Reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – when do you quit?

I’m more than 200 pages into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and once again, my husband is urging me to quit reading it. He asked me to stop reading it when I told him it was about a woman married to a bad husband and but I’ve now met the husband and see that it was quite obvious from the outset, even to the heroine, that her husband was never, ever going to be a good husband. My husband’s survival instincts must have kicked in because without sleep, I’m a mean, mean wife, and he probably didn’t want to be collateral damage in case I get too involved in or too annoyed with the story.

It’s not that I don’t get absorbed in the book when I do pick it up but I’m finding myself annoyed with the heroine, Helen. I thought she was rather dumb to marry Arthur Huntingdon in the first place. It’s one thing to have a girlish crush on a ne’er do well but quite another to marry one. Even before he proposes to her, Helen is not blind to his faults although she naively thinks she can reform him and in fact her love has a bit of a missionary zeal to it. While Arthur courts her, he enjoys thwarting her desires, disregarding her feelings, and openly flirting with other women in front of her. His friends are not nice or pleasant people, and he gossips about his friends with her, never realizing that the behavior he boasts about with regard to his friends shows him in a terrible light (he eggs on an alcoholic friend to drink) – and she recognizes his terrible behavior and his failure to understand it! Even the servants try to tell her he’s not husband material while a friend expresses shock that Helen has accepted him because she didn’t think he would be someone Helen could respect. Helen is not blind to Arthur’s faults, and there is no outside reason for her to marry him quickly despite her own misgivings because she has a loving family with adequate financial means, but she rushes into marriage with him anyway armed with the belief that she will improve him. He’s not a villain so far, just a bit selfish, just a bit childish, a bit of a garden variety jerk and layabout, and obviously not someone who is going to take care with her feelings or make her happy. She is so frustrating as a heroine.

Jane Eyre had so much more pluck.

I suppose it does raise the question of to what extent do you forgive a loved one’s faults and keep one’s faith that the loved one will do better. Unfortunately, we don’t really see any of Arthur’s good traits to help understand Helen’s blind belief that he will become a better person.  I can’t recall anything good about Arthur except that he’s lively, likes jokes – even if his jokes aren’t always nice – and that he’s a better conversationalist than the two suitors immediately around her.

How awful for Victorian women to have such a circumscribed social circle. Thank goodness for the women’s movement. Modern women can go to college, have careers, live on their own, and don’t need to marry one of the boys they meet in high school – or bachelors who’ve decided they finally want a pet for a wife.

The only saving grace is that I know Helen leaves him – in fact, tries to vanish from Arthur’s life – or else there would be no story, but I still can’t tell how terrible his behavior has to be before she takes the drastic steps she does to spirit her son away. I can appreciate how this story must have been shocking at the time with respect to women’s options when faced with a bad marriage, but I’m finding it hard to summon up much sympathy for Helen. I liked the book better when it was told through Gilbert’s POV.

I don’t know whether to plod on through the bad marriage or pick something else up. I admit to looking at other books even as I read this one. What makes you decide to trudge on with a frustrating book in the hope that it gets better or drop it in favor of something else?