and miles to go before i sleep

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Arthur Huntingdon,'no fool', though not an intelligent man, realizes that he is powerless to control, or even touch, the core of his young wife's nature and personality. Commentators on the relationship between man and woman as outlined by Anne Bronte, especially as regards the former's tyranny, have focused on material issues, and they are certainly important; but Huntingdon's failure to subjugate his wife completely is arguably an even more vital concern in Wildfell Hall. It has been pointed out that his ruin is hastened by his union with Helen, and it is surely true. However, the factor that accelerates his downfall is not any lack of devotion, support, or dedication to his welfare on her part (she evinces them all) but the inviolability of her spirit. Try as he might, and he adopts all the means at his disposal, he never gains total dominance over the girl he surely married for love. If he had, or could have deluded himself that he had, the restlessness that drives him to drink and dissipation might never have grown so strong. He might perhaps have ended up like Helen's uncle ('a worthless old fellow enough, in himself, I dare say) a gout-ridden, essentially superficial, but jovial country gentleman. Helen's refusal to grant her husband his conjugal rights has often been commented on, and such a step is indeed remarkable in an early Victorian novel. Still, her locking her door at one point during their first quarrel is a transient gesture and, as she announces, more a token of displeasure than anything else. (Her qualifying statement is as tactless as it is realistic: 'I don't want to see your face or hear your voice again till morning'. When she decrees that they will 'henceforth [be] husband and wife only in the name' - and she makes her point very explicitly - Arthur Huntingdon is involved in a passionate affair with Annabella Lowborough. His surly reply, a repeated 'Very good', expresses neither surprise nor outrage. The possession of her body is of no great interest to him at this point; what irks him from first to last is his inability to take possession of her soul.

What does it mean — to “let the right one in”? How might the right one quickly metamorphose into the “wrong one”? And what are the implications of this for the vampire’s victims?

In such complex terrain, meanings around hospitality and consent become uncertain: when deception is involved, an invitation might mean one thing to the host/victim and another to the guest/perpetrator. The vampire stands precisely at the point of this problematic nexus between rape and consent. While a victim might well submit to the charismatic and sexual allure of the vampire, seduction does not necessarily imply volition.

Although I would have preferred a critique more attentive to my text and to the Arrest Memorable of Jean de Coras, more subject to "the sovereignty of sources" to which it claims loyalty, I welcome Robert Finlay's response to my challenge.

being able to play songs in your head is cool and all but not really if you can't control what and when it plays so this is a visualization of me trying to concentrate while angel of music plays in my head

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens with Gilbert Markham telling the story of his meeting Helen who has just moved into his neighborhood after leaving her husband. A fugitive from the law, she lives under an assumed name and tries to avoid the society of her immediate neighbors—Markham and his cohorts. Seen through the lens of Gilbert’s desire, Helen’s character emerges as the archetypal misanthropic stranger, inhabiting a wild and romantic Gothic mansion, her past replete with dark secrets. Brontë has done something astonishingly new: she has created a plausible female Byronic hero, coveted for her very “unfeminine” qualities: inquietude, difficulty, and distance. She is the “mysterious lady” who is so reserved that, “they tried all they could to find out who she was, and where she came from, and all about her, but [no one] ... could manage to elicit a single satisfactory answer ... or throw the faintest ray of light upon her history, circumstances, or connections. Moreover, she was barely civil to them .…” Anne revises Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights: it is not Rochester who rules this Thornfield Hall nor is it Heathcliff who lurks about Wuthering Heights seeing ghosts. This time, the woman takes the role of the stormy and seductive artist who charms and mesmerizes the man. Wildfell Hall is a dilapidated, storied mansion, like so many other homes of Gothic literature; it is “cold and gloomy... with its thick stone mullion and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-holes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation” surrounded by trees “half blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the hall itself” which “harmonized well with the ghostly legend and dark traditions our old nurse had told us respecting the haunted hall and its departed occupants.” Helen haunts these bleak rooms, and Gilbert longs to redeem her from her dark past and bring her back into the fold, just as Jane yearns to be Rochester's salvation, his earthly paradise.