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“AN INFERNAL FIRE IN MY VEINS”: GENTLEMANLY DRINKING IN THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Gwen Hyman
Gwen Hyman*
Affiliation:
The Cooper Union
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Extract

Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , September 2008 , pp. 451 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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