Acts of custody in incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Berry, Laura C

If perversity were not so often the defining mode in Bronte criticism, it might seem perverse to assert that Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are family plots, in fact, stories about custody. Literary criticism-not to mention, in the case of Wuthering Heights, Hollywood and a fiercely held popular opinino-- has insisted on these novels as romantic fictions about the couple. And there is ample reason for critics to repeat an attention that the novels themselves would seem not only to invite but to demand. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall offers not just one couple in its effort to demonstrate the lurid brutalities of marriage, but pair after pair of ill-suited (we might as well say violently opposed) mates. In fact, the overdetermined quality of nuptial impossibility among these couples, and the determination with which the novel nevertheless reproduces them, is suspicious. As for Wuthering Heights, the endurance of a single unkillable couple becomes a novelistic obsession similar to the endlessly repeated duos in Wildfell Hall. Not only are Cathy and Heathcliff unable to exit the narrative decently even in death, thev are forced to endure the unimaginable horror of an interminable courtship carried on (and on) over supernatural terrain, and apparently reproduced with modifications in the various unions that the novel offers as distorted reflections of its original couple.l Perversely or not, I will be arguing that in Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights the conjugal is replaced by the custodial, and that marriage must make way for a decided emphasis on childhood. "Custody" is a holding place for two significant notions that the novel maintains together: incarceration and protective guardianship. The conjunction between bonds and bondage is the means through which these fictions grapple with domestic enclosure.

Of course, domesticity is a concern by no means confined to the novel in the 1830s and 40s. As critics have exhaustively shown, the domestic appears in writing as diverse as abolitionist tracts and cookery books. Because domesticity is so widely influential in this period, this essay examines the relationship between imprisonment and caretaking in the debates over the Infant Custody Bill of 1839, as well as in the fictions of the Brontes. "Custody" reshapes not only the idea of home but of self, in both legislative discourse and fictional narrative. In the Victorian period, the individual in the eyes and statutes of domestic law became a more fully articulate and articulated subject. The individual could also be understood as a child. The legal status of the child shifted from being disposed as "property" to being scrutinized as a "person." Just as the child first began to be understood as a legal subject with rights and needs separate from claims of property, he or she was also defined as dependent. The idea of the individual child subject was imagined in legal discourse at the same time as-and in relation tothe idea of the socially-dependent "client," who would eventually dominate domestic law. Debates over "mother right" in Parliament redefine motherhood and family. In sentimentalizing motherhood, and thereby bolstering domesticity as a category both spatially and ideologically separate from the world of politics and labor, the custody debates exchange a "legal" and implicitly male model for selfhood-a man whose authority rests in status and property-for a "feeling" child whose significance lies in the fact that he or she is not fully independent of the social structures that surround him or her.

The custody debates are not about women, then, or even about mothers; instead they serve to define self in relation to social structures. In the course of the nineteenth century, and particularly in the development of custody law, family relations were defined sentimentally, and women's role in the family shifted from an all-important emphasis on wifedom and its financial implications to a crucial consideration for the sentimental tentacles of motherhood. It is the tentacular relations of the family, rather than its sentimental lures, that will become the basis for the fictions of family, and particularly the necessity of representing childhood, in Emily and Anne Bronte's novels. Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall define the paradigmatic subject not as a woman but as a child, especially one in need of training. Their subject is neither gender nor coupling; rather, these Bronte novels are concerned, like the parliamentary testimony we will scrutinize, with reimagining self. If the child of the custody debates makes possible a new era of social intervention into the middle-class family, the Bronte child offers a self who-unlike the fictions of, for example, Charles Dickens-- defies social intervention. The custodial struggles of these novels produce a subject who seeks to defeat, or at least to evade, the violence and confinement that these authors perspicaciously understand as necessary to domestic life.