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A number of contemporary critics have recognized The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a landmark feminist text, but it had long been unfavorably compared with the works of Anne's more celebrated sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Although critics are by no means incorrect in suggesting that Tenant lacks the psychological complexity of (1847) or Wuthering Heights (1847), the novel has unnecessarily suffered from the dismissive labels imposed on it by earlier scholars, beginning with Charlotte's disparaging comments in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Charlotte claims that Anne had made a poor choice of subject in her second novel:

She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was a naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind: it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents and situations), as a warning to others. (qtd in Andrews 27)

This critical attitude has been perpetuated in our own century by such critics as Winifred Gérin and Margaret Lane, the latter of whom in The Drug-Like Brontë Dream (1952) patronizingly designates Anne "as 'a Brontë without genius,' but as one who certainly had her share of the Brontë temperament" (31). For her own part, Gérin makes the unconvincing argument that the didactic nature of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall precludes it from having literary merit: "It was written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkenness, to be considered a work of art" (Gérin 39). This sort of argument has proven damaging to the text because it discourages the critical reader from investigating the novel on anything more than a superficial level.

However, although The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has received a significant amount of critical censure, it has also gained attention for its surprising radicalism. Contemporary critics have demonstrated an ability to overcome the traditional prejudices that have prevented deeper investigations of the novel in the past and have subsequently discovered in it a number of subversively modern ideas. In "'Imbecile Laughter' and 'Desperate Earnest' in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1982), Juliet McMaster rejects the notion that she should try to defend Brontë's novel rather than simply investigate it: "I proceed on the assumption that The Tenant is a fine and important Victorian novel that deserves serious critical attention as a work of fiction, and apart from biographical considerations" (352). From this critical position, McMaster is able to concentrate on how the structural and thematic pattern of the story-within-a-story "is supported at the dramatic level by the vivid delineation of irresponsible laughter and moral seriousness in the sayings and doings of characters" (368). In effect, the critic argues that Brontë demonstrates an awareness not only of the dangers of dissolution and profligacy or of the moral standards that differentiated the Regency and Victorian periods, but by associating these different standards with her characters she shows her acute (and remarkably contemporary) understanding of the inequitable distributions of social power to men and women in the nineteenth century.

In "The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1982), Arlene M. Jackson acknowledges that Bronte's writing lacks the qualities which have made Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights canonical texts, but implies that this should not prevent critics from appreciating the important contribution of a novel like Tenant: "Without the searing intensity of Charlotte or the dramatic inventiveness of Emily . . . Anne demonstrates through her writing that she has a conscious, perceptive control of her fictional materials. This control gives Anne Bronte a claim to artistic merit in her own right" (198). Jackson recognizes that the often brutal realism of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a way of exploding Victorian myths about gender roles in "revealing a marital discord full of suffering, agony, and even ugliness" (200). Thus, like McMaster, Jackson understands the novel's uniqueness in the way it asks bold questions about the power structures that define sexual relationships during the Victorian period:

Anne Brontë also answers a question that other novels of her time do not ask: what happens to a marriage and to the innocent partner when one partner (specifically, the male) leads a solipsistic life, where personal pleasures are seen as deserved, where maleness and the role of husband is tied to the freedom to do as one wants, and femaleness and the role of wife is linked to providing service and pleasure not necessarily sexual, but including daily praise and ego-boosting and, quite simply, constant attention. (203)

Although she acknowledges Anne's limitations as a writer in the opening paragraph of her article, Jackson is able to set these aside and concentrate on specific gender issues in the novel that are deserving of elucidation and critical commentary.

It is precisely this sort of attitude that contemporary critics have adopted in order to give Anne's second novel its due.

References

Andrews, Linton. "A Challenge by Anne Bronte." Brontë Society Transactions 14:5 (1965): 25-30.

Gérin, Winifred L. The Brontës: II. The Creative Work. Ed. Ian Scott Kilvert. Burnt Mill: Longman, 1974.

Jackson, Arlene M. "The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." English Studies 63:3 (1982): 198-206.

Lane, Margaret. The Drug-Like Brontë Dream. 1952. London: Murray, 1980.

McMaster, Juliet. "'Imbecile Laughter' and 'Desperate Earnest' in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." Modern Language Quarterly 43:4 (1982), 352-68.

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A number of contemporary critics have recognized The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a landmark feminist text, but it had long been unfavorably compared with the works of Anne's more celebrated sisters, Charlotte and Emily.

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She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was a naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind: it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents and situations), as a warning to others.

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Richard Burton reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem  'Frost at Midnight'.

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Anne Bronte

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I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.

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If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.”

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I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man

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Quotations

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Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq

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Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq

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LETTER VII

LONDON, March 27, O. S. 1747.

DEAR BOY: Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon: they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage. Do not think that I mean to snarl at pleasure, like a Stoic, or to preach against it, like a parson; no, I mean to point it out, and recommend it to you, like an Epicurean: I wish you a great deal; and my only view is to hinder you from mistaking it.

The character which most young men first aim at, is that of a man of pleasure; but they generally take it upon trust; and instead of consulting their own taste and inclinations, they blindly adopt whatever those with whom they chiefly converse, are pleased to call by the name of pleasure; and a man of pleasure in the vulgar acceptation of that phrase, means only, a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whoremaster, and a profligate swearer and curser. As it may be of use to you. I am not unwilling, though at the same time ashamed to own, that the vices of my youth proceeded much more from my silly resolution of being, what I heard called a man of pleasure, than from my own inclinations. I always naturally hated drinking; and yet I have often drunk; with disgust at the time, attended by great sickness the next day, only because I then considered drinking as a necessary qualification for a fine gentleman, and a man of pleasure.

The same as to gaming. I did not want money, and consequently had no occasion to play for it; but I thought play another necessary ingredient in the composition of a man of pleasure, and accordingly I plunged into it without desire, at first; sacrificed a thousand real pleasures to it; and made myself solidly uneasy by it, for thirty the best years of my life.

I was even absurd enough, for a little while, to swear, by way of adorning and completing the shining character which I affected; but this folly I soon laid aside, upon finding berth the guilt and the indecency of it.

Thus seduced by fashion, and blindly adopting nominal pleasures, I lost real ones; and my fortune impaired, and my constitution shattered, are, I must confess, the just punishment of my errors.

Take warning then by them: choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you. Follow nature and not fashion: weigh the present enjoyment of your pleasures against the necessary consequences of them, and then let your own common sense determine your choice.

Were I to begin the world again, with the experience which I now have of it, I would lead a life of real, not of imaginary pleasures. I would enjoy the pleasures of the table, and of wine; but stop short of the pains inseparably annexed to an excess of either. I would not, at twenty years, be a preaching missionary of abstemiousness and sobriety; and I should let other people do as they would, without formally and sententiously rebuking them for it; but I would be most firmly resolved not to destroy my own faculties and constitution; in complaisance to those who have no regard to their own. I would play to give me pleasure, but not to give me pain; that is, I would play for trifles, in mixed companies, to amuse myself, and conform to custom; but I would take care not to venture for sums; which, if I won, I should not be the better for; but, if I lost, should be under a difficulty to pay: and when paid, would oblige me to retrench in several other articles. Not to mention the quarrels which deep play commonly occasions.

I would pass some of my time in reading, and the rest in the company of people of sense and learning, and chiefly those above me; and I would frequent the mixed companies of men and women of fashion, which, though often frivolous, yet they unbend and refresh the mind, not uselessly, because they certainly polish and soften the manners.

These would be my pleasures and amusements, if I were to live the last thirty years over again; they are rational ones; and, moreover, I will tell you, they are really the fashionable ones; for the others are not, in truth, the pleasures of what I call people of fashion, but of those who only call themselves so. Does good company care to have a man reeling drunk among them? Or to see another tearing his hair, and blaspheming, for having lost, at play, more than he is able to pay? Or a whoremaster with half a nose, and crippled by coarse and infamous debauchery? No; those who practice, and much more those who brag of them, make no part of good company; and are most unwillingly, if ever, admitted into it. A real man of fashion and pleasures observes decency: at least neither borrows nor affects vices: and if he unfortunately has any, he gratifies them with choice, delicacy, and secrecy.

I have not mentioned the pleasures of the mind (which are the solid and permanent ones); because they do not come under the head of what people commonly call pleasures; which they seem to confine to the senses. The pleasure of virtue, of charity, and of learning is true and lasting pleasure; with which I hope you will be well and long acquainted. Adieu!

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Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq

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Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq

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historical studies in physical education and sport

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Historical Studies in Physical Education and Sport - ppt download

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Popular Recreation continued............. The 1800's 'drinking house' was central to village life; the focus for leisure activities (barbaric or not) for the community.

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1795 - 1842

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Link to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall extract

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Link to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall extract

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Extract from The tenant of Wildfell Hall

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Link to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - full text

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By the end of the session you will be able to confidently discuss the different representations of men in the novel and competing ideas about the ‘right’ education of boys.

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1) to examine representations of men in the novel. 2) to discuss education for Victorian boys.