‘Horror and disgust’: Reading the Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

This article started out as a keynote lecture at the ‘Coarseness of the Brontës: A Reappraisal’ conference in Durham on 10-11 August 2017. It raises issues in which the ‘coarseness’ of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) - its most striking characteristic, according to censorious 1848 reviewers - is a central element. These issues include the violent Hattersley marriage, the manifestations of physical desire (especially in women), profane language and the assault perpetrated by the book’s ‘hero’. Arguing that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a mature work of art and no moralizing tract, the article looks at the novel’s relationship with contemporaneous didactic fiction, especially temperance fiction. In addition to examining factors that appalled mid-nineteenth-century readers, it suggests reasons why modern readers may be shocked by aspects of this powerful novel which are not on record as upsetting people in 1848.