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

The legislative reformers during the custody debates envision a potential for liberation in political change. In refusing to allow social remedies into their fiction, the Brontes are writing against a general current of fiction and legislation during this period. The Brontes, in contrast to a writer such as Dickens, take up social issues like custody only to reduce them to the purely private. It can be said, of course, that all novels proceed in this way; and indeed the translation of public issues to private matters is the shift that makes discipline possible, in a Foucaultian reading of fiction. But the Brontes-Anne and Emily, anyway-do more than merely demonstrate the greater persuasive powers of family over political governance. The law, it is true, is irrelevant, "delayed very late" at Heathcliff's order (314). But this brief mention of the world outside the Heights highlights the fact that, unlike Dickens's world, there are no opposing social structures in place in these novels.13 There are no workhouses, no schoolrooms, no Chancery Courts, no offices of circumlocution. The family does not function in oppositional relationship to a heartless outside. Heartlessness always resides in, and can never be fully separated from, the haven itself.

If bold recourse to the law is not only insufficient but futile, if the existence of institutions outside the purely domestic is ignored, we might expect that a recuperated next-generation couple could serve as solace to a shattered family, and make nice the naughty injustices of the past in a comedic pairing. But the Bronte novels reveal marriage as inherently flawed, not just unredeemed but unredeemable. The Tenant of Wild fell Hall suggests that violence and cruelty are an inescapable part of coupling, and critics have often pointed out the clarity with which Anne Bronte seems to understand the brutalities of marriage.14 Her portrayal of Arthur and Helen Huntingdon's courtship and marriage is a cutting analysis of relationships, it is true, but most readings of the novel have tended to see Bronte's fulminations against the couple as a critique of brutal masculinity and the socially-informed power relations that give that brutality a legal and cultural sanction.ls But Wildfell Hall does not, in fact, trace a causal relation between conjugal violence and masculinity. Cruelty in couples originates within the self; it emerges inevitably as a result of the individual appetites of men and women, and in fact it is understood to be the generating force that makes the individual possible.

Male/female relationships here and in Wuthering Heights are conceived of as essentially sadomasochistic, but the positions within such a system function less as a critique of gender relations than as a discourse on "relations" more generally.'6 As much as marriage is represented as imprisonment in Tenant, for example, it is always a prison created out of desire rather than enforced by a straightforward male brutality. Helen's interest in Huntingdon emerges first as a direct result of the restraint she is under in her aunt's household, and among the likes of that very boring suitor, Boarham. Arthur Huntingdon, in all his "wildish" glory, represents "expansion to the mind, after so much constraint and formality as I had been doomed to suffer" (153). Helen's sexual desire is apparent, whether it is expressed by way of a certain religious zeal (167), or by the betrayal of her emotions by her body (164), or in the way in which the two continually spar verbally and physically. A powerful physicality defines Helen's relationship to Arthur Huntingdon; they cannot keep themselves to themselves: "I placed my hand on the portfolio to wrest it from him; but he maintained his hold.... I wrenched the portfolio from his hand" (176). Soon after, we learn that he "caught me in his arms, and smothered me with kisses" (184).17 Pleasure is dependent upon cruelty, as we have seen in the frequently violent nature of erotic communion. Objects of love are eroticized in terms of violence, as when a courtship moment is enhanced by Huntingdon's coming in from a more conventional hunt "all spattered and splashed as he was, and stained with the blood of his prey" (177).