"You Have Only Yourself to Blame": Mind and Reason in Anne Brontë's: Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

Abstract:This paper extends legal and medical approaches to Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by considering Brontë's attunement to a greater cultural shift around the question of whether men were capable of or responsible for controlling their emotions and conduct, which led to general condemnation of passionate behaviour more broadly. I argue that the law and medicine are related concerns in the novel. While Brontë attends to a woman's place in society and her limitations, the novel also emphasizes the education and reformation of men with regard to their brutal conduct. My analysis, then, focuses on changing cultural attitudes toward responsibility. I show how in the novel, medical science and morality intersect to provide a more complex theory of the aberrant mind than mid-nineteenth-century English law allowed for, while at the same time upholding legal understandings of responsibility for individual conduct. Thus, while Brontë explores various sciences of mind, which to some extent suggest innate character deficiencies, as well as the destructive mental effects of alcoholism, she ultimately frames psychological ideas of the mind within a moral context. Wildfell Hall aligns with changing attitudes regarding mental and physical violence—that brutality is a violation of social codes—even if the perpetrator of the violence is "provoked."