The Tenant of Wildfell Hall nor even vitality, famously exhibited by Heathcliff, and has nothing of the fundamental goodness that finally redeemed Rochester. All Huntingdon's vices come from his being spoilt as a child. Analyzing the lack of sense and reason amongst males as the consequence of value-system based on the worship of machismo, Anne depicts the pathetic end of her main hero, brought on by his drinking habits. Totally dependent on his estranged wife in his final illness, Arthur Huntingdon ultimately loses all his personality. According to Caroline Franklin, Anne Brontë uses the Byronic paradigm "not to titillate, but to shock" – her protest
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas." In his essay on Emily Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne briefly mentioned "The Tenant" in the context of Branwell's decline as a novel "which deserves perhaps a little more notice and recognition than it has ever received" and added that "as a study of utterly flaccid and invertebrate immorality it bears signs of more faithful transcription from life than anything in "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights"." Margaret Oliphant believed that Anne "would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but