“The Most Attractive to the Worst Kinds of Men:” Self-Importance and Romantic Relationships in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

46 Victorians Journal “THE MOST ATTRACTIVE TO THE WORST KINDS OF MEN!” SELF-IMPORTANCE AND ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall BY AY^EGUL KUGLIN Anne Bronte’s The Tenant ofWildfellHall is famous as a novel that attempts the unusual: not only does it portray the life ofa young heroine after her wedding—the point at which domestic novels customarily end—but it also portrays an unhappy marriage in all its ugliness and destructiveness, a rare and courageous undertaking for literature of the time. While the plot centers on Helen Huntingdon’s disastrous marriage to a dissolute alcoholic, it does so in the context of other relationships, both happy and dysfunctional. The reasons for the breakdown of Helen’s marriage have to do not only with Huntingdon’s depravity and alcoholism but also with Helen’s zeal to reform him, which proves to be, in its way, quite as catastrophic. Depictions of alternative relationships model Anne Bronte’s views on how couples might achieve harmony and mutual satisfaction in their relationships. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, destructive relationships and marriages are those founded on each partner’s expansive neurotic needs. On the one hand, as defined by Karen Homey, these needs are expressed as self-importance, selfishness, aggressiveness, arrogance and / or irresponsibility, as seen in Huntingdon (194-95); on the other, extreme self-effacement exacerbates the destructiveness of the relationship, dramatized by Helen and Milicent. Neurotic tendencies inhibit moral growth and lead the character to loss of self and, even, of life. Conversely, relationships based on mutual attraction without the need to gratify neurotic tendencies allow for moral growth and thus prove successful. Homey’s psychoanalytic theory might seem a peculiar choice for an analysis of this work, given that the most obvious conflict Victorians Journal 47 appears to be that which poses Helen’s devotion to principles of religion against her husband’s defiance of them. However, in spite ofthe prevailing religious terminology in which family conflicts and resulting worries are couched in the novel, they have to do less with sin than with the mortal world. Aunt Maxwell does warn Helen that her intended is running ‘“down the headlong road to the place prepared for the devil’” (Bronte 118) and implores her to reconsider her choice for the sake of her worldly happiness: ‘“you little know the misery of uniting your fortunes to such a man!”’ Similarly, while Helen is disconcerted by her husband’s lack of interest in going to church, she is shocked by his admissions to actually harming women through seduction and desertion (163) and ruining men by encouraging alcohol and gambling addiction, as with Lowborough (151). She fails to see the confluence between such attitudes and behaviors and Huntingdon’s character orientation. The central conflict of the novel is based on disturbances in the self and in human relations, rather than relations between the individual and God. Critics approach this in various ways: Ian Ward emphasizes the spouses’ inequality before the law and Helen’s ensuing inability legally to escape abuse; Terry Eagleton’s Marxist reading focuses on the conflict between Huntingdon, one of the gentry, and his wife, who lacks money, rights, and social standing, and may even, as John Sutherland points out, be illegitimate (77). Similarly stressing the class aspect, Gwen Hyman identifies Huntingdon’s drinking as the source of the conflict, which she defines as a way of “avoiding...class eradication” (458) and “reinforcing his class position through his refusal to limit his appetites” (456). According to Marianne Thormahlen, Huntingdon is driven to “drink and dissipation” because “he never gains total dominance over the girl he surely married for love” (836-37). For Annette Federico, on the other hand, Huntingdon’s alcoholism is a result of existential crisis, “his means of coping with a universe empty of meaning, an extension of his own moral despair” (20). Beatriz Palomo rejects that interpretation, claiming “Huntingdon is 48 Victorians Journal no Byronic hero...He is just a selfish, shallow man, whom alcohol has made brutal and stupid” (192). This character’s shallow selfishness is essential for interpreting the narrative’s conflicts and resolutions. Huntingdon, a narcissist exactly as described in Homey...