Manly Education and Its Anxiety in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

Kim, Ji-Eun. “Manly Education and Its Anxiety in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 40.2 (2014): 45-64. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Bronte critiques the culture of manly education in the middle and upper classes through Gilbert Markham and Arthur Huntingdon. Whereas Gilbert Markham, a middle class farmer, has uncontrollable bursts of temper, violent upper-class Arthur Huntingdon drinks, womanizes and curses. Ironically Markham and Huntingdon are both fathers to young Arthur; Markham replacing Huntingdon as he dies. Bronte attributes both of these men’s faults as the result of indulgent permissiveness from their mothers. Bronte was writing when this notion of the child’s education was greatly heightened in society. This paper examines how Bronte has Helen administer pedagogy to her son that mirrors John Locke’s essay, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Locke insists that parents apply the empiricist epistemology and emphasizes that “[v]irtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.” Helen sets out to recover this virtue that was lost in her husband’s generation. She rectifies young Arthur’s nature by spiking alcohol drinks, and planting Christian virtues. For this reason, Arthur grows up to be a gentleman that does not replicate his deceased father. (Yonsei University)