SOURCE: “The Voicing of Feminine Desire in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, edited by Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor, Northern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 111-23.

In the following essay, Langland offers a feminist/post-structuralist analysis of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a Victorian narrative of transgressive feminine desire.

Because of its radical and indecorous subject matter—a woman's flight from her abusive husband—Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shocked contemporary audiences. Yet the very indecorousness of the subject may seem to be undermined by the propriety of the form this narrative takes: the woman's story is enclosed within and authorized by a respectable man's narrative. Within the discourse of traditional analysis we would speak of the “nested” narratives of Anne Brontë's novel, one story enclosed within another. In this case...