In Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildf Ell Hall

Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildf ell Hall LAURA C. BERRY If perversity v^ere not so often the defining mode in Bronte criticism, it might seem perverse to assert that Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are family plots, in fact, stories about custody. Literary criticism—not to mention, in the case of Wuthering Heights, Hollywood and a fiercely held popular opinion— has insisted on these novels as romantic fictions about the couple. And there is ample reason for critics to repeat an attention that the novels themselves would seem not only to invite but to demand. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall offers not just one couple in its effort to demonstrate the lurid brutalities of marriage, but pair after pair of ill-suited (we might as well say violently opposed) mates. In fact, the overdetermined quality of nuptial impossibility among these couples, and the determination witi\ which the novel nevertheless reproduces them, is suspicious. As for Wuthering Heights, the endurance of a single unkillable couple becomes a novelistic obsession similar to the endlessly repeated duos in Wildfell Hall. Not only are Cathy and Heathcliff unable to exit the narrative decently even in death, they are forced to endure the unimaginable horror of an interminable courtship carried on (and on) over supernatural terrain, and apparently reproduced with modifications in the various unions that the novel offers as distorted reflections of its original couple.' Perversely or not, I will be arguing that in Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights the conjugal is replaced by the custodial, and that marriage must make way for a decided emphasis on childhood. "Custody" is a holding place for two significant notions that the novel maintains together: incarceration and protective guardianship. The conjunction between bonds and bondage is the means through which these fictions grapple with domestic enclosure. Of course, domesticity is a concern by no means confined to the novel in the 1830s and 40s. As critics have exhaustively shown, the domestic appears in writ- ing as diverse as abolitionist tracts and cookery books. Because domesticity is so widely influential in this period, this essay examines the relationship between imprisonment and caretaking in the debates over the Infant Custody Bill of 1839, as well as in the fictions of the Brontes. "Custody" reshapes not only the idea of home but of self, in both legislative discourse and fictional narrative. In the Victorian period, the individual in the eyes and statutes of domestic law became a more fully articulate and articulated subject. The individual could also be understood as a child. The legal status of the child shifted from being disposed as "property" to being scrutinized as a "person." Just as the child first began to be The work of these two Bronte sisters in relation to one another has been usefully discussed by several critics. Of spedal note is Gordon's 1984 essay. See also Jacobs. An interesting essay that reads Anne Bronte's novel in relation to George Eliot, especially her story, 'J^uiet's Repentance," is that by Kunert. LAURA C BERRY I ANNE AND EMILY BRONTfi'S PARENTAL CUSTODIANS 33 understood as a legal subject with rights and needs separate from claims of property, he or she was also defined as dependent. The idea of the individual child subject was imagined in legal discourse at the same time as—and in relation to— the idea of the socially-dependent "client," who would eventually dominate domestic law. Debates over "mother right" in Parliament redefine motherhood and family. In sentimentalizing motherhood, and thereby bolstering domesticity as a category both spatially and ideologically separate from the world of politics and labor, the custody debates exchange a "legal" and implicitly male model for selfhood—a man whose authority rests in status and property—for a "feeling" child whose significance lies in the fact that he or she is not fully independent of the social structures that surround him or her. The custody debates are not about women, then, or even about mothers; in- stead they serve to define self in relation to social structures. In the course of the nineteenth century, and particularly in the development of custody law, family relations were defined sentimentally, and women's role in the family shifted from an all-important emphasis on wifedom and its financial implications to a crucial consideration for the sentimental tentacles of motherhood. It is the ten- tacular relations of the family, rather than its sentimental lures, that will become the basis for the fictions of family, and particularly the necessity of representing childhood, in Emily and Anne Bronte's novels. Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall define the paradigmatic subject not as a woman but as a child, especially one in need of training. Their subject is neither gender nor coupling; rather, these Bronte novels are concerned, like the parliamentary testimony we will scrutinize, with reimagining self. If the child of the custody debates makes possible a new era of social intervention into the middle-class family, the Bronte child offers a self who—unlike the fictions of, for example, Charles Dickens— defies social intervention. The custodial struggles of these novels produce a subject who seeks to defeat, or at least to evade, the violence and confinement that these authors perspicaciously understand as necessary to domestic life. Of Tender Years Before the passage of the Custody of Infants Act in 1839, it was the existence and disposition of a minor's estate that alone made the concern of the law possible. When parents separated or, much more rarely, divorced, the father's right to custody of his progeny was largely unquestioned and legally absolute. Adjudicating a well-known case in 1827, Lord Eldon cited precedent for the theory that "this Court has not the means of acting, except where it has property to act upon" (qtd. in Forsyth 11). It was not legally impossible for the Court of Chancery to act in parens patriae, but it was highly improbable. Paternal custody right was maintained by a reluctance to interfere with the private matters of the family, which were thought best governed by the father. Custody law and precedent historically defined a child's relationship to his family as financial. The mother's role was made secondary, if not altogether ig- nored. In 1850 the English barrister William Forsyth looked back on the earlier era with dismay: 34 NOVEL I FALL 1996 The general rule of law in this country is, that ihe legal power over infant children belongs to the father, and that during his life the mother has none. In the words of Blackstone, "a mother, as such, is entitled to no power, hut only to reverence arid respect." ... [T]he father has, at common law, a right to exclusive custody of his child even at an age when it still requires nourishment from its mother's breast. (11-12) Custody right in pre-industrial England supports the primacy of property and status in the legal relations of the family, and the enduring importance of primo- geniture. The child is in effect a form of property and so, like all other wealth in the marriage, belongs more or less exclusively to a husband. For the most part, of course, the law treated all persons only in relation to property. But in the judicial code and in legal practice, the father, as the marker for property and status, was understood to be the paradigmatic individual, a category emphatically understood to be a social one. In the course of the nineteenth century the social representation of the family was retooled, and the father's absolute right over his offspring, not surprisingly, received critical comment. The family was transformed from an analog for rigid patriarchal control to a "correlative figure of parliamentary democracy" (Donzelot 4).^ In this context the state of custody law began to seem troubling as an unchallenged legal fact. In a characteristic statement of mid-century sensibil- ity, Forsyth "admits" in A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Custody oflrifants that: the application of this law which enforces with such jealous care the rights of the father, has often been extremely harsh. He might be a man of the most immoral character, and his conduct towards the mother such as to render it impossible for her, without all sacrifice of dignity and self-respect, to live with him; and yet, provided only that he was cautious enough not to bring his children into actual con- tact with pollution ...he had the entire control over and disposition of them, and might embitter the life of the mother by depriving her of the society of her offspring. And what untold suffering might she not be called upon to endure, in the mental struggle between the affection which prompted her to submit to insult and injury for their sake, and the desire to escape from such usage by abandoning her home. (12-13) Family law in the early part of the nineteenth century was subject to considerable criticism because the law did not accurately reflect rising public sentiment about the family, particularly the role of the mother. But even though the ideological gap between a portrait of sentimental motherhood and the law of custody only widened, a mother's right to custody of her child was not established for many decades. The 1839 Custody of Infants Act, about which I will mostly be speaking, allowed a wife who was separated from her husband to petition the court and, provided she was of good character, to gain access to her young children and, potentially (although it was unlikely).

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