Citation

Ward I. Criticism 2008; 49(2): 151-182.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Wayne State University Press)

DOI

10.1353/crt.0.0020

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

There was no real “case” of Helen Huntingdon, at least not in formal juristic terms. That is the issue. Helen Huntingdon was unhappily married, subject to various forms of spousal abuse. But the law offered no respite. Instead, it left her with a choice: put up with it, or run away. It was not an uncommon dilemma in mid-nineteenth-century England. It was, however, an uncommon subject for public discourse, and it was an even more uncommon subject for literary commentary. Nevertheless, it was the subject of Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And the furtive tenant, who was hiding from her husband and from the law, was Helen Huntingdon.

As we shall see, on its publication in 1848 the Tenant scandalized Victorian England, and its rather shadowy status in the nineteenth-century canon can perhaps be ascribed to this initial response. In its stark portrayal of a dysfunctional, abusive marriage, the Tenant shattered the pretenses of marital harmony so beloved of many Victorians. It was not, of course, alone in doing so. The establishment of the Divorce Court in 1857, to which we shall return in due course, did the same; laying, as Frances Power Cobbe attested, any number of “hideous revelations” before a lascivious public. Such narratives, real or fictional, combined to effect a critical transformation in the perception of the female condition in Victorian England, as Mary Poovey has argued, “from silent sufferer of private wrongs into an articulate spokesperson in the public sphere.”