The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1848

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 8

Chapters 9-15

Chapters 16-22

Chapters 23-33

Chapters 34-44

Chapters 45-53

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Weather and Landscape

Victorian literature in general, and novels by the Brontës in particular, use weather and landscape to hint at emotional states—a literary device known as pathetic fallacy. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, seasons often function to foreshadow an event or feeling. Helen’s feelings for Huntingdon are solidified in summer. She marries in winter, the darkest time of year, a forecast for her first marriage. In spring, when the natural world awakens, Helen longs for new life in her relationship. She finally leaves Huntingdon in the fall, the season of harvest but also of withering. The seasons provide a motif that hint at a character’s experience.

Time of day also holds an emotional resonance in certain key moments. It is twilight when Helen goes outside to find her husband and discovers him with Annabella. Likewise, she is watching a sunset and admiring a single, lone star—a symbol for her feelings—when Lord Lowborough informs her he has learned of his wife’s infidelity. She leaves Grassdale for good in the early morning, in the darkness before dawn, symbolizing a new beginning and an emergence from her sadness at last. Likewise, Gilbert enjoys the dawn light after he finishes Helen’s journal and realizes he has a fresh chance at a relationship with her.

In much the same way, the novel uses landscape to symbolize an emotional landscape and to sketch out the different worlds of the novel. The area surrounding Gilbert’s home of Linden Grange is healthy and abundant, full of wooded valleys, meadows, and cornfields. Huntingdon’s estate of Grassdale is elegant and its grounds with their woods and water are cultivated for pleasure. In contrast, Helen hides from the world at Wildfell, where the land surrounding is steep, the trees “scanty and stunted” (45), and the fields are “rough and stony and wholly unfit for the plough” (45). The rough scenery and ruined hall reflect her emotional devastation, but, just as Gilbert notes traces of previous beauty in the interior rooms and signs of a former garden without, it might be possible to rebuild.

The Moss Rose

The moss rose plays a significant role in two scenes in the novel, where it symbolizes Helen’s love. The moss rose is not a true rose but an annual with bright blooms, prized for its ability to endure drought and survive in rocky soil. Gilbert’s sister, named Rose, gives Mrs. Graham some plants as a gesture of kindness, and when they bloom at Wildfell, Helen, on a walk one day with Gilbert, asks him to give Rose a bloom. Helen wants to show that she has made something of this gift and she herself is growing at Wildfell. Gilbert asks if he might have a rose for himself. When she gives him one, Gilbert understands that Helen feels something for him, though she insists they can only be friends.

In an echo of this earlier moment, when they are together at Staningley at the end of the novel Helen plucks a moss rose that has bloomed through the snow. She describes the plant, like herself, as more beautiful for what it has endured, and she presents it to Gilbert as an emblem of her love. Seeing him hesitate, she snatches the flower from his hand and throws it away; she has learned, from the painful lesson of her first marriage, not to bestow herself where she is not truly wanted. Gilbert leaps through the open window and reclaims the rose, thus claiming the gift of her heart. In giving him the flower again, Helen shows her trust and her hopes that, this time, her marriage will thrive and bloom.

Paintings

Like the landscape, Helen’s paintings serve as a motif to illustrate certain emotional turning points. While painting was considered an appropriate pastime for genteel young ladies, few women pursued it as a profession or means of income. Helen’s choice to paint to support herself when she leaves her marriage indicates that she is looking for a way to reclaim a sense of her own worth, personhood, and beauty that has been stolen from her through abuse.

When she is in love with Huntingdon, Helen paints a picture of a young girl in a forest beneath a pair of turtle doves, which Huntingdon interprets as Helen herself maturing into womanhood, eager to be “wooed and won” (175). Turtle doves were symbols of love and faithfulness because they were said to choose their mate for life. Huntingdon is likewise pleased when he sees Helen has made sketches of him, but when she tears up the miniature and throws it in the fire, she shows him that she is in command of her emotions and will even deny herself if need be.

The portrait Helen paints of Huntingdon serves both to warn Gilbert that there is a man in Helen’s past and provides proof that Helen has severed herself completely from her marriage and her love for the man he was.

Once established at Wildfell, Helen wants to paint the sea, presumably to test her skills—she is branching out from portraits and quiet, cultivated landscapes to more challenging subjects. When he sees the finished painting, Gilbert finds it “strikingly beautiful: it was the very scene itself, transferred as if by magic to the canvas” (93). He appreciates Helen’s skill, and admiring the painting is one way he can appropriately express his admiration for her. For Helen, the painting suggests that she has found a kind of freedom at Wildfell Hall: Where the young girl she painted was enclosed by the forest, Helen now has the more open vista of the ocean before her. Her paintings symbolize her emotional maturation and reclamation of her sense of self.