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.

Tenant has generated a fair amount of critical attention in recent years, but most of the interest surrounding the novel has focused not on Arthur but on his long-suffering wife, Helen Huntingdon. The tale of a woman who frees herself from the constraints of a bad marriage and an abusive husband to find freedom and true love has instead been justly celebrated for its proto-feminist sensibilities: Helen Huntingdon's famous locking of her bedroom door is often portrayed as the shot that echoed round the world of Victorian gender politics.Footnote ¹ And Arthur Huntingdon, the most arresting figure in the novel, is, in post-Victorian critical writing, almost always read only through his effects on his wife.

Certainly, those effects are significant: as Arlene M. Jackson notes, Huntingdon is “a drunkard who verbally abuses his wife, who prefers the companionship of fellow . . . debauchees . . . and who feels it is his right to have affairs with whatever pretty women come his way” (199). Helen eventually finds herself compelled to flee her marriage in order to protect her son from his wealthy, landed, and outrageously drunken father's influence. She begins the novel in the assumed persona of a young widowed painter who moves into a crumbling pile in an isolated village. Her story is told through her diary, a gift she gives to her jealous would-be lover, the ambitious yeoman farmer Gilbert Markham, in order to explain her inability to marry him. Helen's diary is an unflinching record of Arthur Huntingdon's career, documenting his transformation from a sexy, funny, impetuous lover to a fat, red-faced, out-of-control sot who flaunts his affairs with women high-born and low-, offers to auction off his wife to the highest bidder, burns her paintings, teaches his toddler son to drink and swear, and finally dies a slow and horrible death.

Though his behavior is almost stereotypically outrageous, however, Huntingdon is not simply an enactor of excessive patriarchal authority, nor just an overplayed Regency rake whose excesses serve only as a means of drawing attention to his wife's strengths: rather, he is a figure whose complex alimental embodiment of gender and class is at once necessary to his self-perpetuation and agent of his obliteration. And it is precisely this behavior that makes him the most consistently interesting character in the novel – far more interesting than his morally correct wife.Footnote ² And the most interesting question about Arthur is the simplest: why does he drink?

After all, Huntingdon himself seems to understand that perpetual drunkenness can only end badly. Before he and Helen are married, he assures her that though he doesn't “abstain like a ninny,” he is no “tippler . . . I value my comfort far too much. I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; – besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity – and moreover, drinking spoils one's good looks” (207–08; ch. 22).

Perhaps because of his consciousness of the evils of drink, some critics read Huntingdon as a tragic figure who drinks to escape his existential dilemma.Footnote ³ But while the idea of Huntingdon as a philosopher lost and found in the bottle, a rebel without a cause for the nineteenth century, is particularly attractive to a postmodern readership besotted with anti-heroes, it accords a great deal of interiority to a character who evinces very little of this interesting quality. Similarly, the view of Huntingdon as an “alcoholic” in the modern sense is profoundly ahistorical: the idea of drinking as compulsive behavior out of the control of the individual was not entertained by the early Victorians. In the first half of nineteenth the century, habitual drunkenness was seen as a behavioral or criminal issue, inflected with ethical connotations, tied to class and dependent for its definition on widely varying community standards. The Victorian drunkard was viewed variously as viciously depraved, morally bereft, or badly socialized. While one might certainly die from the effects of habitual intoxication, the idea of drunkenness itself as a disease was not widely accepted until at least the 1860s.Footnote ⁴

This crucial cultural difference is predicated in part on the everyday presence of drink in the early years of the British nineteenth century. In the 1820s, the timeframe of Tenant's central story, England was still mired in a mild fog of intoxication, a hangover from the 18^th century, when, as Sarah Freeman writes, “[t]he traditional view of alcohol was that it was as natural and necessary for survival as food” (94). Everyone drank: fine ladies and factory workers, rich and poor. Laborers and even lawyers still girded themselves for the day with a fortifying breakfast of beer soup, a rich mixture of bread scraps and warm ale; public schools served weakened “table” beer to children. Drunkenness was not particularly problematic – it was a sign of fellowship, part of the social contract. As Lilian Lewis Shiman notes, “[i]t was a man's right to get drunk if he wanted to. Drunkenness carried no social stigma” (2).

Brontë's Reverend Millward, the leading light of his community, is the embodiment of this embrace of drink. As Gilbert Markham explains, “[h]e had a laudable care for his own bodily health . . . was, generally, extremely particular about what he ate and drank, though by no means abstemious, and . . . [was] a great despiser of tea and such slops, and a patron of malt liquors . . . which . . . were maintained by him to be good and wholesome for everybody” (43; ch. 1). Millward declares that Helen's determination to teach her son to hate alcohol is “making a fool of the boy . . . despising the gifts of providence, and teaching him to trample them under his feet”: wine and spirits, he affirms, “are all blessings and mercies, if we only knew how to make use of them” (64; ch. 4). Gilbert's mother affirms the fortifying, manly nature of drink: teaching little Arthur to abstain will, she declares, turn the boy into “the veriest milksop that ever was sopped!” (54; ch. 3).

But while Tenant is set in the Regency, it was written in the late 1840s, and the thinking of that period shapes the novel's attitude towards alcohol. To a mid-nineteenth-century reader, Millward's views on drink – and his copious personal indulgence – would mark him as distinctly old-fashioned, an apt character for an “old-world story” (34; frame letter); when he affirms, “now THIS is the thing!” (63; ch. 4) as he pours himself a tall glass of Mrs. Millward's ale, he is as misguided as he proves himself to be in lecturing Helen on morality and piety. The change is directly related to the new vicissitudes of high industrialism and its active remaking of the body.

Work in England had continued its subjection to the drinking culture through the early years of the century: regular hours and smooth production in the factories and mines remained more or less a pipe dream. Workers drank before, during, and after work, fueling their long hours and grueling labor with beer. Tipsy workers made costly and dangerous mistakes, and production was slow. “Saint Monday” – an extra day off for carousing after the dry Sunday holiday – was widely celebrated by workers who declined to appear on Monday mornings. As factories' production needs changed in response to growing competition and technological changes, ambitious capitalists began to search for ways to combat such behavior (Schivelbusch 148–49). Where once drink had been a tool used to pacify and manage workers (in the pay packet, at the company-owned pub), now it was an evil to be eradicated, a foe of orderly productive life. Management remade the body: owners stopped paying drink bonuses as they began demanding that workers function like machines.Footnote ⁵

Drink and drunkenness became immoral, anti-Protestant, anti-social (Shiman 2), a new idea most effectively broadcast by the temperance movement of in the 1820s and 30s. In this era of church-driven moral movements, temperance leagues were a perfect “cure” for an anti-industrial vice, combining the language of the workplace with the moral weight of the pulpit: as Marianne Adler writes, “the movement offered a moral platform legitimating the demand for security of property, a disciplined labor force, and an expanded home market” (386). The cause was reform-minded, but not revolutionary: it preached against “gin,” the generic term for all hard alcohol, usually taken in cheap shots in working-class pubs,Footnote ⁶ but it never advocated abstinence. Beer and wine were allowed in moderation. Prominent London churchmen and wealthy industrialists who indulged in wine and port at their own tables lent their names to the cause,Footnote ⁷ but the real leadership belonged to the managing classes.

Workers with an interest in “bettering” themselves found encouragement in the temperance movement, where self-improvement through self-control was gospel: they often saw the societies as a coveted gateway to the middle class. Temperance reformers aligned their movement with scientific progress, technological advancement, and a strong industrial work ethic (Harrison 96–98). But while the movement was immensely socially and economically useful to its middle-class leaders, it was hardly a land of opportunity for the lower orders. The temperance notion of drink and intoxication was deeply inflected by class, and the drinker urged to reform was inevitably marked as a person to be condescended to. Temperance leaders preached that the tendency to true drunkenness was bred in the bone. For those with the propensity, drunkenness could be avoided through moderation and care; but once a drinker had truly embarked on a career of drinking, he could not be redeemed, because the legacy carried in his blood, once taken up, could not be suppressed. The key, here as in the workplace, was gaining control before it was too late. In this way, the mind could triumph over the body: the individual could win out over fate through the medium of aliment. But since the bloodstreams of the lower orders were the exclusive sites of the inborn propensity towards drunkenness, the poor could only be bettered to a certain degree – unlike their aspiring leaders.Footnote ⁸ Class was at once malleable and static: the imperative towards upward mobility among the middle ranks was married to the notion of inherence among the lower classes through the device of appetite and its control.

Members of the gentry, with their putatively more rarefied blood, were excluded from the “bettering” rhetoric of the leagues; but the rise of temperance nevertheless had moral implications for their tables and their appetites. Temperance's ethos rejected drink because it was anti-social and anti-productive. Similarly, the ease-inducing – and ease-requiring – fare of the rich was increasingly perceived not only as old-fashioned and hidebound, but also as unproductive and – what came to the same thing – immoral, as new demands for professionalism, efficiency, and productivity also profoundly changed the bodily definitions of the middle class. If the workers who toiled on the factory floor were reduced, in Dickens's famous term, to “hands,” their betters in the managerial offices might be usefully imagined as disembodied heads. For them, professionalism – labor not of the hand but of the head – was the site of social advancement, and to this end, the body had to be utterly subdued so that the mind could go about its business (Adler 387–88). Managers and owners might have aspired, ultimately, to the luxuries of the gentle table, but they fueled their race to the top not with the heavy, brain-clogging fare of the rich, but, rather, with breakfast on the fly, the light City luncheon, and, in particular, with coffee.Footnote ⁹ By outlawing certain modes of alimentation – by seeking to control the body through what was taken in, and by tying this moral code explicitly to socio-economic output – temperance rhetoric served not only to control laboring bodies, but also to name any unproductively consuming body as alienated from the system, a relic of the past.

This temperance narrative pervades the early sections of Brontë's novel, particularly in the person of Gilbert Markham. The very picture of well-directed, productive eating, Gilbert stands in sharp contrast to his neighbors. Though he is thwarted in his unnamed but apparently considerable ambitions beyond the farm by a deathbed promise to his father, his methodical approach to his work in “the improvement of agriculture” (35), his close supervision of his workers, and his very valuing of productivity align him with the strivers of Brontë's age. Eschewing both luxury and self-indulgence, he sates his very real “hunger,” founded on his daily labors of hand and of mind – for example, “breaking in the grey colt . . . directing the ploughing of the last wheat stubble . . . and carrying out a plan for the extensive and efficient draining of the low meadow-lands” (36–37) – on nothing more intoxicating than “tea, ham and toast” (39). Gilbert is never seen to touch a drop of wine or ale. Instead, he reports on the bad behavior of others, noting, for instance, the insufferable gossip Mrs. Wilson's partiality for gin and water (she “affirmed that wine sat heavy on her stomach” [63; ch. 4]), and the habits of his lazy brother, Fergus, who eats with great appetite and refuses to work. The morally inflected middle-class imperative to productivity and abstemious behavior that Gilbert embodies is especially problematic for the mid-century upper-crust gentleman embodied by Arthur Huntingdon – a figure more and more removed from the useful world by the advance of the business-minded striver.

The idea of the wealthy gentleman underwent critical changes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Where once, he could be plausibly drawn as at least a putatively productive leader – benevolent owner, informed producer, capable political chief – this portrait became increasingly untenable in the popular imagination in the face of industrialism and sociopolitical changes. The image of the productive man of inherited wealth faded as the traditional activities of the English gentleman were slowly usurped by the professional classes.Footnote ¹⁰ Lawyers and bureaucrats kept city and town functioning. The army and foreign services were increasingly professionalized. While the lords pondered grave issues in the Upper House, the day-to-day running of government was undertaken by a vast and ever-growing cadre of civil servants. Affairs of state and affairs of the home estate alike were most often managed by ambitious professionals. In this new world, gentlemen like Huntingdon became utterly unproductive. While a man of privilege might technically be a market producer (his land the site of a mine; his plantations abroad yielding spices, fruit, tea), he was entirely estranged from the process of production. His hands were never dirtied; his brain never taxed; he simply reaped the benefits of other people's labor.

If a gentleman had no burning academic or artistic interests, what remained was not very much: outdoor sport, indoor entertainment (billiards, amateur theatricals), the pursuit of ladies, and dinner. Formerly the centre of his domain, the gentleman was more and more an irrelevance, a body to be kept up and cared for by legions of servants and other functionaries, removed from the business of the swift-moving century.Footnote ¹¹ This is certainly the case with Arthur, as Helen notes:

The occupations that Helen proposes are, of course, untenable for a man like Huntingdon. Reading, drawing, and piano are the occupations of ladies, and Huntingdon cannot take them up without running the risk of feminizing himself. Conversely, he cannot “attend to the farm” without lessening his own status – a very dangerous proposition in the age of the striver, when the gentleman's state suddenly required an endless and difficult process of reassertion.

Ironically, while the gentlemanly body was delineated as a wasteful, unproductive anachronism, the striver at the same time aspired to emulate the trappings of that body in order to mark his own success, so that the wealthy gentleman's sole employment became the marking of his own status as a means of sustaining and protecting himself and his kind. As Stephen Mennell notes, the remedy to the increasing difficulty of telling old money apart from new money was a perpetual resetting of the requirements for genteel life (209): to keep off social climbers, the stakes were raised increasingly higher, so that visible markers of gentlemanliness (houses, clothing, carriages) became increasingly unstable. Since only money, land, and blood marked heritable class – and since money and land could be acquired – the gentleman, to maintain his standing, was required to take refuge in blood: to insist that class was bred in the bone. If Tenant's Gilbert embodies the upwardly mobile middle-class man, Huntingdon's role is to demonstrate that his position cannot be won by labor. At the same time that he finds himself strikingly superannuated, then, he must also seek constantly to differentiate himself from the very forces that threaten to erase him.

Arthur's solution is to turn to the useless with a vengeance: to embrace the vision of parasitic gentlemanliness promulgated by the business-minded, temperance-inflected rhetoric of the middle class. Take, for example, Huntingdon's courtship of Helen: even in the midst of this most charged and socially difficult of operations, he can talk of nothing but gossip, drink, and triviality. The very frivolity of such practices is important: their unproductive nature is, in fact, exactly what is gentlemanly about them. Arthur's anger at Helen's destruction of his portrait is also indicative of the state of the gentleman. Though Huntingdon treats his pursuit of Helen very much as a game, he cannot allow his own idolatrous image to be trifled with: his position in this narrow world, as the most handsome, the most charming, the most looked-at man in every room, the figure who is in command of all around him (though to no apparent purpose except the gratification of his own vanity) is all that is left to him. Hunting serves as an apt sign of his status. Arthur “find[s] occupation enough in the pursuit and destruction of the partridges and pheasants” (238; ch. 25), which, as Helen says, “serves to get the time on . . . and gives him some better employment than the sottish indulgence of his sensual appetites” (331; ch. 36). But even hunting is anti-productive, the opposite of useful efficiency: it is nothing more than a mock pursuit of sustenance, an enactment of the stereotypical role of brutal provider (Huntingdon returns from his sport “stained with the blood of his prey” [177; ch. 18]) meticulously staged on estates that have been carefully stocked with the requisite victims. It is productive of an inassimilable overabundance, an excess of aliment that nobody particularly needs.

But Huntingdon's leisure is not insignificant. Faced with superannuation and the prospect of being over-run by rising strivers, Brontë's gentleman of leisure is compelled, as it were, to go to work in order to hold onto his place in the social order: his job is the production of his own gentlemanliness, the endless reiteration of his own status. He seeks to perform his role by filling himself with the stuff of gentlemanliness: to create a sense of inherence by using food and drink to make himself into a man who is indisputably a gentleman. The image of the depraved Regency rake, who produces nothing, instead spreading destruction with his drunken binges and his indulgence of insatiable appetites of all kinds, is precisely the sort of image most useful to the middle-class political project of excluding the privileged from automatic power.Footnote ¹² But it is precisely these habits of indulgence that the gentleman seeks refuge in, reinforcing his class position through his refusal to limit his appetites.

Aliment is the ideal means of separating himself from the striving masses. As John Burnett notes, in the period that saw the advent of Tenant, “[i]n nothing was the contrast between wealth and poverty more obvious than in food. House, dress, or manners might still be a misleading test of income . . . but a man's dinner-table instantly announced his standard of living to the world at large” (71). Food demonstrates more than just income: a display of appropriate fare is a sign of an inherent understanding of one's position in the world, of the appropriate construction of the self vis-à-vis class position. As Pierre Bourdieu writes,

In Brontë's day, Bourdieau's notion was literalized and looped: there were (as temperance rhetoric implicitly suggests) still many believers in a digestively classed universe who held that members of different classes had fundamentally different constitutions, and, thus, were able to digest different fare. The poor, for instance, were thought more capable than the rich of surviving on rough food (Mennell 26). The idea was useful in propping up the notion of truly heritable class: this inborn bodily sumptuary code made the notion of the gentlemanly table itself seem inherent, even when social climbing made all other markers of the upper class achievable.Footnote ¹³

Aliment, then, serves as a crucial sign of status: a clear means of displaying one's wealth and sophistication, it is also a means of ingesting class, of swallowing the gentlemanliness one always already has whole at table and, thus, making it manifest. Perhaps equally importantly, it facilitated the demonstration of class through particular alimentary refusal. To fill and, thus, to refashion the body with the fare of the striver, to value aliment that grants speed and efficiency, is, for a gentleman like Huntingdon, to give in to the notion of social transformation through labor. By taking in the diet of industrialism, Arthur must, in a sense, deliver himself up to its ethos. To a gentleman like Arthur, such a position is impossible: it erases his entire raison d'etre, refuses the validity of his inherited position, insists that he earn his way in the world in order to justify his existence. It supports the notion of the man of leisure as social parasite who needs to be repaired in order to fit more smoothly into a reorganized social structure, based on energy, expertise, and merit rather than on tradition, blood, and privilege. For Huntingdon, ingestion of the fare endorsed by the middle class is an act of self-poisoning. To place himself outside of the world of work which seeks either to co-opt him or to shut him out of power entirely, Huntingdon must swallow fare that allows the gentlemanly body to insist on its own validity beyond the moral strictures and social insistences of the rising classes: fare that is anti-productive, anti-orderly, irrational.

To save himself, the gentleman – historically, marked by his distance from the bodily, his rhetorical and social near-erasure of his physical self, an ideal very much embodied in the nearly see-through Mr. LawrenceFootnote ¹⁴ – must re-embody the body, making himself corporeal, even grossly so, in order to preserve his status as a member of the elite – since reserve, that key gentlemanly attribute, also connotes suppression and, thus, mechanization of the body. Huntingdon turns away from the highly ordered regime of middle-class meals and the orderly body it is meant to produce (he skips breakfast or takes it late, spends it not fueling for the day but teasing his wife or flirting with other women; drinks coffee to recover from the night before; never seems to lunch on anything at all). Instead, he fills his body by that which is interdicted by the industrial order, flouting the rules, refusing change that refuses him, feeding a social sphere that the strivers would like to starve out of existence.

As the mad carousing, drunken wrestling, and inebriated nonsense babbling and toasting of Huntingdon and his friends clearly demonstrates, alcohol is all about reveling in the body and refusing the tyranny of rational control. Alcohol, as Deborah Lupton notes, is a “liminal” food (31): it puts its consumer into a state between consciousness and unconsciousness, control and chaos. This in-between state, a site of discomfort for advocates of order and hierarchy, also subverts the mind, threatening it with the chaos of the brainless gross corpus. Rather than a civilizing force, a locus of education in morals and manners, as the Victorians thought of it, the table thus becomes the seat of the anti-civilized, the birthplace of bad behavior. And alcohol leaves its mark after it has been swallowed – in drunkenness, and then in its after-effects, and eventually, permanently, on the face and body, “mak[ing] his eyes dull, and his face red and bloated” (330; ch. 36) – thus making “good blood” visible, unmistakable, to the naked eye.

And so Huntingdon marks both body and behavior through drink, producing only riot and waste, and thus avoiding gentlemanly obliteration. Despite his protestations, this is the case from the beginning – a fact made clear not only in his stories of London dissipation but also in his very physicality. Helen's quiet friend Millicent, who finds him too “bold – and reckless,” also objects that his “face is too red” (195; ch. 21), correctly reading the telltale signs where Helen sees only “a pleasant glow – a healthy freshness” (196; ch. 21). Marriage and fatherhood only drive Huntingdon further into the bottle. Adherence to the marital regime brings him closer to the social realm he must flout to maintain his status – as, indeed, his friends make clear in the letters responding to his announcement of his engagement, letters full “of bitter execrations and reproaches . . . They all say there'll be no more fun now, no more merry days and glorious nights – and all my fault – I am the first to break up the jovial band. . . I have shamefully betrayed my trust” (197; ch. 21). Like Lowborough when he abstains from wine, Huntingdon is clearly breaking his compact with his boon companions, threatening to turn his back on their gentlemanly escapades and “reforming” – that is, to bringing himself into line with the Law.

As he begins to pay off his debts and becomes a father, Arthur becomes at once more obviously outdated – stranded on his estate, choking on his idleness – and more imbricated in the useful, codified, socially structured life advocated by middle-class ideology. Though he tells his fiancée that “the very idea of having you to care for under my roof would force me to . . . live like a Christian – not to speak of all the prudence and virtue you would instil into my mind” (188; ch. 20), Arthur really needs a wife not to reform him but to adore him, to reaffirm his power, and to demonstrate his gentlemanly badness by her very goodness, as Helen herself realizes. “[H]is idea of a wife,” she notes, “is a thing to love one devotedly and to stay at home – to wait upon her husband, and amuse him and minister to his comfort . . . when he is absent, to . . . patiently wait his return; no matter how he may be occupied in the meantime” (256–57; ch. 29). What he gets instead is a wife complicit with the middle-class drive to subsume him. His “angel monitress” (212; ch. 22) is, despite her gentle birth, the embodiment of the mythical middle-class true woman, bent on reforming her husband: bemoaning his lack of “something to do – some useful trade, or profession, or employment,” she seeks “to have [his] thoughts changed . . . to think more deeply, to look farther, and aim higher” (219–20; ch. 23) – to turn him, that is, into a productive member of society.

The only response for Arthur is refusal. Turning away from the middle-class myth of the sacred hearth, Huntingdon flees home for his London club, to a substitute “home” (202; ch. 22), as he calls it, devoted to the undermining of order and the indulgence of those appetites which the angel in the house is meant to restrain. Desecrating home itself, he and his friends descend on Grass-dale to make merry, flouting the alimental rules of the social order by drinking their way through the coffee hour and disrupting the civilized, feminized rituals of tea with their drunken carousing. And in this way, he saves himself from being entirely sidelined while avoiding usefulness and, thus, class eradication. Drinking also solves the problem of ennui inherent in the purposefully purposeless life of leisure. Sober, Huntingdon is unbearably bored at home, as Helen's description of his sorry state during their first fight shows:

No wonder that at the end of such a day, Arthur “made a long stay in the dining-room after dinner, and . . . took an unusual quantity of wine” (224; ch. 24). Drinking obviates the problem of boredom: his refusal of the productive, rational, Godly order Helen represents is made manifest in “madness, folly and brutality” (354; ch. 38), the triumph of the irrational gross body over the mind. Huntingdon calls this being “[his] own man”: his gentlemanliness demands a determined lack of control, which, paradoxically, is the only way to control his own life. Even when he is hung over, his painful idleness is not a sign of pathetic uselessness, but a proud marker of gentlemanly prerogative: as he boasts, “[i]f you knew all, my girl, you'd say . . . ‘What a wonder it is you can bear it so well as you do!’ I've lived more in these last four months, Helen, than you have in the whole course of your existence, or will to the end of your days . . . so I must expect to pay for it in some shape” (269; ch. 30). Unlike a homebound woman or a working man chained to a desk, he has the freedom and the wherewithal to plunge into excess and riot. And it realigns him in relation to his wife: if she is in charity with him, she takes on once again the dual role of “angel monitress” (212; ch. 22) and handmaiden, in this way reaffirming his power over her; if she is angry, he counters by commanding and bullying, throwing books at the dog, swearing at the butler, and thus re-establishing himself as the powerful, manly head of the household.

This behavior is of a piece with Huntingdon's overt insistence on his masculinity as the right to do what he wants, whenever he wants. He tells Helen, for instance, that “I won't be dictated to by a woman, though she be my wife” (248; ch. 27) – thus refusing the middle-class terms of his marriage, in which he has cast her as the pious reformer and himself as the flawed man who will “do [his] utmost . . . to remember and perform the injunctions of [his] angel monitress” (212; ch. 22). When Annabella Lowborough leaves Grass-dale after her husband's discovery of her affair with Huntingdon, her paramour “subsequently expressed himself rather glad she was gone: ‘She was so deuced imperious and exacting,’ said he; ‘now I shall be my own man again, and feel rather more at my ease’” (353; ch. 38). For Huntingdon, being one's own man is impossible within the bounds of social constraints, which are embodied in women; manliness precisely demands a determined lack of control, which, paradoxically, is the only way to control one's own life. As he asks his wife, rhetorically, “[d]o you think I have nothing to do but stay at home and take care of myself like a woman?” (26; ch.30) Footnote ¹⁵

Unsurprisingly, as Helen notes, “[h]is appetite for the stimulus of wine . . . increased upon him. . . . It was now something more to him than an accessary to social enjoyment: it was an important source of enjoyment in itself . . . he would have made it his medicine and support, his comforter, his recreation, and his friend” (272; ch. 30). Huntingdon soon needs, when in his cups, to be helped up the stairs to bed. He lies insensate on the couch after his binges; then he begins to pass out on the couch during his drinking sprees. He bloats. While drinking and gorging make him gentlemanly, it seems, they also break him down.

But while drink makes him weak, tired, sickly, and cranky, this in and of itself separates him from the coffee-driven, suppressed, and repressed middle-class body: drink makes it clear that Arthur Huntingdon is not a productive corpus, a well-functioning mechanism subject to the tyranny of the clock. And it reaffirms his status in a positive sense, as well: the idea of excess-driven illness as a marker of class remains common through the Victorian era. Huntingdon himself, for instance, notices that “he was getting a trifle fatter, too, than was quite desirable – but that was with good living and idleness” (279; ch. 31). As Dr. J. Edwin Danelson, a popular nineteenth-century writer-physician, notes, though “the accumulation of fat in superfluity is a disease,” it is also an indicator of status: “[i]t attends indolence, and excessive eating and drinking. . . . [T]he wealthy, usually are, or grow to be fleshy” (667).

More tellingly, Huntingdon's state is evocative of the most famous class-marked malady to afflict the rich: gout, the disease that kills Helen's dissolute uncle.Footnote ¹⁶ Since the seventeenth century, gout had been widely regarded as a manifestation of gentlemanly blood, and, thus, as much an incontrovertible marker of class as a scourge. As George Ellwanger writes in Reference Ellwanger1897, “[f]rom its being usually attributed to luxury and close familiarity with the rarer products of the vine, Gout is sometimes supposed . . . to be a rather desirable companion than otherwise – the acquaintance with which confers a certain title of distinction upon the possessor” (9–10). Doctors believed that the gouty gentleman crowded his body with too much rich food and failed to eliminate it through appropriate exercise (Porter and Rousseau 142). Huntingdon's state is very much of a piece with this notion: stuffed to bursting with wine and excess, undisturbed by any labor except the labor of eating and drinking, his body begins to self-destruct and shuts itself down, just as the immobilized gouty gentleman's body does. Like the gouty gentleman, Huntingdon thus writes class on his body through his very incapacity, letting his rarefied bloodlines show through and marking his outsider status with reference to the marketplace.Footnote ¹⁷

But habitual drunkenness also undermines his gentlemanliness, even as it demonstrates his position through the swelling immobility it brings. The playful but irresponsible young lover turns into a brutal, boorish, besotted husband; drink makes him fat and grey, and then “sick and stupid” (291; ch. 31). His appetites coarsen. He indulges in gin, the most lower-class of drinks,Footnote ¹⁸ aligning himself with that other “leisured” class, the other site of gross corporeality, the unemployed poor.Footnote ¹⁹ In this way the control that Huntingdon necessarily cedes, in his quest for rule-free living and unchecked consumption, helps to bring about his downfall. And, even as it kills him, leisure demands more, creates an insatiable appetite: while Huntingdon labors to prove himself a gentleman beyond the bounds of middle-class rules, he must also continually consume, both to recreate the states of useless inebriety or useless recovery that mark him as gentlemanly, and to demonstrate his very mastery even of this state. It is for this reason that he has “an infernal fire in [his] veins, that all the waters of the ocean cannot quench” (265; ch. 30); for this reason that, even in the depths of his illness, he complains constantly of “cursed thirst” (433; ch. 47).

And even as he becomes his “own man” through drink, he unmans himself. Under the influence, he is far too weak to act; assaulted by the equally drunken Hattersley, “he laugh[s] and shriek[s] alarmingly” (291; ch. 31). The after-effects of drink further feminize him. He becomes peevish, petty, temperamental, cruel, a slave to his moods and passions. His “nerves [are] racked and torn to pieces” (266; ch. 30); “his vigour and vivacity quite departed,” “[h]e lies on the sofa nearly all day long,” “flushed and feverish, listless and languid” (237; ch. 25). His gentlemanly self-actualization through drink has turned him, in other words, into the archetypal Victorian fainting lady.

In the last stage of his drinking career, Huntingdon is completely debilitated. He falls victim to a dangerous fever and internal injury from a riding accident that “would have been but trifling to a man of temperate habits” (428; ch. 47). He is, at last, all body: only intermittently conscious, in terrible pain, he exists only as a corpus to be fed, cooled, medicated, and soothed. But, abandoned by friends, lovers, and all but the most vicious hired help, he has simultaneously lost any grip on rule and status. Helen returns to Arthur to nurse him, but she, of course, has no interest in reinstating him in his former sphere: she seeks, as he suspects, to reform him. She comes, she tells him, “to offer you that comfort and assistance your situation required; and . . . benefit your soul as well as your body, and awaken some sense of contrition” (430; ch. 47). In this endeavor she fails almost completely, despite Arthur's suffering and his manifest fear of death. To understand why Huntingdon chooses the death he dreads over sobriety, it is important to look closely at Helen's language and at her approach to the problem of drink. As Arthur seems to understand, Helen is now uninterested in temperance: instead, she seeks to feed him a new, radical anti-drink philosophy along with her cooling tonics, and in so doing, this middle-class avatar threatens to rob her husband of his remaining gentlemanly status.

As her retraining of her son makes clear, Helen has long been moving away from mere temperance and towards something more powerful. Her rhetoric and actions suggest that she finds a home in the teetotal movement, though the movement itself, like the striver philosophy of the text in general, is contemporaneous not with the novel's fictional timing but with Brontë's own day. The new anti-drinking activists of the late 1830s and the 1840s were of a very different breed than the moderate temperance workers. There were two key ideas at the center of the teetotal movement that separated it from its predecessor: the pledge of absolute abstention from alcohol,Footnote ²⁰ and the belief that any soul desiring salvation could be saved from the demon drink. Teetotalers believed that all drinking was dangerous; that alcohol was the scourge of society; that anyone could fall into drunkenness (though some were more likely to fall than others); and that drinkers at every level of the social ladder, from both genders, and at all stages of progress in drunkenness could be redeemed by signing the teetotalers' pledge. Teetotalers put their faith only in absolute abstinence – not only for reforming drunkards, but also (as in the case of little Arthur) for those who were not yet drunkards but who might have a propensity for drink, particularly through inheritance (Shiman 18). Adherence to the creed meant no wine at table; no port after dinner; no alcohol for medical purposes.

And the teetotalers, who felt that no soul was beyond recall, refused to limit themselves to working-class drinkers: in direct contradiction to the temperance ethos, they insisted that even aristocrats could be drunkards, and even aristocrats could be reformed. High-status adherents who signed the comprehensive or “long” pledge agreed to cease providing wine for their friends, to fire servants who drank, to boycott functions at which alcohol was served – in other words, to refuse the entire network of social relations on which the upper-class economy was built. The high-ranking Anglican clergymen and upscale patrons who supported the temperance movement had no interest in allying themselves with those who embraced confirmed drunkards and preached that lords and gentlemen could be drunkards, too, effectively refusing to see innate differences between people of different classes. Instead, nonconformist preachers and working-class speakers became the teetotalers' advocates.Footnote ²¹

The movement thus became a proving ground for ambitious but poverty-stricken men, offering a genuine means of social advancement to those who were charismatic, eloquent, and energetic in their exhortations to their peers to change their world by giving up the demon drink. Teetotalers were often highly political animals, savvy social reformers who understood the potential that such a morally inflected movement held for political change beyond the limits of its most obvious mission. Often allied with Chartists, anti-corn law activists, and other worker movements (Shiman 32), leaders were determined to forge bonds between the middle and working classes and, eventually, to replace the aristocracy and the system it still putatively ran with a revolutionary democracy. “The rise of teetotalism,” Harrison writes, “constitute[d] a coup by an élite of working men allied with radicals and nonconformists . . . [and] offered the attractions of a sudden and dramatic social transformation” (137–38). The novel's espousal of this radical movement is, in the context of its time, at least as shocking as its portrayal of the drunken gentleman. The most scandalous aspect of Brontë's work may well have been her embrace of such socially revisionary notions through the device of her dissection of the anatomy of gentlemanly drunkenness.

There are many evocations of the movement in Tenant: Helen's move from a belief in moderation to an ardent advocacy of abstinence; the behavior modification she uses on her son, lacing wine and spirits with tartar emetic to instill a hatred of drink in him; her pious sermons to bedbound Huntingdon, and, in particular, her insistence that reform and forgiveness are always within the grasp of those who truly repent, an assertion that is entirely of a piece with the Methodist-inflected democratic rhetoric of the teetotalers. When she finds, for instance, that her husband fears death, she keeps that specter before him, explaining calmly, “[i]f a consciousness of the uncertainty of life can dispose you to serious and useful thoughts, I would not deprive you of the benefit of such reflections, whether you do eventually recover or not” (434; ch. 47). When he asks, “Where's the use of a probationary existence, if a man may spend it as he pleases, just contrary to God's decrees, and then go to heaven with the best – if the vilest sinner may win the reward of the holiest saint, by merely repeating, ‘I repent’?” she insists that “sincere” penitence may yet open the pearly gates for him (450; ch. 49).

When Helen forces Huntingdon to sign a “written agreement” (431; ch. 47) ceding control of their son to her before she allows him to see the child, she creates no legally binding document, but she does evoke the teetotaler's pledge of abstinence. The pledge was a major document, in which the sinner promised to leave the drinking world entirely. The pledge was generally accompanied by a verbal confession of the signatory's drinking sins, and these often salacious stories, ending, of course, in miraculous reform, often formed the basis for teetotal lectures. Though these conversion narratives were secularized, they had the hallmarks of religious conversion; but they also bore the frisson of the forbidden, and the scandalous stories of drink and depravity that formed the core of the tales did no harm to a fledgling movement fishing for members (Harrison 131). And, of course, these stories of miraculous abstinence and hard-won reform were in themselves classed, marking the social rising of the transgressor even as they indicate his lower status as a subject of legitimate but nonetheless prurient scopophilia.

Helen's diary is itself very much of a piece with this style of confessional: she offers the licentious tale of the rich gentleman whose behavior cries out for reform. The errors of the drunkard are recounted in salacious detail, and conform exactly to the teetotaler narrative: the drinker's appetites increase with each taste, and abstinence is manifestly the only refuge possible. Through the device of the confession, Helen attempts to wrest control of the narrative from her husband; in returning to him, she seeks to cap off her story with an appropriate ending, and, thus, to rewrite him.

Ironically, her use of the teetotal narrative confirms the notion that Huntingdon's appetites are in his blood. Drawing on the notion of inherent tendencies towards drink, teetotalers contended that the drinker must abstain for life because every taste of alcohol is poison to him: he is constitutionally incapable of containing his appetites. But by invoking the language and the methods of the teetotaling crusader in her efforts to save her husband, Helen threatens to imbricate him in the quasi-democratic, unapologetically meritocratic philosophy that the teetotal movement embodies. By turning him into the scopophilic subject of the mixed-class teetotaler gaze, she attempts to make him part of a world in which social transformation is made possible through moral rectitude and communal dedication – a world in which the drunkard is reformed and “improved” by allowing others to feed him a diet of adherence and capitulation to the larger social good. Where the gentleman must drink to retain his difference from the crowding middle classes, the drinker, in the teetotal ethos, must renounce the crowd by renouncing drink. The narrative creates a new class of people, compounded from groups across the social spectrum, who opt out of the middle-class paradigm precisely by embracing it with unlimited ardor. It is, in effect, an uber-strivers' realm, the antithesis of everything that Huntingdon represents. His capitulation must necessarily mean his obliteration.

So Huntingdon opts out of the tale: he refuses to adhere to the reform narrative, even as he undergoes the trial-by-fire of his illness. “I can't repent,” he insists; “I only fear” (450; ch. 49). He declares, that is, that it is impossible for him to be saved. He turns to drink even when it is clearly lethal to him, as Helen recounts:

The fare that Huntingdon has turned to in order to re-make himself as a man is now entirely fatal to him: excess and drink, the crucial markers of his status, can no longer be assimilated by his body at all. He is progressively mortified, literally and figuratively, by the aliment that has constituted him and filled him and that has failed to find an outlet. Helen writes that a bleeding procedure leaves Huntingdon “more subdued and tranquil” (433; ch. 47), reinforcing the notion that the trouble lies in his very veins. Gentlemanliness becomes a state of atrophy: status is marked not by bloodlines, but by fatally thickened blood.

By feeding Arthur, over and over, the story of his potential reform and resurrection, Helen had hoped to move him from his abject position (evocative of the in-between of drunkenness) either into the realm of the living (the reformed drinker who saves his own life by abstaining) or of the dead (the penitent sinner who asks forgiveness of his Maker). Instead, refusing containment to the end, Huntingdon becomes, as Gilbert puts it, “a living corpse” (453; ch. 50), progressively deprived of movement and sensation, rotting from within. A more graphically abject creature cannot be imagined: he is literally the corpse that will not remove itself into death.Footnote ²² “Often,” Helen recounts, “he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate of his perishing clay – the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading his frame; the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and all the horrors of corruption” (450; ch. 49). For Helen, Huntingdon is literally that which she has cast off which yet fails to part from her, that which she rejects but which is still, as she herself says, “a part of [her]self” (268; ch. 30). And Huntingdon's abjection is a synechdochal evocation of the abjection of the gentleman of good blood vis-à-vis mid-nineteenth-century society: he is a creature of a past age that the present cannot seem to shake off, an embodiment of a system of position and rule that refuses to give up the ghost, so to speak, and make way for an order that values labor and merit above blood.

Helen's efforts instead nearly result in her own death, as Huntingdon seeks refuge from the horror that he sees waiting for him in the grave – erasure from the narrative – by clinging to Helen and, in effect, attempting to swallow her as the antidote to his fatal diet. “Helen, you must save me!” he implores, speaking not of his soul but of his body (446; ch. 49). His demands for her attention and care devour her, until she is, as Hattersley puts it, “worn to a shadow” (448; ch. 49). In Huntingdon's last days, Helen reports, he “clings to me . . . with a kind of childish desperation, as if I could save him from the fate he dreads” (450; ch. 49). Speaking of his impending Judgment Day, he laments, “I wish to God I could take you with me now! . . . you should plead for me” (451; ch. 49). By the time he finally dies, he has “dragged her with him nearly to the portals of the grave,” as Gilbert succinctly puts it (455; ch. 50). He hopes to save himself simply by swallowing that which is marked safe, but without digesting its safety himself, in the manner of the cannibalistic ideal of swallowing an opponent's strength with his flesh. But despite her inherited wealth, Helen – energetic, productive, responsible – is that which threatens to blot him out. She will not be absorbed into the idle gentlemanly body; and she turns to poison in his mouth, and his nutrient-free liquid diet embalms him alive. The only escape available to Huntingdon, a creature constitutionally unable to bring his appetites into conformity with the status quo and his mind into line below God, is the closure of the grave.

His death seems to signal the end of abjection infecting the text; and though she cannot bring her husband's story to the ending the teetotaler confession requires, Helen is able to haul the narrative back into line through other means, offering a vision of a rightly ordered society freed from the poisonous demands of excess. In her relationship with Gilbert Markham, she lives out the narrative of forgiveness, responsibility, and reformation. Here Helen puts Huntingdon's story to use just as the teetotalers did their members' testimonials: she first intrigues and titillates her suitor/reader (with her diary as with her person), and then changes him from a violent, careless, selfish young man into a responsible, relatively self-controlled adult lover through the device of the tale of licentious abandon and its consequences. The boy who sulks and seethes, who beats Mr. Lawrence over the head with his whip handle and makes himself a misery to all around him is replaced with the rational, open-hearted man who requires only truly love to render him complete. Similarly, the man “in a frenzy of ardour” (123; ch. 12), echoing both Huntingdon and Hargrave in his hungry pursuit of Helen, learns to bring his consumption under control through her program of self-denial. The gentleman is constituted here precisely through the regulation of his appetites.

In this way, Tenant enacts a radical social revision, suggesting that the leisured class is killing itself off with its very leisured status, and that in order to remain healthy, the body politic must excise this parasite, so that a figure more productively imbricated in society may take its place. Gilbert's status as a gentleman who is also a working farmer implies that his replacement of Huntingdon in Helen's affections – and, finally, in marriage – resuscitates gentlemanliness as a useful, socially redeemed state; his healthy appetites, predicated on productive activity, offer a palatable counterpoint to the stuffed but never sated gent. Gilbert, the reluctant farmer who nevertheless shoulders his responsibility and provides for his family, is redeemed, then rewarded for his hard work and ambition not only with her love but also with the riches that have come to her from her no-good husband and her gout-ridden uncle.

Though Gilbert is now, of course, a man of leisure, he is, unlike the previous owner of his money, able to use his time productively – in this case, by turning the story that the novel retails into a commodity to be consumed by his brother-in-law. And Gilbert's satisfaction with his lot hints at constitutional energies and internal resources that allow him to remain in the productive economy. The power of the teetotaler's cautionary confession is thus made abundantly evident: a yeoman farmer becomes a new-style meritocratic landed gentleman. The transubstantiation is startling in its ambition and in the possibility for the fundamental resetting of the social hierarchy that it portends. Brontë's text, then, succeeds in its radical discourse.

But the text's revisionary work is troubled by this pilgrim's very progress. It is worth noting that Gilbert, the useful, active farmer who shoulders his responsibilities despite his inclinations in other directions, neglects his work on the farm more and more as the narrative progresses. Helen is the catalyst for this: he leaves his fields to bring her a book in the midst of hay-making, then refuses to work at all when he mistakenly believes that Helen has duped him (“I had no interest in anything now,” he says [131; ch. 13], evoking Huntingdon). After he reads the diary and makes up with Helen, “[t]here was but little business done. . . . The farm was abandoned to the labourers, and the labourers were left to their own devices” (411–12; ch. 45). When he is parted from his beloved, he returns to work, and as the separation stretches between Gilbert and Helen after Huntingdon's death, he becomes more and more productive, as work once again becomes commonplace for him. But, of course, Gilbert's marriage to the heiress makes his labors obsolete: he removes himself from the realm of fecund productivity and “bequeath[s] the farm to Fergus” (490; ch. 53). A long way away from the “dusty, smoky, noisy, toiling, striving city” that his correspondent resides in (490; ch. 53), Gilbert has allowed the striver's age to pass him by: what he has worked for, it seems, is precisely the sort of idle gentlemanliness that he himself seemed at first glance to render obsolete.

In his framing letter, Gilbert describes how, ensconced in his study on a rainy day, he has “withdrawn [his] well-roasted feet from the hobs [and] wheeled round to the table” (34). Like Huntingdon before him, the once active Mr. Markham is no longer bounding over hedges and racing up hills; in fact, like sofa-bound Huntingdon, he seems incapable of getting out of his chair. The scene calls to mind the wheeled chairs that accommodated those suffering from attacks of gout, suggesting that the overstuffed gentlemanly body may be inevitably acquired by those who seek out its place, regardless of birth. Despite the middle-class insistence on the poisonous nature of the stuff that perpetually fills Huntingdon's glass, Gilbert's stilled and idle body in the wheeled chair denotes a powerful thirst, in this striver avatar, for class, that most intoxicating, most poisonous elixir.