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A Defense of Gilbert Markham

It seems oddly common for people to say about Tenant of Wildfell Hall that while Gilbert might SEEM like a great guy worthy of Helen, ACTUALLY if you pay attention he's really a crappy person.

The thing is that Gilbert is the one who told us that. You don't need to pay attention- he informs us every time he says or even thinks something problematic and even explains exactly what negative trait made him be that way and what was so harmful about it. This isn't subtext, it's plain, blatant, explicit text.

Now, that doesn't mean that Gilbert is a saint. He does, in fact, hit Lawrence over the head with a stick and knock him off his horse, objectively an awful thing to do. I think it does mitigate things somewhat that Lawrence handled literally everything about his interactions with Gilbert horrendously and in the specific head-whacking incident refused to allow Gilbert to deescalate and ride away, but that doesn't actually justify violence, just explain why Gilbert reached that point. But we see Gilbert's whole process as he does it, realizes what he did, refuses to repent of it, changes his mind and tries to help, later apologizes... the whole book is an exercise in seeing a hot-headed young man grow up, and even by the end he hasn't entirely, but he's been learning.

The thing about Tenant is that it is basically the chronicle of a pampered (though pampered from the perspective of human relationships and NOT hard work, which is important) and clueless young man maturing, written with fifteen years or so of hindsight. (We will for these purposes ignore the exact framing device because it makes zero sense.) Anne Bronte is putting us inside the mind of a man who isn't a bad person but hasn't had much of an opportunity to become a good one either; ironically, we see echoes of their first extended conversation at his house in his own situation, in that (as he had advocated for) he DOES learn from his own experiences how to become a better person but in doing so hurts others enough so as to demonstrate that ideally, one should be taught to be better in the first place rather than gain it through trial and error.

But Gilbert has good bones, because he wants to learn and he wants to better himself. He also has, somehow, whether because of Helen's influence or not, managed to overcome his mother's terrible teaching-by-doing as far as spoiling the son at the expense of the daughter, and that being a model for a wife's treatment by her husband. She is disbelieving when her son says he wants to treat his wife well! That he has managed to figure out on his own, and it's that very ability to not just learn to be better but WANT to learn to keep improving himself to be the best he can be for those he loves that shows his value.

A significant part of the book's message is an examination of what men can do to women and what men, therefore, owe women. It is not anti-man or anti-marriage; Bronte, in telling this story, acknowledges that loving marriage is a good thing AND it gives men a power over women that they can, and must, use responsibly. If she didn't think that this was both true and possible, not only would Helen never have married Gilbert, but Hattersley would not have been able to redeem himself. To Bronte, the most important character trait a person can have is to be able to learn and change, with the best way being to be willing to learn and be better BEFORE being faced with the situation that forces you to learn from mistakes.

Gilbert makes a lot of mistakes throughout the book, pretty much from beginning to end, of various magnitudes. But the main thing we get from him is that he is open to growth. Despite his mother's pampering, when challenged by someone whose respect he wants (and who demands that respect from him, which Eliza, for example, never quite does), he rises to the challenge and is open to changing his views and bucking society's toxic norms. Even more than that, he respects her, not just as a woman but as a person. His pride is sometimes an obstacle, but especially by the end of the book he holds onto his pride not because he needs something OVER her but because he needs something to MATCH her.

If there is a subtext that needs to be read into Tenant, it's not "actually Gilbert sucks," it's "beneath all of Gilbert's retroactive self-mockery, what were the things about him that led Helen to love him and to see him as the kind of man who she has realized could make her happy?" And when you peel back those layers of self-assessment and self-analysis, all of which comes of course with an idealization of Helen to contrast it against, it becomes much clearer. Gilbert truly loves her, loves her son, is open to learn and grow and self-assess his behavior to improve. It's that very trait that leads to his own chronicle of the events setting off his more negative traits in such high relief.

This is why, incidentally, I can't STAND the 1996 adaptation. Setting aside how it takes a book with real moments of both comedy and insight and flattens it into misery porn, the ending is a slap in the face. The book is great as a portrait of Gilbert's growth, and while Toby Stephens is great casting for that book character he's given little to do to show it (and thus little to make Gilbert interesting or anything more than Not-Huntingdon), and instead we know everything about Helen from the start. The show is portrayed as HER journey, thus not only defanging the book's depiction of an ordinary young man's growth to become better and thus removing half the plot but also, ironically, casting Gilbert as someone who Helen needs to grow and heal enough to be able to love and accept by reversing the marriage bait-and-switch at the end. They cast the show as being about a woman's healing from a toxic marriage through the love of a better man, which is fine for what it is, but it's not Tenant! Helen has already healed, more or less, if by healed one means acquiring the understanding of the world that will structure the rest of her life. By the end of the diary that Gilbert has read, written before she ever meets him, she understands what she previously missed and what she needs now. Throughout the book she is consistent and Gilbert is the one who needs to grow and develop and meet her where she is, and its this ability to do so in him that proves to her that he can, if imperfect, meet the standards that she requires. By flipping this around and having Helen be the one worried that Gilbert is married, the story feels cheapened because the rest of the story doesn't at all bear it out and Gilbert isn't interesting enough on the screen to sustain it. I guess they saw themselves as flipping it to be "the book from Helen's side" but they'd have really needed to commit to it and they didn't bother.