Temperance and moral reform

Temperance and moral reform are recurring tests of agency in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: the novel contrasts sincere but fragile resolutions with entrenched dependence, and sets the work of care against the drinker’s resistance to change. Lord Lowborough repeatedly struggles to stop gambling and drinking; Arthur Huntingdon treats alcohol as an indispensable pleasure and later rejects Helen’s efforts to limit it, with catastrophic consequences. Helen’s contrasting success in making her son recoil from intoxicants further distinguishes protective moral education from mere prohibition.

Resolve and the Cycle of Relapse

Lord Lowborough’s gambling is described as a compulsion he neither welcomes nor can readily master. He repeatedly resolves to stop, then breaks his promises: a gain makes him hope for a larger one, while a loss persuades him to continue until he has recovered it. Each outcome supplies a new rationale for another attempt, so the imagined final wager continually recedes. His pattern makes self-reform more complicated than a single decision to behave better; the resolve is real, but the habit turns both success and failure into incentives to persist.

Lowborough does keep his oath to give up gambling, to the surprise of those around him, even as Grimsby tries to tempt him back. Yet abstaining from play does not make him free of destructive habits. He takes to drink, which he finds nearly as difficult to relinquish, and later secretly uses laudanum as well. His consumption is intermittent: he abstains one day and exceeds on another, repeating the uneven pattern associated with spirits. Reform in this instance is partial and vulnerable, not a clean passage from vice to lasting self-command.

Arthur Huntingdon’s Dependence and Helen’s Intervention

For Arthur Huntingdon, wine grows beyond an accessory to social pleasure into a source of pleasure in itself. Helen sees that in weakness he would turn it into medicine, support, comfort, recreation, and friend. Her efforts to prevent that dependence deepening express a sustained attempt to preserve him, but they meet a desire that increasingly resists her influence. His fretfulness and nervous irritability ease as his physical health improves, yet Helen observes that his appetite for wine has intensified; bodily recovery and moral reform do not proceed together.

After a prolonged absence, Arthur returns to a household where Helen has been nursing their ailing infant and enduring his complaints. She delays confronting him while he is tired from the journey, then waits another day when he still seems weary. At dinner, however, his pattern of consumption makes the problem unmistakable: after breakfasting at noon on soda-water and strong coffee, he has soda-water mixed with brandy at lunch, then criticizes the meal and demands a change of cook. Helen reminds him that the cook is the same one he had previously found satisfactory. The episode links his irritability to drinking while showing how his conduct displaces responsibility onto ordinary domestic life.

During his later illness, Helen tries to dilute his wine with water. Arthur treats her intervention as an intolerable insult and, on discovering that she has covertly weakened his pale port, throws the bottle out of the window. He orders the butler to bring the strongest wine in the cellar, drinks the bottle dry, and insists that he would have recovered sooner if Helen had let him have his way. Alarming symptoms follow and worsen. The episode turns a domestic attempt at restraint into an open confrontation: Helen understands the drink as a threat to his health, while Arthur experiences limits as an effort to control him.

Care, Treatment, and the Limits of Reform

The novel places Arthur’s bodily condition alongside competing explanations of it. Helen recognizes his nervous irritability as unlike his usual temperament and sees it as a symptom of a disordered frame, while also identifying wine as a source of escalating dependence. Her account does not treat his illness as proof that he has changed morally: his improving health can coincide with a stronger appetite for alcohol, and her strenuous care cannot compel him to accept restraint.

During a severe phase of his illness, a doctor orders Arthur to be bled; afterward he becomes more subdued and tranquil, and accepts Helen’s services with little speech or bitterness. The brief quiet marks a change in his condition and in the immediate atmosphere of care, but it does not establish lasting temperance. Later, a report describes the serious relapse as the result of his insistence on stimulating drink despite Helen’s remonstrances and attempts to dilute his wine. The recurrence makes the distinction clear: treatment and nursing may temporarily alter symptoms, but neither can substitute for the drinker’s sustained cooperation.

That relapse ends in irreversible physical damage. When Arthur reports that his acute pain has ceased, Helen fears that the apparent relief is not a good sign and sends for the doctor. The doctor tells him there is no hope; mortification has begun. His anguish and approaching death give bodily consequence to the earlier pattern of indulgence and failed restraint. The narrative does not present death as reform: Arthur reaches the end without the recovery Helen had labored to secure.

Moral Education and the Possibility of Change

Helen’s care for her son offers a contrasting, though carefully qualified, account of temperance. She says that she has nearly overcome the difficulty of breaking him of habits taught by his father: bad language seldom defiles his mouth, and she has given him an absolute disgust for intoxicating liquor. Because the child had been unusually fond of drink, she fears the consequences of that taste, remembering both her own father and Arthur. Her aim is prevention, shaped by direct knowledge of the damage adult drinking can do.

Her method is not simple abstinence imposed as a forbidden rule. Helen gives the boy as much wine as his father had allowed him, and as much as he wants, but secretly introduces a small quantity of tartar emetic into each glass. The mixture produces nausea and depression without outright sickness; after repeatedly associating wine with those unpleasant effects, the child grows weary of it. This episode makes her moral education practical and maternal, but also morally complex: the intended outcome is revulsion, achieved through concealed intervention rather than the child’s informed choice.

The contrast between mother and son, on one side, and Arthur, on the other, underscores the limits of persuasion once dependence has hardened into defiance. Helen can shape a child’s habits within the conditions of her care; she cannot make her husband accept a diluted glass, an argument, or an appeal to his own recovery. A later reflection on Lowborough recalls his resolution to come out from destructive company and behave as a man and a Christian, reinforced by the seriousness of Arthur’s final illness and death. The novel thus presents reform as possible but uneven: a vow may be kept in one sphere while another compulsion takes its place, and the consequences of refusing change can outlast every opportunity to begin again.