The tone of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shifts depending on which narrator is speaking. The tone of Gilbert’s letter to Jack moves between dispassionately detailing the facts of his life, to desperately longing for Helen, and ultimately rejoicing in being able to marry her.
The tone of Helen’s diary entries changes from excited and naïve (when she starts looking for a husband as an 18-year-old) to joyful and enraptured (when she falls in love with Arthur and becomes engaged to him) to terrified and full of regret (when she realizes his true character and remains trapped in her marriage to him).
The following passage from Chapter 18 captures Helen’s tone during the period in which she is falling in love with Arthur, before she knows the truth about his abusive nature:
There is a secret something – an inward instinct that assures me I am right. There is essential goodness in him; – and what delight to unfold it! If he has wandered, what bliss to recall him! If he is now exposed to the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions, what glory to deliver him from them! – Oh! if I could but believe that Heaven has designed me for this!
This passage highlights not only Helen’s love for Arthur, but also how her romantic tone has a religious quality to it. Helen loves Arthur but she also sees how loving a sinner such as himself gives her a sense of religious purpose, exclaiming about “the glory” she will experience in saving him from “the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions.”
The final section of the novel—in which Helen tends to Arthur as he dies due to his alcoholism—takes on an even more reflective and religious tone. In Chapter 49, Helen ruminates on Arthur’s death in a letter to her brother Frederick, wondering what it means for Arthur’s sinful soul:
Oh Frederick! none can imagine the miseries, bodily and mental, of that death bed! How could I endure to think that that poor trembling soul was hurried away to everlasting torment? it would drive me mad! But thank God I have hope – not only from a vague dependence on the possibility that penitence and pardon might have reached him at the last, but from the blessed confidence that, through whatever purging fires the erring spirit may be doomed to pass – whatever fate awaits it, still, it is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that he hath made, will bless it in the end!
Helen’s tone here is much more desperate and yet, as in the previous passage, she communicates a sense of hopefulness—she knows that God “hateth nothing that he hath made” and that, even if Arthur must pass through a kind of fiery purgatory, God will bless him “in the end.”
The tone of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shifts depending on which narrator is speaking. The tone of Gilbert’s letter to Jack moves between dispassionately detailing the facts of his life, to desperately longing for Helen, and ultimately rejoicing in being able to marry her.
The tone of Helen’s diary entries changes from excited and naïve (when she starts looking for a husband as an 18-year-old) to joyful and enraptured (when she falls in love with Arthur and becomes engaged to him) to terrified and full of regret (when she realizes his true character and remains trapped in her marriage to him).
The following passage from Chapter 18 captures Helen’s tone during the period in which she is falling in love with Arthur, before she knows the truth about his abusive nature:
There is a secret something – an inward instinct that assures me I am right. There is essential goodness in him; – and what delight to unfold it! If he has wandered, what bliss to recall him! If he is now exposed to the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions, what glory to deliver him from them! – Oh! if I could but believe that Heaven has designed me for this!
This passage highlights not only Helen’s love for Arthur, but also how her romantic tone has a religious quality to it. Helen loves Arthur but she also sees how loving a sinner such as himself gives her a sense of religious purpose, exclaiming about “the glory” she will experience in saving him from “the baneful influence of corrupting and wicked companions.”
The final section of the novel—in which Helen tends to Arthur as he dies due to his alcoholism—takes on an even more reflective and religious tone. In Chapter 49, Helen ruminates on Arthur’s death in a letter to her brother Frederick, wondering what it means for Arthur’s sinful soul:
Oh Frederick! none can imagine the miseries, bodily and mental, of that death bed! How could I endure to think that that poor trembling soul was hurried away to everlasting torment? it would drive me mad! But thank God I have hope – not only from a vague dependence on the possibility that penitence and pardon might have reached him at the last, but from the blessed confidence that, through whatever purging fires the erring spirit may be doomed to pass – whatever fate awaits it, still, it is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that he hath made, will bless it in the end!
Helen’s tone here is much more desperate and yet, as in the previous passage, she communicates a sense of hopefulness—she knows that God “hateth nothing that he hath made” and that, even if Arthur must pass through a kind of fiery purgatory, God will bless him “in the end.”
