5. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

By Anne Brontë 

I'm not very knowledgeable about classic literature and had only heard about the existence of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall when I read that it influenced Elizabeth Hand's 2015 novel, Wylding Hall.  

 

But after the crushing disappointment of A Haunting on the Hill (2023), I wasn't all that interested anymore, as the premise of Wylding Hall sounded too much like A Haunting on the Hill. If those theatre types annoyed me to no end, I could only imagine how members of a rock band would be much better.  Since Wylding Hall was written first, there's a chance it's better written.  

Anyway, I still wanted to read the Anne Bronte novel. I got this Arcturus trade paperback from Indigo for only $7.  They had a 3 for $12 classic fiction deal but the ones I wanted were sold out.

 

Surprisingly, my friend, who was visiting from Winnipeg at the time, and who's read a lot more classic fiction than I have, was also not aware of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  I think its obscurity (at least compared to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre) was due to its rather scandalous and shocking content - at least, according to Victorian standards.  It was deemed "coarse" and "brutal" for its unflinching depictions of alcoholism, adultery, marital abuse, and a wife leaving her husband—which was apparently illegal at the time.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew to not expect any romance.  In the end, I really enjoyed TToWH.  It was very well-written, a colourful cast of characters and had some keen insights about Victorian society. And there was some romance after all, mainly from the perspective of Gilbert Markham, as the lovesick protagonist.  

 

The novel began with a letter written by Gilbert to a friend, describing the recent arrival of an attractive young widow and her son as the new tenants of Wildfell Hall and how it was drawing much gossip and curiosity amongst the small community.  When Gilbert met Helen, he found her proud and aloof, and they didn't get along very well at first. Over time he became drawn to her honesty, intelligence and depth of character which was very different from the superficial wiles of the local girls.  But Gilbert was still immature in many ways and made the wrong assumption that Helen was having an affair with her landlord Frederick Lawrence.  This forced  Helen to show Gilbert her journal which explained her entire backstory of how she ended up at Wildfell Hall.  The whole story was long and drawn out like a Jane Austen novel, but well worth the wait, for there was a happy ending. Phew!

After the dark cesspool of despair and deviance in Grotesque, it was nice to read something "lighter" in tone.  Although I was expecting a rather violent depiction of domestic discord, I was nevertheless affected by Helen Huntington's plight being married to an irresponsible and alcoholic narcissist. Even though Arthur Huntington was never physically violent, he was very controlling, as well as verbally and emotionally abusive.  He was also unfaithful -- his relationship with his friend's wife was an open secret among his circle of wealthy gentlemen. The depiction of their partying was something to behold.  

Most of the classic lit that I've read were of fairly "respectable" people with the odd character, like George Wickham, who was the black sheep.  In the world of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, we were given a firsthand perspective of what it's like to live in a toxic marriage. Bronte presented all the red flags early on in the courtship between Arthur and Helen.  He would play mind games with the young Helen, who fell for it hook line and sinker through her naivete.  In Victorian times, a woman would be trapped in such a marriage with no hope for divorce.  Even though Arthur Huntington was a fairly wealthy gentlemen, he was a boorish man and indulged in licentious, hedonistic behaviour.  He and his circle of friends often got together to carouse and were basically party animals.  As a wife, you either put up with it, or you joined them, like Lady Lowborough, who becomes Arthur's mistress.

There was a scene where Arthur's friends were staying at his estate, Grassdale Manor, for weeks and weeks.  Not only did Helen have to endure the infidelities of her husband and his mistress, but also the disrespectful behaviour of his awful guests.  Finally, when Lord Lowborough found out about his wife and Arthur, it was a bit of relief as the whole scene was getting quite awful.  Arthur and Helen also had a young son, Arthur Jr, a sweet boy who was becoming wild and out of control under his father’s influence.  With help from her brother, Helen was finally able to escape Grassdale Manor with her son and devoted maid.

I heard that Anne Brontë based a good deal of Arthur Huntington on her own brother, Branwell Brontë. Arthur resembled Branwell in three ways: physical good looks; sexual adventures (before his affair with his employer's wife, Mrs Robinson, Branwell may have fathered an illegitimate child who died at birth) and lastly, his alcoholism. Arthur Huntington was terribly flawed and unlikeable, but he felt very real.

A minor complaint of mine was how Helen Huntington was just a little too perfect.  Her character was imbued with dignity, pureness of heart and an unwavering faith in God.  Her one mistake was marrying Arthur Huntington when she was young and naive. However, I did admire her courage in leaving her awful husband and her ability to use her painting skills to support herself and her son.  The only help she had was from her loyal maid and her brother. I also liked how Gilbert had a good character arc.  He began as a rather immature, cocky young farmer but over the years his love for Helen remained true, and he became someone who was worthy of Helen's love.

I saw the 2022 film Emily, which was loosely based on Emily Bronte. It didn't depict sister Charlotte in a great light, and portrayed Anne as rather meek and passive.  I was never able to finish Wuthering Heights, but I loved Jane Eyre when I read it during my first year at university.  It still remains my favourite of all the books by the Bronte sisters, with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a close second!

8. My Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

I was in Grade 6 when I was first introduced to My Side of the Mountain while attending Kerrisdale Elementary.  I, along with my two friends Ellen and Etta, was a bit of a teacher’s pet.  Mr Hoffman often gave us lunch money to buy him a sandwich at the nearby convenience store on 41^st Ave.  Looking back, it seems a little cringey now, but Mr Hoffman did provide some great reading material.  He was the sort of teacher who wore a suit to school every day, so not sure how much input he had in choosing the books for the curriculum, as the theme seemed to be surviving alone in the wild.  The three books I recall were Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. 

Over the years, I’ve acquired copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins and My Side of the Mountain (my faves of the three books), including a copy of Frightful’s Mountain.  I recently found a copy of On the Far Side of the Mountain so felt I could jump into MSofM as I want to revisit the theme of wilderness survival for a short story I’m working on and maybe follow it up with the sequel.

 

These three books, MSotM esp, inspired my brief obsession with running away and living off the forest during my adolescence.  I had spotted a wilderness survival book at the Kerrisdale Public Library and promptly borrowed it.  I remember filling up my Steno spiral pad (the ones using green paper - Gregg ruled with a centre margin line – good for supply lists and shorthand notation) with drawings and copious notes. 

 

During this phase, I’d often fantasize about running away from home and living off the land somewhere in remote BC.  Sam Gribley had the advantage of having legacy family-owned property to use as a home base - his great-grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains.  His motives were also different from mine – he had a true desire to live off the land, while I dreamed of getting away from my strict, oppressive parents.  I wasn’t happy growing up at home, so studying up on wilderness survival provided an outlet for my nerdy creativity and gave me something to distract myself from my depressingly cloistered situation.

 

Even at 12 years old, I knew the potential risks of a young girl traveling alone to a remote area of BC.  As an adult in the year 2025, My Side of the Mountain seems such an incredibly innocent and romanticized story of a 12 year old boy living like Davy Crockett in the Catskill Mountains.  It isn’t about whether Sam is capable of surviving on his own, or evading wild predators. Or how relatively easy it seemed to capture and train his falcon, Frightful, to hunt food for him.  Human predators also pose a potential threat. 

 

When Sam returns to his hollowed out hemlock tree, he finds a man there.  Hearing sirens earlier, he thought the man might be an escaped bandit, so he calls him “Bando”.  He turns out to be an English prof who got lost while hiking and decided to take a nap.  Sam and Bando become fast friends with Bando spending ten days with Sam helping him build a raft, make jam from the blueberries growing at the farm and carve whistles out of willow branches.  It goes to show how much innocence has been lost when someone like myself is surprised Bando didn’t take advantage of Sam in any way in the secluded forest.

 

Sam also steals deer carcasses from human hunters who have lost track of their prey.  I imagine a few of them would be mighty pissed and figure out that the rumours of a wild boy in the Catskills might be true, and start hunting for the kid.  But this never happens.

 

Then there’s the romanticisation of living off the land.  Not a word was used to describe how Sam deals with his own waste.  Does he dig a hole?  What does he use for toilet paper? Does he find a way to compost?  How does he keep his teeth clean?  He only got sick a couple times:  once almost succumbing to CO2 poisoning while sleeping in his tree from an unvented fire and another time from scurvy symptoms due to a lack of fresh greens in the late winter (quickly remedied with a hunger for rabbit liver).  He also never seems to injure himself, a miracle for a young boy living in the wild.

 

The book spends a fair amount of time describing the food Sam prepares and eats. He picks blueberries and strawberries that grow wild on his great-grandfather’s old farm.  He gathers wild onion and fragrant plants to add flavor to his meals, nuts and cattail tubers to supplement protein and carbs.  Learns how to make acorn flour, smoke fish and venison, and acquire salt from hickory sticks (when boiled dry they leave a salty residue).

 

Some of his meals include acorn pancakes topped with Bando’s blueberry jam.  Turtle soup.  Rabbit stew.  Pheasant pot pie.  Fish wrapped in leaves and baked in hot coals with wild rice. Boiled freshwater mussels with salt.  Then “take out meat. Eat by dipping in acorn paste flavored with a smudge of garlic, and green apples.”

 

For his first guest Bando, he prepares a feast:

 

“Brown puffballs in deer fat with a little wild garlic, fill pot with water, put venison in, boil. Wrap tubers in leaves and tick in coals. Cut up apples and boil in can with dogtooth violet bulbs. Raspberries to finish meal.”

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed the food parts.  But the attention to detail could’ve also been paid to other important things.  For example, when Sam first set off for the mountains, he only had a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, some flint and steel, and $40.  There was no mention of him acquiring more tools, but what did he use to cut up the deer into venison steaks to freeze for the winter?  Surely he didn’t rely on just his penknife and ax?

 

Sam’s parents are also praised for their unconventionality by allowing Sam such autonomy (though the mom does have concerns about being judged by normal society and by the novel’s end, the entire family leaves NYC to join Sam a la American Family Gribley). 

 

That being said, I can see why I loved My Side of the Mountain so much as a kid.  Despite the lack of useful info on how to survive four seasons in the Catskill Mountains and any sense of real risk, it was still a wonderfully written adventure story.  A true classic.  My daughter also read the book about a year ago, but as expected, it did not inspire the same sense of wonder and desire from her as it did me.  It was just lovely to revisit this book again after all these decades. 

7. Animal Farm

By George Orwell

 

22. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel

By Mary Shelley (Published 2009 by Classical Comics)

I plan to read The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein in the very near future and heard that author Kiersten White makes many references to Mary Shelley’s classic novel.  I had read Frankenstein ages ago, either in my teens or twenties, and didn’t want to re-read it again, so I had the brilliant idea of borrowing the graphic novel version from the library. 

 

I didn’t realize until I had finished it that there were two versions of the graphic novel:  Original Text and Quick Text.  Thankfully, I had read the version with the original, though still abridged, text.  Published in 2009, the graphic novel may be a little hard to find now.

 

I couldn’t relate to how incredibly stupid and self-centred Victor Frankenstein was.  I understand the major theme is about the folly of man, but still…

 

I suppose this mirrors life because in the real world, since time immemorial, or at least during humanity’s patriarchal history, there have been plenty of brilliant men who have made incredible innovations, but through some terrible weakness, ie. short-sightedness, greed, narcissism, etc. the invention had wrought more damage than good.  This is the core lesson of Frankenstein. 

It’s an epic tragedy.

 

In the source text, the character of Elizabeth Lanza is rather thinly drawn.  She loves Victor dearly, has a generous heart, and is self-sacrificing.  And she dies by the monster’s hands.  Apparently, the Elizabeth in Kiersten White’s retelling is not only a survivor, but is highly intelligent and calculating.   In a way, I’m glad I re-read the Frankenstein graphic novel as it not only heightened my enjoyment of The Dark Descent..., it was a factor in not seeing how the plot in White’s retelling would play out. 

7. My Career Goes Bung

By Miles Franklin

20. Persuasion

By Jane Austen

4. Emma

By Jane Austen

Another ongoing reading project of mine is to work my way through Jane Austen's oeuvre. So far, Emma is only my third, having already read Pride and Prejudice (twice) and Sense and Sensibility. I had meant to read in order of publication, since I had a copy of Mansfield Park, but mistakenly picked up Emma instead. No matter. Now that I've finally read Emma, I can now say that Amy Heckerling's 1995 film, Clueless, did a great job updating the 1815 novel!

Emma, the youngest daughter of the hypochondriacal Mr Woodhouse, is a bright, attractive twenty-year-old woman burdened with a bit of idleness and boredom, being somewhat isolated in the country estate of Hartfield. She decides to befriend a younger woman of lesser status named Harriet Smith and takes it upon herself to play matchmaker for her new pet friend. When a farmer of solid character proposes to Harriet, Emma intervenes, with the heartfelt belief that Harriet, though illegitimate, is still a "gentleman's daughter" and therefore, "superior to Mr Robert Martin."

... It was a bad business. She would have given a great deal, or endured a great deal, to have had the Martins in a higher rank of life. They were so deserving, that a little higher should have been enough: but as it was, how could she have done otherwise? - Impossible! - She could not repent. They must be separated...

Emma's meddling in Harriet's affairs naturally results in unexpected consequences later on in the narrative. It is also obvious that Emma is a terribly flawed character; her well-meaning efforts to improve a friend's lot in life being rife with hubris. Worse, she refuses to listen to the sagacious advice of her dear friend and neighbor, Mr Knightley. Despite all these flaws, Emma Woodhouse is probably one of the more charismatic Austen heroines I've read so far. Emma may be overbearingly conceited and unwise, but she is also admirable for her independence, self-containment and unconventionality, which is evident in her conversation with Harriet:

   '... If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it.'
   'Dear me! - it is so odd to hear a woman talk so!' -
   'I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! But I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to chance such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: I believe few married women are half as much mistress of the husband's house, as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eye's as I am in my father's.'
   'But then, to be an old maid at least, like Miss Bates!'
   ...'If I know myself, Harriet, mine is an active, busy mind, with a great many independent resources; and I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty...'

There are many character foils in relation to the titular character, which is part of what makes the novel so enjoyable. Emma seems fairly confident that she won't end up a silly old maid as Miss Bates, and she is more surely financially secure than Jane Fairfax, who is her equal in age, yet faced with a less certain future. Nevertheless, for various reasons that she confesses to Frank Churchill, Emma has always consciously avoided being friends with Jane Fairfax.

'I have known her from a child, undoubtedly, we have been children and women together; and it is natural to suppose that we should be intimate, - that we should have taken to each other whenever she visited her friends. But we never did. I hardly know how it has happened; a little, perhaps, from that wickedness on my side which was prone to take disgust towards a girl so idolized and so cried up as she always was, by her aunt and grandmother, and all their set. And then, her reserve - I never could attach myself to anyone so completely reserved.'

But it's not until she meets the vicar's new wife where Emma meets her true nemesis. It is not because Mrs Elton is the daughter of a wealthy trader (and therefore not gentry) that repulses Emma, but her utter lack of refinement and character, which induces Emma to rant:

'Insufferable woman!' was her immediate exclamation. 'Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable! Knightley! - never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! - and discover that he is a gentleman! A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery...

Since Mrs Elton is also a social butterfly, her ubiquitous presense in the village of Highbury sets the stage for a few awkward situations which tests Emma's sense of social obligation, and force her "to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought! ". A good example is when Mr Weston invited Mrs Elton to join their touring party that Emma herself very much wanted to go:

Now, as her objection was nothing but her very great dislike of Mrs Elton, of which Mr Weston must already be perfectly aware, it was not worth bringing forward again: - it could not be done without a reproof of him, which would be giving pain to his wife; and she found herself therefore obliged to consent to an arrangement which she would have done a great deal to avoid; an arrangement which she would probably expose her even to the degradation of being said to be of Mrs Elton's party!

Naurally, one has found themselves in similar predicaments as our dear Emma! Fortunately (or unfortunately), the novel has a conventionally happy ending where eventually Emma learns the error of her ways and even winds up marrying a man of high character who is suitable to her status and temperament. Ah, but what else can I say that has not been said before about Emma? The novel was immensely enjoyable, but it also lacked a narrative arc that P&P and S&S had. Not only was it denser, but it also felt longer, because it got rather bogged down in the middle. Despite its flaws, Emma was still a book that I'm so glad to finally read. And I'm beginning to understand how Austen's books can inspire such a devoted, near universal following. The charming romances and comedy of manners are definitely a factor in a kind of surface appeal. But when it comes down to it, Austen was, at heart, a keen observer of every day human foibles.

Last year, the Indo-British author V.S. Naipaul caused a minor stir when he proclaimed that there was no woman in the history of literature who was his equal - not even Jane Austen. Perhaps his chauvinistic ego had ample time to inflate since 2001 when he won the Nobel prize, but he also failed to recognize (had he bothered to read any of her books) that Austen had no equal in characterizing pompous asses like himself.

Although Naipaul's declaration was nothing short of embarrassing, it did inspire a wealth of spirited responses from the literary world. One excellent article I found was this book review:
"Like it or not, the reality on the ground is that Jane Austen benefits and suffers from being associated with women, and her status as a major writer has been complicated by gender issues since her earliest readers".

Bilger's insightful review also allowed me to discover William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who, twenty years ago, might have wholeheartedly shared Naipaul's attitude... until he started reading Jane Austen and came to the realization that she was - surprise! - a great writer. Looking back on the writers "whose heroes he had wanted to emulate", he found them "wanting by comparison". According to Deresiewicz, "[S]he didn't need to play the same game as the big boys. Her small, feminine game was every bit as good." He then became inspired to write a book about his experiences, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter.

Great. Another book to put on my ever growing list of books to read. But not before I finish Austen's entire oeuvre!