“A Creature of My Own Imagination”: Artistic, Maternal, and Sexual Desire in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how sublimated, repressed desires can be grasped through literary representations of artwork as an extra-linguistic mode of social intercourse in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).Engaging with previous scholarship that considers the role of maternal desire in the novel, I argue that Brontë subverts the traditional courtship plot by proposing dangerous ideas of maternal sexuality and desire that the text, radical as it may be, cannot entirely contain.Accordingly, Brontë's protagonist's artwork comes to stand in metonymically for her desire and her sexuality.In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë's protagonist, Helen Graham, meets her second husband when she is already a married woman and, crucially, already a mother.Here, Brontë subverts the traditional courtship plot through the introduction of a heroine who is in no way virginal, proposing dangerous ideas of maternal desire and sexuality that the text-radical as it may be-cannot overtly put into words.Far from reaffirming domestic ideologies, however, this maternal narrative demonstrates the complex status of desire in the maternal plot.Accordingly, Brontë invokes Helen's art to communicate sentiments-whether romantic, desirous, violent, or fearful-that she cannot freely commit to language.Rather than directly acknowledging the extent of Helen's passions, Brontë gestures toward their erotic nature through Helen's own descriptions of her artwork, as well as other characters' perceptions of and reactions to her art; as a result, Helen's artwork comes to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".