In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), virtue liberates.
The novel’s protagonist, Helen Huntingdon, leaves her husband, steals away to an abandoned mansion with her son and art supplies, changes her last name, sells oil paintings illegally under a pseudonym, and scandalises the local village with her flagrant independence and flouting of convention. Helen’s liberation, however, does not lie in any of these acts of defiance and independence in themselves. Rather, her pursuit of freedom takes a form that is unfamiliar in a modern feminist context.
The freedom Helen pursues is not the ability to do as she likes, but the freedom to choose what is right and pursue what is good. What constrains her are not societal norms, institutions, and traditions in and of themselves, but rather those circumstances and relationships that erode her ability to exercise virtue. Helen’s ultimate liberation lies in securing a life where she can live virtuously.
There is much debate among literary scholars about whether or not this strange, tightly plotted, gothic-yet-realist Victorian novel can be described as “feminist.” Some critics have declared the text boldly feminist, while other critics argue that the novel’s structure, its Christian moral overtones, and the decisions of its protagonist undermine or compromise its feminism. These opposing views have left the novel hovering uncertainly on the edge of the canon of feminist literature since the 1970s.
To understand the feminism of this novel, we must first understand the moral philosophy undergirding it: the virtue ethics that motivate the heroine’s actions and the novel’s purpose as a political text. Scholars such as Ruth Abbey, Erika Bachiochi, and Virginia Sapiro have already illuminated the role of virtue ethics in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Their work provides a useful precedent for a parallel approach to Brontë’s novel that focuses on the moral dimension of its feminism.
The feminism of Anne Brontë is certainly distinct from twenty-first-century feminism. Yet it is refreshing and potent, with productive potential applications to our time, precisely because of its philosophically robust conceptions of personhood, freedom, and the rights of women.
Realist Fiction with a Political Purpose
Anne Brontë, the least known of the three celebrated Brontë sisters, only wrote two novels before dying before the age of thirty. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel,is recognisably a sister text to the masterpieces of the other two sisters, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. All three novels innovate on the gothic and Romantic genres and contain skilfully plotted nested narratives, powerful evocations of the English moors, and most famously, resonant representations of female interiority.
What sets Anne’s writing apart from her older sisters’ is its unflinching realism and sense of real-life political urgency. Both of Anne Brontë’s novels portray brutality, vulgarity, and immoral behaviour, which caused shock and scandal among her readers and reviewers. The potency of Anne Brontë’s novels, which lingers long after reading them, lies in their dark, sobering subject matter. This unpalatable realism is one reason her novels received less critical acclaim over the years. Her sister Charlotte’s disapproval and suppression of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death is another.
Brontë’s novel has an expressly political purpose. In a preface, Brontë describes Tenant’s intended effect in political and moral terms: contributing something towards a “reform” of societal problems, resulting from her intention as the author to simply “tell the truth.” She then specifies which truths Tenant is telling: “with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear.”
This motive—to accurately and faithfully depict vice and vicious characters “as they really are”—parallels Mary Wollstonecraft’s aim of exhibiting the wrongs done to women and the ills of society in her unfinished novel Maria, which, like Tenant, advocates for reform by using fiction to expose the reality of women’s lived experiences. In their environments of controversial debate on gendered issues, these realist novels have potent political import.
Gothic Horror—With a Twist
Brontë inverts the gothic genre by integrating it with moral realism to advocate for virtue ethics. The novel incorporates several gothic literary elements, including a nested narrative structure, a suspenseful attempt to escape predatory male characters, and gloomy, architectural settings: the old aristocratic house and desolate moorland mansion.
The gothic house is also a feature of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but Anne Brontë uniquely inverts the motif by shifting the locus of horror from the house itself to the vices of its inhabitants. In Tenant, Helen’s husband Arthur and his friends engage in a plethora of vicious behaviours from adultery to drinking and gambling while at Grassdale Manor, one such gothic abode. These have a host of effects on Helen, her son, and each other. Helen writes that the atmosphere of Grassdale seems to “stifle” her and describes the house as “a prison” and her escape from it a “deliverance.”
Helen’s entrapment at Grassdale results from both Arthur’s immoral behaviour, and her legal and financial vulnerability under English marriage and property law. In Maria, Wollstonecraft performs a similar literary manoeuvre, associating gothic terror with women’s real, lived experiences of sexual violence, abortion, poverty, and inequality under the law. Addiction, abuse, and moral corruption constitute the gothic horror of Grassdale Manor.
Helen eventually flees Grassdale and finds refuge at Wildfell Hall. Wildfell is also a large “mansion of the Elizabethan era, built of dark grey stone, venerable and picturesque to look at, but doubtless, cold and gloomy enough to inhabit.” The mansion and its surroundings—which are “lonely,” “unsheltered,” “stern and gloomy,” “untilled and untrimmed, abandoned to the weeds and the grass”—present “a goblinish appearance,” reminiscent of “ghostly legions and dark traditions.” This description of Wildfell is steeped in gothic tropes, yet this gloomy house is not a house of horror like Grassdale. Instead, it is a refuge and a haven. The entry detailing Helen’s arrival highlights this:
One faint red glimmer cheered us from a window where the lattice was in good repair … We were admitted by an old woman who had been commissioned to air and keep the house till our arrival, into a tolerably snug apartment … Here she procured us a light, roused the fire to a cheerful blaze, and soon prepared a simple repast for our refreshment.
The passage’s emphasis on light and warmth in the “glimmer” in the windows and the “cheerful blaze” in the fireplace de-gothicises Wildfell Hall. Helen’s description of the following morning illuminates the key exposition of this generic inversion:
Sleep was sweet and refreshing when it came, and the waking was delightful beyond expression. It was little Arthur that roused me, with his gentle kisses. He was here, then, safely clasped in my arms, and many leagues away from his unworthy father!
At Wildfell Hall, Helen’s son is safe from the vices and immorality of his father and the whole Grassdale set.
Seeking Freedom from Vice
As the mistress of Grassdale Manor, Helen had been trapped in a stifling atmosphere of vice and abuse. As the tenant of Wildfell Hall, she is free to raise her son according to good principles and free from abuse and moral degradation herself. Tenant is a novel concerned with freedom of a very particular kind: namely, freedom from conditions, patterns, and institutions that inhibit the exercise of virtue and erode one’s ability to choose what is good.
Tenant explores the concepts of freedom and self-control in the realm of alcohol and gambling addiction. Brontë depicts the debilitating effects of alcoholism through Arthur’s character, whose physical, mental, and moral health all deteriorate as a result of his drinking. Even more distressing is the depiction of Arthur’s friend Lord Lowborough’s struggle with a gambling addiction and the way that the whole Grassdale set deliberately exploit his vulnerabilities and tempt him to both gamble and drink. Brontë’s cast of characters demonstrate in stark reality the ways that addictive substances and behaviours like drinking and gambling diminish the capacity to freely exercise virtue—and that these struggles are not confined to the individual but reach into the lives of vulnerable others.
Possibly the most chilling scene in the novel is when Arthur and his friends gleefully exert their bad influence on Helen’s son (little Arthur), only a few years old: giving him wine, teaching him to swear, encouraging him to “have his own way like a man, and send mamma to the devil when she tried to prevent him.” Arthur’s inability to practise self-control begins to influence his son to have the same inability; these behaviours and choices reduce the freedom of individuals and their communities over time to choose the good.
Brontë’s argument is that women—and children, and indeed men—are harmed by the enslavement that comes from patterns of bad behaviour, shirking of responsibility, and a lack of self-mastery. This is a feminist argument demanding a higher standard of behaviour from men and broader cultural reform for the good of women and society at large.
Helen’s priority is the good of her young son, and his welfare drives her decision-making. Her choice to leave her husband is more driven by this concern than by a desire for independence in itself; Helen pursues independence from the bad influence of her husband to ensure her son’s growth in virtue. Helen’s decision to prioritise her responsibilities as a mother above maintaining conventional appearances is a radical proposition in Brontë’s context, particularly considering the legal context regarding unequal marital separation and child custody laws. However, it is clear that the novel does not represent Helen’s separation from her husband, or little Arthur’s loss of his father, as goods in themselves. Rather, they are tragic necessities because of both Arthur’s lack of virtue and extant law.
What the novel is really arguing for is not merely that women should have the freedom to leave their husbands but that husbands should, in the first place, be an influence of goodness and virtue for their wives and children. This is the freedom Helen is seeking: the freedom to raise her son under conditions that foster virtuous character development.
The Personhood of Women
This leads us to a final concern of the novel: the personhood of women. The novel advocates for an understanding of men and women as integrations of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, and for society to be organised in a way that encourages the development of all of these aspects. This frames the novel’s exploration of marriage as a relationship of equals between husband and wife, in which all parts of a woman’s personhood—her intellect, emotional life, talents, and spirituality—are valued.
Tenant treats Helen’s rational intellect and artistic abilities as integral to her own pursuit of virtue. In various scenes, Helen retreats to the library (usually the domain of men), which is represented as an intellectual and artistic refuge from the vice and immorality of her husband and his companions. Helen’s rational intellect and artistic pursuits also become defensive aids in her struggle against Arthur’s friend Mr. Hargrave, who attempts to seduce her.
In a chess game between Helen and Hargrave laden with sexual and predatory tension, the two of them treat the game as “the type of a more serious contest.” Helen experiences the mental game as a moral and intellectual battle against Hargrave’s attempted sexual triumph. In a later scene, Hargrave comes upon Helen as she paints alone, again in the library. When Helen detects another imminent sexual advance, her anger rises, and she begins to “dash away at [her] canvas with rather too much energy for the good of the picture.” As Hargrave grows more excited and insistent, Helen grips her palette-knife and wields it against him, turning her painting tool into a weapon to defend her virtue. Liberal feminist critics of the novel have considered Helen’s palette-knife as symbolising her autonomy and self-reliance. Helen’s concern is not for independence for its own sake, however, but for the freedom to prioritise virtue and follow her conscience. Helen’s palette-knife is not only a physical shield or financial tool but a moral instrument.
Helen’s escape from Grassdale to Wildfell Hall is made possible by her intelligence and her artwork. By making them essential to the suspenseful escape plot and investing them with a moral quality, the novel portrays these multi-dimensional gifts as integral to what literary critic Janina Hornosty calls Tenant’s “central drama: … the making fit of the human being for the end of earthly life.” This drama plays out in the novel as the pursuit of virtue.
The novel serves as an argument that women should be given professional, artistic, and intellectual opportunities because of who they are ontologically—persons called to virtue—and that awareness of this integrated personhood should characterise society, especially marriages. The argument developed in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication, that women and men are responsible for developing their whole person and growing in virtue, can be traced through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, lending its feminism a metaphysical foundation and moral urgency.
Freedom, Personhood, and Modern Feminism
Personhood is a fundamental concept in both virtue ethics and feminist philosophy. Tenant’s exploration of thisconcept expands its relevance far beyond its immediate historical context. Indeed, the novel merits a place among the classics of feminist and moral literature. Its substantive philosophical contribution is no less relevant in our time than it was in Brontë’s.
Any political project that advocates for women’s rights assumes some prior ontology of the female person as a certain kind of being endowed with particular rights. Brontë’s feminism, like Wollstonecraft’s, is based on an ontology of the human person as a being with the capacity and imperative to grow in virtue. Modern feminism has tended to de-emphasise these fundamental considerations of personhood and ontology, but, given their pivotal position in a philosophy of rights and responsibilities, they are worth returning to. Brontë’s novel, written from a paradigm of virtue-based human ontology, provides a timely opportunity to refine twenty-first-century ideas about feminism and freedom by reconsidering foundational concepts like personhood and responsibility.
The irony—and the tragedy—of excluding Brontë’s novel from the canon of feminist literature because of its distinct framework of virtue ethics is that this very grounding in virtue ethics is precisely what modern feminism needs. A recovery of virtue ethics-based feminism offers an expansive, corrective and fruitful opportunity to refine our concepts of freedom, personhood, and women’s rights. Brontë’s novel offers a powerful contribution to this project, demonstrating that true liberation comes not from unrestricted licence but from the freedom to choose what is right.
