A Logos Masquerade: The Unity of Language and Woman’s Body in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

Abstract Although contemporary criticism tends to steer away from popular Lacanian frameworks, I find in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) a range of ideas that, if elucidated by the less popular theory of the masquerade, are useful to understand for our appreciation of women writers’ struggle to bridge the gap between language and the body. I argue that Helen masquerades in language to show man that the power of the phallus is a mere mask of language. In her masquerade, she employs language to subvert, in Lacanian nomenclature, the ‘name of the father’ and to resist the overarching constitution of ‘the big other’ before unmasking the ‘phallus’ through her body and the emancipatory language of her diary. Helen somatizes her words by enacting them, thus incarnating ‘the logos’ in her body through various acts of defiance and emancipation.