New Leaf November 2019 Discussion • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by gmw

Funny the different reactions. I thought the chess scene felt awkward and out of place; tacked on. My thought at the time was something like: I think the scene was inserted because one of Anne's early beta readers complained that Hargrave's villainy at this point was too subtle. To me it felt like a bludgeon when Anne had managed more subtle character evolution everywhere else.

It brought to mind for me scenes from Les Liaisons Dangereuses where everything is double-speak. It would have been more effective had it taken place in a room full of people who did not know about the underlying schemes. Still, it had a flavor, so to speak, for me.

[fantasyfan]

I suppose it appealed to me because I love Chess, its history and played competitively for a while. Thus I immediately reacted to its use as an image and felt it an ideal mirror of a psychological conflict. Even the two opposite colours reflected the opposite genders and their opposing strategic moralities.

[CRussel]

Well, I wasn't ever a competitive chess player, though I did dabble a bit in my youth (don't we all?), and I found the chess scene compelling. Yes, perhaps a bit on the obvious side, but it worked for me.

[gmw]

The following comments have nothing to do with why I found the chess scene out of place, after all, we must suppose that Anne Brontë knows better than I whether such a scene was realistic for the time, however...

I was surprised that Hargrave should challenge Helen to a game of chess; I would have assumed that the gender roles of the time would have made this unlikely.

But some looking around shows Wikipedia referring to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the Romantic Era: "The game was played more for art than theory." And Wikipedia also has a few words to add on female chess players in this time.

More entertaining are some quotes from this page about Chess and Women. You have to laugh (or cry) at some of the back-handled compliments paid to women's skill at chess.

These quotes do highlight why I was surprised at the challenge: men obviously felt it necessary explain away why women played so well or be seen to be showing "gallantry to indulge them with a conquest occasionally". But then I suppose it is yet another way (as if it was needed) for Anne Brontë to show how little gallantry existed in the form of Hargrave.


I did find the predatory Hargrave to be a particularly interesting character, and I liked the way the Anne had him insinuate himself into Helen's life - and yet still Helen knew to reject him. I suppose that's why I disapprove of the chess scene as much as a I do, its lack of subtlety devalues Helen's foresight and strength of character.

[fantasyfan]

Thanks for that material gmw! The Winter article is especially interesting.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by gmw

I did find the predatory Hargrave to be a particularly interesting character, and I liked the way the Anne had him insinuate himself into Helen's life - and yet still Helen knew to reject him. I suppose that's why I disapprove of the chess scene as much as a I do, its lack of subtlety devalues Helen's foresight and strength of character.

Terrific commentary on chess and women; thanks.

I know I also found Hargrave to be one of the most interesting characters; he was really the only one who was a mixture of good and bad. Everyone else was either good, bad, or changed from one to the other. What puzzled me a little was how Millicent, who otherwise was clear-sighted in her assessment of others' characters, thought her brother above reproach and would have been an admirable mate for Helen. Sisterly fondness, yes, but there's also something obtuse about it, especially as Millicent was aware of how her mother was shopping her but didn't admit her brother's complicity in issues of family power and finances.

Going back to the chess scene, aside from the power struggle between Walter and Helen, it also served to distract Helen from wondering where Arthur and Annabella had got off too. Rather odd in that sense, as Walter clearly thought that discovery would aid his cause. For that matter, Arthur and Annabella snatching stolen moments alone in the woods was absurd, as surely their affair was have been conducted in the time-honored house party fashion, where the man tiptoed to his paramour's room in the dead of night, to return to his own dressing room before morning. So I think none of it worked, really, on a practical level.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks from me too for those articles, gmw. I particularly enjoyed the Winter article, which I am still going through. Who knew that wire hair pins could be such a problem?

As you say issybird, Millicent's lack of awareness of her brother's character is odd. Of course she would not have been subject to his predatory behaviour and presumably had never seen him behaving in that way with other women. Also of course the fact that he was a mix of good and bad perhaps confused the way in which she saw and understood him.

Maybe AB got the idea of assignations in the shrubbery from her brother's affair with their employer's wife. Surely being visited in one's bedroom would be much more comfortable if it could be done!

[Bookpossum]

On the subject of articles of interest in connection with Wildfell Hall, I found this article about Caroline Norton very enlightening on just how lacking in any rights a married woman was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Norton

Here was an educated woman with connections in high society, but she could do nothing in terms of her own rights or those of her children - including her dreadful husband demanding that any money she earned was his. I did like her solution to that one. While there are still inequalities for women, at least things are a bit better now than they were back in the 19th century!

[gmw]

Thanks for the link, Bookpossum.

Things are better, yes, but I recently read "The Land Before Avocado" by Richard Glover about 1960s and 1970s Australia, and found it a rather rude shock to be reminded just how recently some of this stuff changed:

To list all the ways in which ’60s and ’70s Australia was terrible for women might test the patience of the reader, besides which Anne Summers has already done it in her stirring polemic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975, just at the end of our own period of time-travel. All the same, the sexism of the period is one of the starkest examples of how the Australia of a few decades ago seems like a radically different country. Try any one of these facts on a young Australian and watch as they look at you with mute disbelief:

• Married Australian women needed their husband’s permission to leave the country. It wasn’t until 1983 that a married Australian woman no longer officially required her husband’s permission to be issued a passport.

• Until Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act was introduced in 1984, a married woman usually couldn’t open a bank account, purchase property or maintain a credit card without her husband’s permission.

[...and many more...]

In 1983 a bank was offering me, a virtually penniless - but male - University student, a credit card, and I didn't need anyone's permission to make that rather foolish decision.

It has been a long road, and still going.

Now I think it's great that younger folk might look on such details with "mute disbelief", but if the changes are that recent it scares me to think how easily we could backslide ... although further discussion of current examples of that actually happening probably belongs on the P&R forum.

Perhaps this is one reason why the story in this book still works as well as it does. The disparities are all too familiar to any of us more than a few decades old.

[Bookpossum]

I know only too well - I lived through it all! Even so, things were vastly better for women in the 1960s and 1970s and onwards than they were in earlier times. At least we did have some rights. In AB's time, women and children were the possessions of men - their fathers, their brothers in the absence of a father, and then their husbands.

[gmw]

Sure, even in the 50s and 60s we had come a very long way since the time of this book. But I found the comparison interesting, that in the 1970s you can still see rules of the nineteenth century showing in the male dominance of the marriage partnership. By the 1970s the dominance is weakened and much less all-encompassing, but it is still recognisable. We lived like that as the basic assumption, but barely a generation later and it seems unreal that anyone ever thought anything like that could be acceptable.

[issybird]

Continuing with the off-topic discussion (and why not? ), I recently read a book titled Yale Needs Women, about the coeducation of Yale in 1969. It doesn't seem that long ago, but the underlying and prevailing assumption of white male privilege (which continued after a tiny percentage of women were admitted) in the context of laws wherein not only was abortion illegal, so was birth control in the state of Connecticut, is both breathtaking and yet, in the current context, not all that surprising either.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

As you say issybird, Millicent's lack of awareness of her brother's character is odd. Of course she would not have been subject to his predatory behaviour and presumably had never seen him behaving in that way with other women. Also of course the fact that he was a mix of good and bad perhaps confused the way in which she saw and understood him.

Maybe AB got the idea of assignations in the shrubbery from her brother's affair with their employer's wife. Surely being visited in one's bedroom would be much more comfortable if it could be done!

AB’s brother was always top of mind for me when I was reading about him too. But Millicent’s lack of awareness didn’t surprise me; it’s often hard for people to recognize flaws in family.

Agreed on the shrubbery - it hardly seems worth it! But to the young anything is possible

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Victoria

Agreed on the shrubbery - it hardly seems worth it! But to the young anything is possible

There's a fascinating series of videos on YouTube labeled Prior Attire, which feature a woman dressing herself in women's clothing through the centuries. I'm bringing this up because even given everything a 19th century woman was wearing, it was certainly and perhaps surprisingly doable. Still not all that comfortable, though, and I think she'd have been rather rumpled.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by issybird

There's a fascinating series of videos on YouTube labeled Prior Attire, which feature a woman dressing herself in women's clothing through the centuries. I'm bringing this up because even given everything a 19th century woman was wearing, it was certainly and perhaps surprisingly doable. Still not all that comfortable, though, and I think she'd have been rather rumpled.

What fun issybird! I hadn’t even considered how they were dressed. I just watched the video on Georgian ladies. It would definitely be a challenge to slip back into the house unnoticed after a tryst.