ABSTRACT
Ever since George Moore criticized Anne Bronte’s presenting of Helen Huntingdon’s story in diary form (253-57), critics have tried to justify The Tenant o f Wildfell Halls embedding of Helen Huntingdon’s diary within the frame of Gilbert Markham’s letters to his brother-in-law. Early attempts to account for the narrative frame point out that Wildfell Halls titular house suggests a response to Wuthering Heights, with its famous layered narratives.1 More recent comparisons of Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall include the deconstructive ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Bronte’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’, which argues that Bronte used multiple narratives, including spoken ones, to show that experience is irrecoverable. Other recent studies propose new reasons for the enclosure of Helen Huntingdon’s narrative by Gilbert Markham’s letters, among them Edith Kostka’s suggestion that Helen’s diary matures Gilbert.2 I would like to propose yet another possible reason for Anne Bronte’s ‘oft rebuked’ embedding of Helen Huntingdon’s diary within Gilbert Markham’s framing epistolary narrative: Bronte’s exposure to Methodism, which led her to believe that character could be deliberately (re)formed, especially by means of writing and reading personal narratives — an enterprise that Wildfell Hall simultaneously demonstrates and hopes to effect.
