Gender, Sexism, and Double Standards Theme Analysis

The first half of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall consists of Gilbert Markham’s letters to his brother-in-law, Jack Halford, in which he chronicles his daily life in the country village of Linden-Car, while the second half is largely made up of Helen Graham’s diary. The bulk of Helen’s entries concern her tumultuous marriage to the libertine Arthur Huntingdon. The effect of this split narrative is that the lessons contained in Helen’s diary entries often serve as refutations of the conventional wisdom espoused by the villagers whom Gilbert profiles in his letters. Those villagers, including Gilbert’s mother, Mrs. Markham, and the parish minister, Michael Millward, champion a system that privileges male fulfillment over a woman’s right to happiness. The example of Helen’s disastrous union with Arthur Huntingdon and Milicent Hargrave’s with Ralph Hattersley makes Brontë’s point clear, however: a system of laws and cultural norms that first teaches women that they have very little value outside the home, and then requires that they rely on men not only for necessities like food and shelter but also for personal happiness and romantic fulfillment often ends in a form of enslavement. Women are little more than property in this scenario and men their masters.

Gilbert Markham’s mother has very rigid ideas about a woman’s role in the home, believing that the woman’s job is to please the man, while the man’s job is to please himself. Gilbert finds her philosophy simplistic and biased in favor of the male sex, but he only raises minor objections and, in general, Mrs. Markham’s opinions on marriage are shown to reflect the opinions of the inhabitants of Linden-Car.

As a proper and loving Christian wife, Helen works diligently in the first months and years of her marriage to please her husband, but she gradually discovers that there is no pleasing him. She follows to the letter the prescription put forth by Mrs. Markham for a happy marriage, but her efforts only end in misery. Moreover, the societal rules that prioritize a man’s right to happiness over a woman’s only serve to prolong Helen’s misery, and she remains with Arthur for years after their love has died, hoping that her kindness and generosity will change him for the better. What happens instead is Arthur sinks further and further into alcoholism, while also beginning a torrid affair with Lady Lowborough. By spending most of his days drinking, carousing, and flirting and making love with his friend’s wife, Arthur exemplifies Mrs. Markham’s idea that husbands should please themselves.

Helen is not the only woman in the novel victimized by this imbalanced system. Her good friend Milicent Hargrave likewise marries into trouble when she accepts Ralph Hattersley’s proposal. Hattersley is a good friend of Arthur’s and wants Milicent for a wife mainly because she is too timid to restrain his wild conduct. While Hattersley is off carousing with Arthur and his fellow hedonists, Milicent suffers greatly. Later, Hattersley reforms his behavior, making Milicent a happy woman, but not before many of her youthful years are wasted in anxiety and grief.

Walter Hargrave, brother to Milicent and Esther, is held up as an example of manly perfection by both his mother and sisters, and it’s true that he isn’t as poorly behaved as Arthur and Hattersley, but that is a low bar indeed. Helen sees through his smooth façade to the selfish and conniving man underneath, but she is one of the only ones, because Hargrave seems like a good man in comparison to his companions.

Women, by contrast, are not evaluated on such a generous curve. This double standard is clear in the chapters told from Gilbert’s point of view, where Helen comes under suspicion simply for living on her own. Mrs. Markham, Reverend Millward, and even Gilbert himself lecture Helen on the dangers of doting too much on little Arthur (her son) and of going to extreme lengths to protect him from the ways of the world. Mrs. Markham even suggests that if Helen continues to shelter little Arthur from reality, she will make “a mere Nancy” of him. Gilbert agrees, comparing Helen’s mothering to the care one might give a tree. If you keep the tree inside a greenhouse for too long, when it comes time to expose it to the elements, it will die. If, however, the gardener is careful to expose the tree to short stints of difficult conditions, it will thrive. When Helen asks Gilbert if his analogy applies to the female sex—that is, whether girls should also be exposed to the rough ways of the world—he answers in the negative. Inherent in both of these arguments is the idea that the male sex is somehow superior to the female, that men are made of stronger stuff than women. It’s obvious to Mrs. Markham and her sympathetic audience that if little Arthur were to be in any way effeminate, that would be undesirable in the extreme, and that it is Helen’s job to make a man of him.

Helen’s diary entries expose the flaw in Mrs. Markham’s and Gilbert’s thinking. Little Arthur gets his fair share of exposure to drinking, cursing, and being disrespectful to women, thanks to his father and his friends, and that exposure doesn’t make him into a stronger or better man. Rather, it makes him unmanageable and moody, and Helen has to work hard to break him of these bad habits. Throughout the book, it often falls to women to prop up or serve as good influences on the men and boys in their lives. Arthur Huntingdon, Ralph Hattersley, and even Lord Lowborough are so weak in both moral fiber and willpower that they verge at times on the pathetic. Brontë’s narrative shows that men could actually benefit from being more like women in the areas of moderation, patience, and kindness.

Throughout the book, wives are expected to be paragons of virtue and understanding, and to suppress their needs entirely in the service of their husbands. Men, on the other hand, are permitted to behave badly, abuse their wives, and neglect their children. Members of so-called “respectable society” rarely censor men for such crimes, saving their vitriol and judgement for women who dare to defy the establishment in any way. Brontë shows that Helen’s decision to leave her husband is the right one, despite the disincentives. Moreover, Brontë suggests that Helen is able to take this difficult step because she has deep reserves of strength to draw on. That depth is, to a certain extent, courtesy of the difficult years she has spent as the wife of Arthur Huntingdon. She is in effect living proof that Gilbert’s theory of conditioning a tree, while correct, can also be cruel. The fact that the villagers fail to recognize that depth while at the same time judging her harshly reveals the shallowness of their understanding and the punitive hypocrisy that women like Helen, Milicent, and Esther are subjected to.