“Let me have its bowels then”: Violence, Sacrificial Structure, and Anne Brontë's<i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i>

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I wish especially to thank Barbara Seeber for her inspiring comments on an earlier version of this paper, and the enormously helpful criticisms offered by the anonymous reviewers. Notes All page references are to Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Ed. Stevie Davies, unless stated otherwise. In view of Derrida's remarks on the interiorization of the phallus—be it food, words, or flesh—through the mouth, it perhaps fitting that the term is such a mouthful. This is discussed in more detail in my conclusion. See Winifred Gérin's introduction to Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. G.D. Hargreaves, p. 14. See also Terry Eagleton and Miriam Allott. See, for example, Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Anne Brontë's Radical Vision: Structures of Consciousness, and Elizabeth Langland, Anne Brontë: The Other One. See Elizabeth Langland, "The Voicing of Feminine Desire in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." In Agnes Grey training in "manliness" similarly entails cruelty to animals. See my "'Hapless Dependents': Women and Animals in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey." The anonymous reviewer of this article points out that "Brontë's failed hunter is an alcoholic." Percy Bysshe Shelley links meat eating to the consumption of alcohol in his argument that both produce cruelty. In "A Vindication of Natural Diet," Shelley advocates abstinence from "spiritous liquors and animal food" (9) as a simple diet which "strikes at the root of all evil" (10) in families as well as nations: "The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited in the individual…neither frenzied by inebriation nor rendered impotent and irrational by disease" (11). So pertinent are Shelley's vegetarian essays to the portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon, that it is tempting to speculate that Brontë had them in mind. Branwell Brontë's attempted novel, begun in 1845, obsessively links hunting, drinking, and womanizing. The hero, Percy, bears a striking resemblance to Arthur Huntingdon, but Branwell's fragment lacks irony. See The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë. ed. Victor Neufeldt, 3: 420–66. The word "hapless" recalls the "hapless dependents" of Agnes Grey. See my article cited above. It seems ironic that Helen's aunt is so offended by Huntingdon's wooing of her niece; he is, after all, simply fulfilling her earlier dictum that courtship is an invasion—a taking of the citadel by storm. Fiddes notes several cultures in which ritual killing is a rite of passage to adult male sexuality. "!Kung…men are said to chase, kill and eat women, just as they do animals," and in north-eastern Peru. "the successful hunter is usually the winner in the competition for women" (145). I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for reminding me of Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897). There are many similarities between Arthur Huntingdon and Dan Maclure, and between the marriages depicted in the two novels. Like Helen, Beth resents being petted by her philandering coarse husband, whom she eventually leaves when she discovers that he is a vivisectionist. Although Beth shoots, traps, and fishes, she is not cruel, and it is always to feed others, usually—with one significant exception—women. Heather Evans in "The New Woman's New Appetite: Cooking, Eating and Feeding in Sarah Grand's New Woman Fiction." Diss. Queen's U, 2003, makes the interesting point that Beth's cooking is aligned with her art. Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey. 1847. Ed. Angeline Goreau, 119. See Carol Adams, "Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals," in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, 55–84. Stevie Davies says that "puss" is "sporting idiom for hares" (526, n.10), but in Agnes Grey cats are also shot, being regarded as a nuisance. I am inclined to believe that this suggests the gratuitousness of the killing. The same is true of Branwell's manuscript novel. It ends with deflecting potential "black eyes and bloody noses," into an "idyllic" hunting scene in which "Britains [sic] peculiar birds surrender their lives at every shot" (See Neufeldt 423, 424). The word "bottomless" is used three times on p. 12, for example. Freud says that the uncanny is "something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light" (17: 241). "It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs" (17: 245). "Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital" (21: 154). "If the penis were a phallic symbol, men would not need neckties or medals." Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe, 34. Anne McClintock points out that "The whip marks the metamorphosis of infant into man and is eloquent of the social violence of male gendering." (80). See my article cited above for an analysis of the whip in Brontë's first novel. Elizabeth Bronfen links the fear of castration exhibited by the fetishist to fear of death (96–7). "Very earnestly I ask you, have English gentlemen, as a class, any other real object in their whole existence than killing birds?" Qtd. in Ryder, Animal Revolution, p. 117. Terry Eagleton's ground-breaking study of the Brontës, Myths of Power, devotes only one 16-page chapter to "Anne Brontë," the purpose of which is to confirm that "the orthodox critical judgment that Anne Brontë's work is slighter than her sisters' is just" (134): "Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall work on the simple assumption that love, earnestness and evangelical truth are preferable to social achievement and can, with sufficient long-suffering, be attained" (123). See the "Biographical Notice" in Wuthering Heights, xliii–xlix. Miriam Allott's Critical Heritage observes without irony that Anne's "lesser imaginative gifts were recognised then as now" (33). Branwell observed in the Angrian writings (juvenilia) that "Anne is nothing, absolutely nothing." For a comment on this as ironic and taken from Jane Austen's Persuasion, see John Adlard, "The Nothingness of Anne." Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaggie BergMaggie Berg is Full Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. She has published mostly on the Brontës but also on French feminism. She is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Humans and Animals in the Brontë Novels.

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