“You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.”
The novel begins by immediately informing the reader that this is to be a flashback story. There is an interesting kind of literary fake-out going on here as this opening line exists independently of any context. It just seems like any other first-person opening line. Except that the second line directly addresses the reader in the second-person: “My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer.” Only when the end of Chapter One is reached and the narration ends with the epistolary sign-off,
“Yours immutably,
Gilbert Markham”
Does it become completely clear that what we have been reading is not simple narration, but a letter. Of course, this novel was published at a time when first-person novels were almost exclusively written in epistolary form so it is likely a reader at the time of publication would not have been subject to the fake-out. For the modern reader, however, especially one unfamiliar with the epistolary form, the revelation that they have been reading a letter might well come as a surprise.
“It is an act of very great impertinence, sir; and therefore I beg you will ask nothing about it, for your curiosity will not be gratified.”
Gilbert, the letter writer, is describing here a memory of coming across a “portrait of a gentleman in the full prime of youthful manhood” which had been facing the wall, hidden behind a different painting. The painting will eventually prove to play a significant part in the narrative, but this response by Helen (Mrs. Graham at the time) is of significance to the story’s overall handling of themes related to gender expectation, marriage expectations and the secrets and deceptions at play behind the scenes.
I have had eight weeks’ experience of matrimony. And do I regret the step I have taken? No, though I must confess, in my secret heart, that Arthur is not what I thought him at first, and if I had known him in the beginning as thoroughly as I do now, I probably never should have loved him, and if I loved him first, and then made the discovery, I fear I should have thought it my duty not to have married him.
By this point, Mrs. Helen Graham has become Mrs. Arthur Huntingdon. As one might well expect, the novel is about the necessities of marriage for women at the time, but unlike the novels of Jane Austen, Helen’s marriage are not of the happily-ever-after-‘cause-I-met-my-soul-mate type. In fact, the marriage to Arthur is her first: one of the secrets and deceptions driving the narrative is Helen’s masquerade early on as the widowed “Mrs. Graham.” The fact is that there was no Mr. Graham. Until the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, the very concept of a wife getting a divorce from a husband (no matter how terrible a person) was essentially nil, leaving her with just two options: kill him or change him. Helen, being devout to the point of absurdity, chooses the latter.
The first of these communications brought intelligence of a serious relapse in Mr. Huntingdon’s illness, entirely the result of his own infatuation in persisting in the indulgence of his appetite for stimulating drink. In vain had she remonstrated, in vain she had mingled his wine with water: her arguments and entreaties were a nuisance, her interference was an insult so intolerable that, at length, on finding she had covertly diluted the pale port that was brought him, he threw the bottle out of the window, swearing he would not be cheated like a baby.
That Arthur is not what Helen thought when she married him is revealed to be caused by that most dependable of failures among men then…and now: addiction. Arthur is a drunk or, as in the parlance of the modern world, Arthur suffers from that disease which causes him to wake up in strange places without knowing how he got there. Arthur is a drunk. And Helen can do nothing to “cure” his disease or even treat drunkenness since AA would not be founded for another century. And so she must suffer throughout the entirety of the 1820's while trying to protect little Arthur Jr. all the wife fending off advances from Mr. Hargrave about whom she cares nothing as well as Gilbert whom she actually loves, but cannot be with because the laws of the land insist she must stay with her useless, drunken, profoundly disappointing choice in a husband. So while this is a novel about a single man possessing wealth in need of a wife, Jane Austen it is not.
