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although the memory of his father’s abuse makes him hesitant to acknowledge the dog’s
owner. Russell Poole notes the parallels between Sancho here and Snap in Agnes Grey,
commenting that “As in Agnes Grey, a dog symbolizes a character's unspoken needs.” 22
Arthur’s inability to express his feelings about his recent liberation from Grassdale
pervades the opening description of him in “An Interview,” and that incapacity
desperately manifests itself in Arthur’s attempt to reach the dog.
The text animalizes and thereby de-vocabularizes young Arthur from the moment
he is introduced, symbolically representing the silencing of Arthur’s opinions by Helen.
The garden from which Arthur eventually emerges has grown wild, “having been left so
many years, untilled and untrimmed, abandoned to the weeds and the grass, to the frost
and the wind, the rain and the drought.” 23 As Gilbert approaches this feral enclosure, he
sees hands and then a head surmount the wall as Arthur, like a monkey, clambers to the
top. The first appellation given to Arthur as a complete being is “little creature,” and
rather than allowing him words, Anne has him simply “call aloud” 24 to the dog, a phrase
that could imply any sort of loud vocal utterance. The text finally identifies him as “the
child” but continues to deny him verbal abilities, most notably when he falls from the
wall and engages in “a silent struggle” followed by “a piercing shriek” 25 rather than
yelling for help. His mother’s arrival silences even these modest attempts at
communication, cutting off any hope he had of establishing a relationship with the first
person he’s seen outside his mother, nursemaid, and possibly uncle.
Arthur’s struggle with communication is juxtaposed in “An Interview” with his
struggle with his longing for the home he recently left. Arthur is drawn only to that
which brings back happy memories of home, i.e., the dog, and completely ignores
Gilbert, a male figure close enough in age and build to Huntingdon to remind Arthur of
his abusive father. As Arthur begins to climb the garden wall, Gilbert remarks that
Arthur’s “eyes did not notice me, but sparkled with glee on beholding Sancho.” 26 He
calls out to the dog, an action symbolic of his wish to be brought back to the only place
he has ever called home. When the dog refuses him, he makes “up his mind, like
Mahomet, to go to the mountain since the mountain would not come to him” and hops the
wall in an attempt to reach the dog. Unable to understand why he had to leave his home,
Arthur feels trapped, as his mountain, his former home, will not come to him. In
desperation he attempts to go to the dog, who serves as a reminder of Grassdale and the
closest he has come to home since arriving at Wildfell Hall. When he is attacked by a
tree branch in the course of his attempt, Gilbert runs to keep him from falling, and,
unable to comfort Arthur on his own, he calls Sancho to “pacify him.” 27 Here Arthur
begins to “smile through his tears” as he finally has reached the perceived emissary of his
lost home, but his mother’s interference tears him away from the animal under the
assumption that it and its owner are harming him. Once again, Arthur cannot understand
being taken away by his mother from a situation he identifies with home.
22 Russell Poole, “Reformation and Cultural Reproduction in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,”
Studies in English Literature , 1500-1900 33.4 (Fall 1993): 860.
23 Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 1996): 23.
24 Ibid., 24.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.