Though they lived in the Victorian Age and published their novels in those years, the three Bronte sisters share a great deal with the Romantic Age in their works: themes, literary devices and features, wild nature and tormented souls. For example, Charlotte’s Mr Rochester or Emily’s Heathcliff embody the typical Byronic hero: moody, restless, wild in manners, tormented but so attractive. The heroes and the heroines in their novels tend to be atypical, anti-conformist, unable to simply accept their duties. They are often led by feelings and passions. And all of that is not typically Victorian. The reading audience was shocked by Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847). (I still am sometimes re-reading it: she was so brave at writing and publishing such a novel at that time)
Gothic novels were very popular at the end of the 18th century (the first one was published 1764 by Horace Walpole and was titled
The Castle of Otranto) and their popularity went on through the Romantic Age. Lord Byron and his friends, among whom P.B. and Mary Shelley , spent their nights together reading and discussing gothic tales and they even proved themselves at writing one , but only
Mary Shelley wrote something as worthy to be remembered as her
Frankenstein (1818).
Gothic novels were based on frightening characters and events and had risen thanks to
Edmund Burke ’s new conception of the sublime as “horrible beauty” whose main source was fear. What is Gothic then in our beloved novels by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte?
1. In Charlotte’s
JANE EYRE (1847) we can recognize many Gothic features
Jane’s childhood terrors in Lowood school
Thornfield mysterious nocturnal incidents
A sense of supernatural
The gloomy atmosphere
Bertha’s madness
Jane’s (apparently) unrequited love
2. The same can be said for Emily’s
WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847): Gothic features are prevailing respect to Victorian themes
the atmosphere of the setting ( that is sinister and sublime because of the stormy, windy weather on the moors )
Catherine’s ghost
the dreams
the superstitions
the graves
the macabre details
the themes of death and revenge
Heathcliff as the villain who persecutes the naive heroine (Isabella Linton, Cathy Jr)
3. To recognize Gothic features in Anne’s
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL (1848) is less immediate.
I read this novel quite recently, not yet a year ago. Last summer in fact. I was impressed by young Anne courage at dealing with the theme of women’s equality. Her Helen is not a silent victim, what the society of the time would have expected from her since conventions dictated submissiveness. This is why this novel is often considered the first feminist novel.
But we have to focus on Gothic details . In The Tenant there are not so many.
Certainly its wonderfully Gothic title owes a debt to the Gothic tradition. Wildfell Hall is a desolate residence in an isolated place. And this is already a typical Gothic setting. Then, Helen is surrounded by mystery in the first part. Nodoby knows much about her and her past and her being self-possessedrather secluded and surrounded by secrecy makes her the victim of local slander.
In the second part, while we read Helen’s diary with Gilbert Markham, the mystery of her past is revealed and we are plunged in a different atmosphere which is still Gothic: Helen and her son become the victims of dissolute Arthur Huntington, respectively her husband and his father. Their lives were spoilt and exposed to many risks: Arthur lost control and became a brute, especially when drunk.
This character is said to be inspired to Branwell Bronte, the Bronte family’s spoilt son, but can well recall – in some moments and only in the central part , not in his sad end - the villain in the Gothic novels who abducted, threatened, raped naive girls.
So, we can conclude saying that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Gothic particularly in its sense of mystery and in its portrayals of an aristocratic life of decadence and emotional brutality
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