{"id":2255,"date":"2025-03-27T02:34:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T02:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2255"},"modified":"2025-03-27T02:34:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T02:34:24","slug":"the-new-woman-and-the-tenant-of-wildfell-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/03\/27\/the-new-woman-and-the-tenant-of-wildfell-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe New Woman\u201d and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Victorian Web cites Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s 1849 novel Shirley <\/em>as a New Woman novel, as well as Charlotte herself as part of the New Woman movement. Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, <\/em>published a year earlier, upholds the same characteristics in a defining way. The article writes that \u201cmany New Woman novels strongly opposed the idea that home is the woman\u2019s only proper sphere. The female authors revealed the traps of conventional Victorian marriage, including the condition of marriage which tolerated marital rape, compulsory or enforced motherhood, and the double standard of sexual morality.\u201d The article outlines the paradox of the New Woman: alternately oversexed and undersexed, hyperfeminine or hypermasculine, \u201cmanhating and\/or man-eating or self-appointed savior of benighted masculinity.\u201d Wildfell Hall<\/em> exemplifies the duality of the New Woman almost half a century before the New Woman phenomenon made the socially significant changes talked about in the Victorian Web article.<\/p>\n

The protagonist of the novel, alternately Helen Huntingdon and Helen Graham, does what the article defines as characteristic to New Woman novels: it \u201cexpressed dissatisfaction with the contemporary position of women in marriage and society \u2026 New Woman novels represented female heroines who fought against the traditional Victorian male perception of woman as \u2018angel in the house\u2019 and challenged the old colds of conducts and morality.\u201d Helen Huntingdon, the wife to Arthur Huntingdon, represents one side of the New Woman attempting to reform the degeneracy of her husband, while Helen Graham, the fugitive single mother hiding from her abusive marriage, represents another. When Helen first marries Mr. Huntingdon, it\u2019s the definition of an \u201cI can fix him relationship\u201d even before she is exposed to the depths of Huntingdon\u2019s depravity. Throughout the novel, Huntingdon operates as a corrupting force on other characters, encouraging alcoholism, addiction, and adultery; he attempts to \u201cmake a man\u201d out of his very young son in his image, giving him alcohol and teaching him to swear. At first, Helen tries to encourage reformation, though she is met with resistance at every turn.<\/p>\n

Helen spends the entirety of her marriage with Huntingdon trying to reform him. She tries to curb his drinking and his partying, to manage his debts, and even turns a brief blind eye to his adultery. He resists her at every turn, gaslighting and manipulating her, flaunting his cheating and trying to corrupt her. He calls her his \u201chousehold deity\u201d and confines her to the property, refusing to allow her to accompany him when he leaves for months to \u201cdo business\u201d (read: party) in London or even to attend her father\u2019s funeral. Their marriage falls apart. Helen, in an act of defiance, bands Huntingdon from her bedroom and so denies him access to her body. Huntingdon refuses to allow her to divorce him, or even to live separately from him. When Helen at last runs away from Grassdale Manor with her son, and assumes the name Helen Graham, she is resisting the institution of marriage that has become so confining for her. This is only a brief overview of the ways in which the New Woman ideology can be read through Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em>, and it is possible to go much more in depth about it. I felt that Anne deserved her name among the New Women movement along with her sister.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Victorian Web cites Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s 1849 novel Shirley as a New Woman novel, as well as Charlotte herself as part of the New Woman movement. Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published a year earlier, upholds the same characteristics in a defining way. The article writes that \u201cmany New Woman novels strongly opposed … Continue reading \u201cThe New Woman\u201d and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5320"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}