"Uncivil Usage": Shifting Forms of Control in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

The question of how authority is maintained is a major preoccupation in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where the treatment of animals serves as a significant indicator of different strategies for exerting control. Brontë's mirrored structure of two separate courtships enables a comparison of the different forms of control exhibited by each of Helen Graham's suitors; encoded in their treatment of animals are insights into the alternative manifestations of authority each man represents. Although Arthur Huntingdon and Gilbert Markham use very different methods to assert control, ultimately they are both deeply concerned with maintaining a position of structural privilege. While Arthur embodies an entitled, thoughtless masculine power typical of an upper-class gentleman, Gilbert exemplifies a much more deliberate maintenance of control, indicative of new forms of governance emerging in nineteenth-century England.