The Tenant of Wildfell Hall vs Wuthering Heights

http://www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/an-novls.html

I found this incredibly interesting article on how Anne Bronte is probably the most 'genius' of the sisters but that due to Charlotte's prevention of "The Tenant" from continuing its publication, Anne lost a lot of ground and ultimately became considered the 'least genius' of the three. I only copied a part though about how "The Tenant" was actually an answer to "W. Heights" since she more or less disapproved of it (the whole article is in the link). I had no idea there was so much rivalry between the three of them!

Anyway, what do you guys think? Do you think that TTWH is really an answer and a challenge to WH? If it is, which of the novels do you consider to be the better?

Anne's Challenge to Wuthering Heights

Agnes Grey was a story of the trials and tribulations encountered by an inexperienced nineteen year old girl who set out to make her own way in the world as a governess, just as Anne herself had done. Indeed the whole novel was based largely on Anne's own experiences in her two posts as a governess. In contrast, Emily's Wuthering Heights was a very dramatic, passion-packed, fictional-fantasy, which immediately caught the public's eye and stole the limelight from Anne's more down-to-earth, realistic story-line book. Nine months later, in July 1848, Anne fired back with her second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It seems that Anne was concerned over the presentation of certain themes in Wuthering Heights - and wanted to put forward a challenge to it, exhibiting some of the same themes - but in a more realistic context. One example is the excessive drunkenness which pervades Emily's story - while the ill-consequences of it are not made obvious. The sisters were all too aware of its effect; having witnessed it ruin their brother, Branwell. 'Anne is determined that her readers will feel the degradation of drunkenness' asserts Edward Chitham.68 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was an instant, phenomenal success, and rapidly outsold Emily's all-time classic. In her preface to the second edition, written a few months later, Anne hinted that she perceived Emily's story as 'much soft nonsense': 'if I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense' she declared; and Wildfell Hall has since been said to mock Emily's novel - even in its initials: it is now generally acknowledged as Anne's answer to Wuthering Heights.69

The essence of the story is a woman, Helen Huntingdon, who flees her persistently drunk and brutal husband, and their family home; taking with her their young son whom she is determined to protect from his father's influences. They go into hiding in an old, uninhabited, Elizabethan mansion (Wildfell Hall), and she manages to support herself and son by working as an artist. This whole scenario was a taboo subject to the Victorians - not to say an illegal act! 70n - and there was a strong reaction from many quarters. Many years later, in 1913, May Sinclair - one of the Brontës' biographers - declared that 'the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband reverberated through Victorian England'

The themes Anne presented in this novel were very daring for the Victorian era, and she gave them bold treatment: no punches were pulled in her depiction of scenes of mental and physical cruelty. Many critics slammed the book for its coarseness, and its 'morbid revelling in scenes of debauchery'. Anne had observed, close at hand, how Branwell's dissolute ways were gradually destroying him: and one of her objects in writing Wildfell Hall was to warn other young people against following the same path. Her aims were not only, totally misinterpreted by Charlotte, but also by her reading public, many of whom took the story as having been created purely as 'lively entertainment'; others considered that she had a 'scandalous insistence' on presenting scenes 'which public decency usually forbids'.71 These opinions were also expressed in many of the reviews:

The reviewer in Sharpe's London Magazine declared that his article on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was written merely to warn his readers, especially his lady readers, against reading the book. He was confident the writer was a man rather than a woman, and condemned the 'profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured'.72 The Spectator accused the author of having 'a morbid love of the course, not to say of the brutal'.73 The critic in the Rambler declared that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was 'one of the coarsest books which we ever perused', and went on to condemn the author's 'perpetual tendency to relapse into that class of ideas, expressions, and circumstances, which is most connected with the grosser and more animal portion of our nature'.74 However, even amongst these early reviewers, there were those who detected the incredible literary talent behind the novel: The Spectator had declared: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, like its predecessor, suggests the idea of considerable abilities ill applied. There is power, effect, and even nature, though of an extreme kind, in its pages',75 and an American critic later wrote in the North American Review: 'All the characters are drawn with great power and precision of outline and the scenes are as vivid as life itself. . .', but that it brings the reader 'into the closest proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English': 76 he then went on to generally criticise the novel's coarseness and declared that it would leave in the reader an impression of horror and disgust. He would have been quite shocked had he been told that this was precisely the author's intention.77 In her preface to the second edition, written a few months later, Anne defended her motives in the way she had presented her subjects:

' . . . when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts - this whispering, 'Peace, peace,' when their is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.

My object in writing the following pages was not simply to amuse the Reader; neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.' In this book 'the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive, but I know that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain: . . . when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it, though it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader's immediate pleasure as well as my own.'.

When the sisters' novels became due for a reprint in 1850 - just over a year after Anne and Emily had died, Charlotte prevented the re-publication of Wildfell Hall. Some believe that Charlotte's suppression of the book was to protect her younger sister's memory from this adverse onslaught to her character. However, Wuthering Heights had brought similar accusations on Emily, yet Charlotte did not take the same action on Emily's behalf, despite always appearing to have been closer to her than she was to Anne; seeming to make this a rather weak argument. Others believe Charlotte was jealous of her younger sister.78 There are many instances of Charlotte slighting Anne throughout her later life. Anne had always been the dependant, coddled baby of the family, the 'cherished and protected little one', and, it seems, in later years Charlotte was finding it difficult to accept her as a mature and independent young woman producing literary work that could match, and maybe even surpass her own. Whatever the reason was, Charlotte lived on for another five years during which time her later novels, along with Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights continued to be published, firmly launching these two sisters into literary stardom; while Anne's masterpiece was completely suppressed. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was eventually re-published, some six years after the 'second edition', but by this time had 'missed the boat', leaving Anne forever in the shade of her two sisters. Even the re-publication did not help matters, appearing in a cropped and heavily edited form (see 'The Mutilated Texts of the TWH' - later).

No Englishman'd dream of dying in someone else's home,esp. of someone they didn't know!