. Brava Ms. Bronte!
In terms of content (and moral instruction) I took my medicine without much trouble. The novel, as the blurb on the back makes evidently clear, is rather didactic--it calls out a social evil (or perhaps a couple of social evils) in a slightly melodramatic, narrative manner. The worst of that is the religious framing of the topic of alcoholic moral dissolution. I say this because I'm not a believer and so I don't naturally associate morals with religion but rather hypocritical moralism--what religions are really all about, in my humble and unpopular opinion.
The best of this is that the somewhat Christian spin on dissolution was rather a slight motif and in no way waters down or gets in the way of the actual narrative presentation of the protagonist's husband's chemical and moral dissolution and its effects upon himself, her, her child, or their friends. It's a well drawn portrait of a selfish and privileged man overindulging until he's lost in selfish pleasures and addictions he doesn't even notice anymore and its restraint is remarkable. Frankly, in the end, Mr. Huntigdon is really much more true to life than the far more romantic (and romanticized--even over-romanticized) Heathcliff or Rochester--perhaps because based on the dissolution of Anne's own brother, Bramwell.
Best of all, the mixed voices of the narrative were very much what Russian post-Formalist literary critic M. M. Bakhtin had in mind, I believe, when he formulated his theory that the best novels are dialectic in nature. We do see/hear several viewpoints and philosophies argued/displayed in both deed and effect in the narrative and we're not really manipulated much as readers to moralize upon them as so many of these types or narratives ask us to do. So score there. I found neither of the two protagonists likable--Helen is far too priggish to be likable and Huntingdon too self-centered morally loose (obviously) to be respected so of course these flawed characterizations, while perhaps slightly damaging the big feminist point some critics insist on assigning to this novel (not without reason, but it is a story/novel/narrative too, I hasten to add) it helped me to read without condescending to the moral. In the end I was torn between wanting the narrator, Markham, to get the girl or not. But often people we like end up with others whose worth we fail to see and their happiness is in no way mitigated by our doubts. Live and let live, I say.
Which reminds me, I was always a bit on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next in this novel--no mean trick for a realistic narrative without the melodramatic goings-on of Gothic romances. Good stuff!
Picking it up, you remember why: The title and cover painting recall a thrilling female Gothic story with a scary, Byronic hero-villain and an abandoned old (don't forget crumbling!) manor on the moors... and then the blurb on the back dashes all of your hopes. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall isn't Gothic at all; this novel's horrors are real.
But this winter I braved it anyway and have been happily rewarded. It may well be the smoothest read of the three Bronte sister's big novels--although it's been some time since I last read the sisters from Yorkshire and was just in the mood/inundated with Victorian prose at the moment. Interestingly, both the mixing of male and female narrative voices as well as the Chinese Box form of the narrative (exactly like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in fact, a series of letters recounting a narrative with a written MS in the middle as a kind of flashback) worked fine for me and my casual reader and reality-checker were well satisfied at the author's level of craft--that is to say, I found the artistic techniques to blend smoothly with the reality of the narrative presented. Although interesting, the form didn't get in the way of the story and both the male and the female voice were perfectly convincing, again to yours truly. Brava Ms. Bronte!
In terms of content (and moral instruction) I took my medicine without much trouble. The novel, as the blurb on the back makes evidently clear, is rather didactic--it calls out a social evil (or perhaps a couple of social evils) in a slightly melodramatic, narrative manner. The worst of that is the religious framing of the topic of alcoholic moral dissolution. I say this because I'm not a believer and so I don't naturally associate morals with religion but rather hypocritical moralism--what religions are really all about, in my humble and unpopular opinion.
The best of this is that the somewhat Christian spin on dissolution was rather a slight motif and in no way waters down or gets in the way of the actual narrative presentation of the protagonist's husband's chemical and moral dissolution and its effects upon himself, her, her child, or their friends. It's a well drawn portrait of a selfish and privileged man overindulging until he's lost in selfish pleasures and addictions he doesn't even notice anymore and its restraint is remarkable. Frankly, in the end, Mr. Huntigdon is really much more true to life than the far more romantic (and romanticized--even over-romanticized) Heathcliff or Rochester--perhaps because based on the dissolution of Anne's own brother, Bramwell.
Best of all, the mixed voices of the narrative were very much what Russian post-Formalist literary critic M. M. Bakhtin had in mind, I believe, when he formulated his theory that the best novels are dialectic in nature. We do see/hear several viewpoints and philosophies argued/displayed in both deed and effect in the narrative and we're not really manipulated much as readers to moralize upon them as so many of these types or narratives ask us to do. So score there. I found neither of the two protagonists likable--Helen is far too priggish to be likable and Huntingdon too self-centered morally loose (obviously) to be respected so of course these flawed characterizations, while perhaps slightly damaging the big feminist point some critics insist on assigning to this novel (not without reason, but it is a story/novel/narrative too, I hasten to add) it helped me to read without condescending to the moral. In the end I was torn between wanting the narrator, Markham, to get the girl or not. But often people we like end up with others whose worth we fail to see and their happiness is in no way mitigated by our doubts. Live and let live, I say.
Which reminds me, I was always a bit on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next in this novel--no mean trick for a realistic narrative without the melodramatic goings-on of Gothic romances. Good stuff!