Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text

Anne Bront6's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall quickly calls attention to itself as the longest single-narrative, enclosing epistolary novel of the nineteenth century. Beginning dear Halford, it concludes four hundred and fifty pages later with a Till then, farewell, Gilbert Markham. It is not the characters of the individual subjects of the novel nor the contents of Markham's narrative that shape the meaning of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but rather the relative dispensation of alternative narratives competing for our attention and hence for a textual priority. Each mode of discourse must confront the recognition that in any scheme of recovery, voice is a privileged aspect of language, that the intrusion of the otherness of the listener is a necessary constitution of meaning. The engagement of a narratee is achieved by sublating a variety of secondor third-hand discourse: community gossip; the narrator's own source, a faded old journal (TWH, 34); the incomplete manuscript of Helen Huntington's diary, given to the narrator because she cannot speak her story; a cluster of failed correspondence between Gilbert and Helen; and finally, a sort of running commentary on another and historically prior text, Helen's exegesis of the Bible, which serves to foreground all the other narratives. Each of the enclosed varieties of discourse appears as a supplement, an attempt to amend or correct either the inadequacy or the social threat posed by another version of the same events. Rather than seeking to establish their primacy or priority by creating a discontinuity among narratives that would furnish a ground for deconstruction,2 however, Anne Bront6's narrator presents the reader with another situation: a world of proliferating <'texts which cannot be contained, except by a desperate and ar

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• Gothic Fault-Lines in Anne Brontë’s Social Fiction

  Open Access•Isabelle Hervouët•Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens•2023

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• Convergence and Divergence of Epistolary Narrative Voice in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Message on Longing and Passion

  Open Access•Khalid J Oudah Alogaili, Ali Khalaf•International Journal of…•2026

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