SOURCE: “The Other Case: Gender and Narration in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor.” In Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4, Fall, 1994, pp. 323-45.

[In the following essay, Federico discusses Brontë's use of a male narrator in The Professor.]

Male novelists who use female narrators have been praised for their insights into “feminine psychology,” yet we seldom expect women writers to represent masculinity from a male point of view. In her recent work on feminism and narratology, Susan Lanser considers “the social properties and political implications of narrative voice,” claiming that “female voice”—the grammatical gender of the narrator—“is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practice” (4-5). This tension is conspicuous in novels published in the nineteenth century: a strict literary double-standard reflects a cultural double-standard that devalues feminine discourse in the public sphere. Like everything else, narrative voice corresponds to the cultural needs of Victorian society, and so an age comparatively rich in literary heroines (and in women writers) still finds the masculine voice more representative, and, supposedly, more rational, more “objective.” Because narrative voice carries the burdens of Victorian gender polarization—in its representation of male or female language and the expectations it raises about masculine or feminine plots¹—grammatical gender in a Victorian novel is as ideologically constructed as the gendered body inhabited by the author.

If narrative voice is a site of ideological tension, it is even more difficult to construe when a male voice is adapted self-consciously by women writers who call themselves “Currer Bell” or “George Eliot.” Indeed, because narrative authority conforms to rather than challenges “hierarchical, patriarchal norms” (Cohan & Shires 146) we can gain insight into the ways women who use male narrators understand gender relations, and how they reproduce masculinity—and with it, dominant discourse—in the choice of male language, preoccupations, and pursuits.

In her first novel, The Professor, Charlotte Brontë uses a first-person male narrator, and, as I will discuss, critics have tended to see this as both an artistic error and an elision of her feminist voice. But whether she takes a male or female narrator, Brontë is no less intent on examining the encoding of gender in nineteenth-century discourse. Specifically, the male voice provides an opening to confront a central issue for Brontë—power—which is different from her explorations of powerlessness in her later heroine-centered novels. In The Professor, she is learning what it is to have the power of authorship, and therefore it is consistent that she should go inside the system to attempt to represent the source of that power.²

Many psychoanalytic approaches to The Professor accept the “feminization” of the male narrator as the woman writer's personal experience of subordination translated into a pseudo-male voice. Though this helps in understanding biographical issues and the so-called “female imagination,” such readings tend to overlook how the appropriation of the male voice may challenge a tradition of androcentric narrative and Victorian patriarchal hegemony. As Terry Eagleton explains, one interpretation of feminism “is not just that women should have equality of power and status with men; it is a questioning of all such power and status. It is not just that the world will be better off with more female participation in it; it is that without the ‘feminization’ of human history, the world is unlikely to survive” (150). Brontë engages this concern by using an intrinsically authoritative male voice to tell a story that is not about a heroine's traditional growth into power, but instead authorizes a masculine growth out of power by asserting the need to temper male authority with “feminine” social virtues, usefully defined by Susan Morgan as “gentleness, flexibility, openness to others, friendship, and love” (19). At the same time, however, Brontë describes the practical and psychological obstacles to this “feminization” for men who are subject to ideological constraints, particularly the insistence on sexual difference. For as Mary Poovey has persuasively argued, “[M]en were too thoroughly ensnared in the contradictions that characterized this ideology to be charged with being simple oppressors” (22). William Crimsworth, the hero-narrator of The Professor, represents a view of masculinity that differs entirely from Brontë's later portraits of attractive and powerful men who threaten the heroine's autonomy. In her first novel, Brontë attempts to be the autobiographical male, to imagine what he imagines, even to have a male body³—in other words, to treat the burdens of sex from the male point of view, and thereby explore the social consequences of her culture's constructions of gender.

Critics tend to speak summarily about The Professor, written in 1846 and published posthumously in 1857. It is “a rehearsal for Villette” (Lane vii) or an early “failed” attempt to create a heroine like Jane Eyre (Basch 68-9). In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter mentions The Professor only briefly as an example of how “women writers internalized the values of their society” (136-7). Even critics who turn their full attention to the novel, such as Helene Moglen and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, are conscious of a tendency to make excuses for its flaws. Moglen sees Brontë's choice of a male narrator as evidence that she is still “bound to the ambivalent attitudes of adolescence,” unable to associate a female voice with authority; Crimsworth's voice is the novel's most “crucial problem” (86-8). In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar concede that to discuss the novel as they have done “in terms merely of roles and repressions is … to trivialize the young novelist's achievement in her first full-length book” (335). Their description of The Professor as an extension of Brontë's “exotic ‘male’” Angrian tales full of “obsessive and involuntary” characterizations (313-15), and as a “pseudo-masculine Bildungsroman,” “literary male-impersonation,” and “male mimicry” (318-19) suggest that the novel's difficulties or flaws are linked to Brontë's handling of gender, especially the use of a male narrator. Instead of dismissing the narrator as a clumsy mistake by a young writer, Gilbert and Gubar at least try to make sense of the masculine voice, explaining that “by pretending to be a man, [the woman writer] can see herself as the crucial and powerful Other sees her” (317). To put it differently, by pretending to be male, Brontë can better analyze what really concerns her: being female.

Gilbert and Gubar make a similar argument about the male narrator in George Eliot's novella, The Lifted Veil (1859), a text that, like The Professor, has been either ignored or dismissed as an unsuccessful attempt by a relatively inexperienced writer of fiction.⁴ Claiming Eliot's debt to Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Gilbert and Gubar see The Lifted Veil as a dramatization of Eliot's “internalization of patriarchal culture's definition of the woman as ‘other’” (466). The clairvoyant male narrator, Latimer, who finds women both fascinating and repulsive, is an expression of Eliot's divided consciousness and represents her attempt to survive “in a male-dominated society by defining herself as the Other” (476). “Like Charlotte Brontë's early male persona … Latimer reflects his author's sense of her own peculiarity” (447). In both The Professor and The Lifted Veil, then, the woman writer with the masculine pseudonym engages her own status as female Other by assuming the voice, the authority, and the privileged position of the male subject. In this interpretation, Brontë and Eliot are not concerned with the experience of the narrator as a man or the representation of masculinity; authorial voice is still tied to female “schizophrenia,” a “dis-ease with authority,” self-hatred, and internalization (Gilbert and Gubar 444-5, 449).

Such readings are useful in their focus on the whole problem of “otherness” for Victorian women writers. But to claim that a woman chooses a male voice in order to work out her ambivalence about being female narrows the ideological implications of otherness, as well as the revisionist possibilities of these texts. Indeed, the resonance of “otherness” in these interpretations, with its suggestions of psychological oppression, indicates the problem inherent in women's writing, so that female subjectivity and feminist discourse is necessarily undermined by the constraints of man-made language.

The fact that the Brontës' books were called “masculine” by contemporary reviewers and George Eliot's quasi-dramatized narrators arrogate masculine authority⁵ suggests how well the language and voice of the male subject can serve the cause of sexual equality. “In order to be a complete individual, on an equality with man, woman must have access to the masculine world as does the male to the feminine world, she must have access to the other” (de Beauvoir 761). For Brontë and Eliot, as for many Victorian women, such access was not always possible. Brontë admitted as much in a letter to James Taylor written in 1849: “In delineating male characters, I labour under disadvantages; intuition and theory will not adequately supply the place of observation and experience. When I write about women, I am sure of my ground—in the other case I am not so sure” (Shorter 30). For Brontë, men occupy a world that is closed to her observation; masculine psychology and motivation are mysterious, impenetrable. He is truly “the other case.” Yet if one accepts Carolyn Heilbrun's claim that “No woman writer struggled as [Brontë] struggled against the judgments of sexual polarization” (78), The Professor may be read as Brontë's earliest effort to confront the ideology of separate spheres. To tell a man's story is to insist on access, to insist on her complete individuality as a person and as an artist. Indeed, Brontë's interest in socialized gender roles, for boys in particular, is evident in a letter written to Miss Wooler just a year before she began The Professor:

You ask me if I do not think men are strange beings. I do, indeed—I have often thought so; and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not sufficiently guarded from temptations. Girls are protected as if they were very frail and silly indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world as if they, of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray.

(Shorter 315)

By using the voice of one of these “strange beings” in The Professor, Brontë examines with a mixture of irony and compassion the moral and emotional immunity built into Victorian constructions of masculinity. As “a tale of socialisation[,] of becoming masculine” (Boumelha 47), The Professor is attentive to the costs of being indoctrinated into patriarchy, and of naturalizing characteristics Victorian society admired in men, such as fixity, dominance, exclusion, competition, and stoicism.

The voice of William Crimsworth, far from sounding “curiously androgynous” (Gilbert & Gubar 319), is aggressively masculine throughout his narrative, locked into a socially sanctioned tone of superiority. There is no feminine apologizing, no womanly code of docility. His voice approximates the literary qualities assigned to men, which Showalter has identified as “power, breadth, distinctness, clarity, learning … shrewdness, knowledge of life, and humor,” along with “masculine faults,” such as “coarseness and passion” (“Double Standard” 340). In other words, Brontë, who aspires to professional status as a novelist, is writing as a professional—that is, as a man. Although Crimsworth tells the reader “I always speak quietly,” and he is an idealistic young man, his language has a feel of license which for Brontë probably defined male discourse: “to scout myself a privileged prig” (77), or “‘Stuff! I have cut them’” (41). If the voice comes across as false machismo, it may be because Brontë felt permitted to be extreme. Crimsworth has a man's right to say what he wants, for the basis of his character is his relative power and his uneasy participation in various systems of oppression. Despite his physical weaknesses (he is near-sighted, and describes himself as thin and slight) and his temporary status as a dependent, Crimsworth's voice resonates with confidence. As it should. Simone de Beauvoir has claimed that “One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior. … The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women” (xxviii). It is precisely this assumption of male power that Brontë seems to question. For Crimsworth does feel a demigod compared with women. He is not one of Brontë's feminine heroes, a man who “must learn how it feels to be helpless and to be forced unwillingly into dependency” (Showalter, Literature 152). For one thing, he has an Eton education.⁶ He also has a choice of professions, and obtains some influential male friends—Hunsden, Brown, and Vandenhutten—who write letters of recommendation and advise him about his investments. The material conditions of his life are not unbearable, and unlike the heroine of Villette in a similar situation he can at least walk down the streets without being harassed.⁷ If gender in the novel is a semantic symbol denoting power, as Moglen suggests (89), Crimsworth's masculinity automatically confers social and psychological advantages over, for example, Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe. He does possess, at least to some degree, four qualities which define power in Victorian society: education, money, mobility, and autonomy (Newton 7).

Nevertheless, Brontë begins The Professor with Crimsworth as a victim of male exploitation: his wealthy maternal uncles had refused to aid Crimsworth's dying mother, and for this (after accepting the ten years at Eton), Crimsworth denies any future aid. He is then pitted against the tyranny of his elder brother, Edward, who employs him as a clerk in his mill. He resents being treated as an inferior by other men (“I hate to be condescended to” [19]), and loathes being his brother's “slave”—a word Brontë applies almost obsessively to his situation in the first five chapters of the novel. Again, one is reminded of Brontë's heroines—particularly Jane and Lucy—when they suffer similar privations; although Jane longs for a new servitude, for example, the language of Brontë's heroine is nothing compared to the fierce resentment of her hero. According to Susanne Kappeler, “The status of the slave … is not in itself objectionable or dehumanizing, it is only so in the context of a male being held a slave, that is to say, held like a woman” (154). Crimsworth has been thoroughly emasculated, and Brontë understands this. By allowing himself to be treated as a slave, “kept down like some desolate tutor or governess” (17), he is obeying a feminine code of passivity which is mocked by his acquaintance Yorke Hunsden, who further insults his masculinity by telling him the only way he'll get ahead in the world is through a woman's agency: “your only chance of getting a competency lies in marrying a rich widow, or running away with an heiress” (31). Yet the apparent extremity of his situation does not approximate that of a governess, “disconnected, poor, and plain” (Jane Eyre 190), as much as it does that of any middle-class woman, who must rely on the charity of those in power for security.⁸ But Crimsworth's position fails to call out the reader's sympathy because it is described in the self-satisfied tones of masculine authority; his superior attitude, as a man and an aristocrat, only invites us to objectify the desolate governess as the lowest of the low. The fact that the hero has been a victim of male oppression (his brother even whips him) does not quicken his sympathies for the oppressed; he seeks to exert his prerogative and find someone—and why not a woman?—to exploit in return. If he cannot do this materially, he will do it verbally in his narrative by, for example, privately abusing “‘That slut of a servant’” who neglects to light his grate (24). Crimsworth is disinherited and strange-looking, and he is brought low; obviously he is an example, along with Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, of Brontë's misunderstood misfits. But the voice of this novel is never really conscious of being perceived as less than fully human, which is the female experience of otherness; he always maintains the privilege of the masculine subject. Even after Brontë drops the artificial, epistolary opening with its male interlocutor, one has the feeling throughout the novel that the narratee is also male.⁹ The absence of feminine consciousness contributes to this, of course, but there is also the narrator's complete failure of imagination when it comes to female experience, and his persistent distancing from and objectification of women.

For example, in the blighted industrial town where he goes to work “with other slaves” (31), Crimsworth's tendency is to view the feminine element with aloofness. He would deem it “like a night-mare” to marry one of his six cousins, and especially abhors “the large and well-modelled statue, Sarah.” The “young, tall, and well-shaped” (7) wife of his rich brother is dismissed as childish, and the other “tall, well-made, full-formed, dashingly dressed” young ladies (sexually mature women clearly make him uncomfortable) are totally uninteresting: “I considered them only as something to be glanced at from a distance; their dresses and faces were often pleasing enough to the eye: but I could not understand their conversation … When I caught snatches of what they said, I could never make much of it” (181). Brontë did not approve of the accepted standards of female attractiveness—tall and full-figured, vain, coquettish—any more than she approved of the social ideal of masculinity. But she is even-handed enough to give the lie to Crimsworth's attitude of superiority. Yorke Hunsden tells the hero that it is his own fault if women do not find him interesting, for he is too narrow-minded to find them interesting: a man who only perceives otherness is deprived of the pleasures of equality. “There are sensible as well as handsome women … women it is worth a man's while to talk with, and with whom I can talk with pleasure,” says Hunsden (181). Instead, Crimsworth is drawn to the portrait of his dead mother, whom he resembles: he has her aristocratic features, such as the “true and tender feeling” expressed in her face (8). Every man Crimsworth knows, however, treats this susceptibility to emotion as a defect (even though most of the time they discover it by examining his physiognomy, rather than in any emotional words on his part), thereby applying pressure on Crimsworth to conform to a strict gender role. After ten years at Eton, it can be supposed that Crimsworth made only one friend, and this turns out to be a “sarcastic … cold-blooded” man who could acceptably converse about the masters, but received Crimsworth's occasional allusions to beauty or sentiment with “sardonic coldness” (1). Hunsden judges Crimsworth's features as too like his mother's, saying “There's too much of the sen-si-tive” (19). And later, M. Pelet bluntly tells Crimsworth the “weak point” in his character is “the sentimental” (79). These indictments of male feeling or “weakness” work effectively to construct a masculine ideal that is stoic, shrewd, and masterful. The voice of The Professor is just such a man; that he is imbued with Charlotte Brontë's Romanticism does not really dilute her critique of sexual polarization. The “bull-like,” aggressive Edward Crimsworth is a melodramatic villain, but he is also the cultural ideal of manliness, “fine-looking,” “well-made,” “of athletic proportions,” a man with “business-like habits” (5). Brontë clearly calculates the emotional costs of a repressed sensibility in men: Edward mistreats his horse, is cruel to his brother, and eventually abuses his wife. But that he is thoroughly masculine is never questioned.

For his patient endurance of injustice, Crimsworth is labeled “‘a fossil,’” “‘an automaton,’” “‘an essential sap, and in no shape the man for my money’” (29) by the feminine-looking Hunsden. Brontë's loose, cynical tone describes masculine banter affecting to disguise care and compassion with sarcasm and insults. The masculine expression of emotion is couched in terms of perverse indifference—for example, Hunsden's sneering generosity and Crimsworth's constant refusal to express his gratitude. At one point, after Hunsden meets Crimsworth’s future wife, Frances, the two men grapple on the street:

No sooner than we got into the street than Hunsden collared me. … [H]e swayed me to and fro; so I grappled him round the waist. It was dark; the street lonely and lampless. We had then a tug for it; and after we had both rolled on the pavement, and with difficulty picked ourselves up, we agreed to walk on more soberly.

(215)

What seems like antagonism is more like a male version of an embrace, and points to the cultural prohibitions placed on expressions of affection between men.¹⁰ The “feminine” qualities of solicitude and compassion, which he identifies with his mother's portrait, are driven underground by other men in the novel who are equally bound by ideological constraints. The hero's “feminization” is constantly embattled and subdued, despite his half-suppressed longing for love or the confession that, “I am my mother's son, but not my uncles' nephew” (42).

Crimsworth's voyage to Belgium initiates a psychological quest for the “mother's son,” and, significantly, commences a conventional (feminine) love and marriage plot, as the hero seeks “the mother who looms in each woman for the grown-up boy” (Rich 152). In Brussels, he is forced to confront aspects of himself that both define and diminish his masculine identity. Crimsworth's tearful exclamation, “Mother!” as he gazes on her portrait, echoes two earlier raptures: the strange “reedy” and “fertile” countryside draws the breathless cry, “Belgium!” (45), followed by the equally strange “Pensionnat!” (50) as Crimsworth gazes at the walls restraining the adolescent demoiselles. His maternal legacy emanates from a foreign landscape that is totally Other—Flemish, Catholic, French-speaking—for until this time, Crimsworth admits that “feminine character” was as alien to him as Brussels. At the Pensionnat de Demoiselles, he has an opportunity to consolidate as well as to modify the pleasure of being a man—that is, of having personal power. But as we have already seen, in doing so he relinquishes the pleasures of sexual equality—the pleasures of shared humanity. For example, Crimsworth takes a scientific pleasure in studying the “hundred specimens of the genus ‘jeune fille,’” but Brontë also makes it clear that the hero must unlearn what patriarchal, and capitalist, ideology has reinforced, and “that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure” (166).

But the habit of privilege is difficult to surrender. Even when he arrives in Belgium—a foreigner, poor, without friends or connections—he is in the position of the masculine subject, almost immediately telling the reader about a “picturesque,” though “eminently stupid” Flemish housemaid, and seeking pretty faces under the bonnets of the demoiselles at the Pensionnat. Crimsworth is, in fact, virtually obsessed with knowing the mysterious female, but this may be less because Brontë is also obsessed with femaleness than with the fact that in creating a male figure she is engaged in a study of oppression from the inside. What nineteenth-century woman writer, taking a male voice, would not need to imagine how men see women? For if she doesn't know “the other case” she does know what it is like to be the object of male scrutiny.

Along with the authority that comes with his status as professor, Crimsworth reveals an insufferable snobbishness based on his nationality, his aristocratic lineage, and his sexual superiority. If Brontë is using a male narrator to engage in fantasies of power, she nevertheless does not make that power attractive. This sexually fastidious man assumes almost immediately, for example, that Zoraide Reuter is “an old duenna of a directress” (55) or “a stiff old maid” (65), and totally dismisses the kind Madame Pelet as “ugly, as only continental old women can be” (59). His smug curiosity about the “unseen paradise” of the demoiselles' garden reveals the degree of his unchallenged indoctrination into his rights as subject: “I thought it would have been so pleasant to have looked upon a garden planted with flowers and trees, so amusing to have watched the demoiselles at their play; to have studied female character in a variety of phases, myself the while sheltered from view by a modest muslin curtain” (54, my emphasis).

To handle male appropriation of the feminine from the center of masculine consciousness is crucial to Brontë's critique. Crimsworth's interest in the demoiselles as female “specimens,” his sexual “mastery” over both Zoraide Reuter and Frances Henri, his critical observations of young women's bodies and faces are precise means for developing and affirming his manliness. As Kappeler has explained, what is at stake in the objectification of women is the very basis of patriarchy and of masculine selfhood: “His understanding of gender relations is at the very bottom of his understanding of himself, it informs his understanding and organization of society, and it informs his semantics, his symbolization of it” (155). Brontë thus makes Crimsworth's masculinity and his discourse almost entirely dependent on how he relates to women. The “sketches” of young women Crimsworth describes in close physical detail are all negatively stereotypic: viragos, coquettes, peevish brats, cool manipulators (there is one attentive student, Sylvie, who is also “the ugliest … in the room” [74]). The level of discomfort Crimsworth endures when confronting these womanly-looking students (72) seems particularly sexual. This is adolescent female sexuality without the “modest muslin curtain” to protect his amour-propre. The peep show, which would have displayed “the angels and their Eden” (64) and which protected Crimsworth from interacting with real women, has become uncomfortably confrontational. The professor who had earlier stated “I am not easily embarrassed” (66) can blush with shame when in the presence of the demoiselles:

More obvious, more prominent, shone on by the full light of the large window, were the occupants of the benches just before me, of whom some were girls of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, some young women from eighteen (as it appeared to me) up to twenty; the most modest attire, the simplest fashion of wearing the hair, were apparent in all; and good features, ruddy, blooming complexions, large and brilliant eyes, forms full, even to solidity, seemed to abound. I did not bear the first view like a stoic; I was dazzled, my eyes fell …

(71)

Though disturbed by his sexual interest in young women, what is most troubling is their bold disregard for his privilege of objectifying them. “If I looked at these girls with little scruple, they looked at me with still less” (72). Their exhibitionism and their aggressive looks—“An air of bold, impudent flirtation, or a loose, silly leer, was sure to answer the most ordinary glance from a masculine eye” (84)—appalls Crimsworth.¹¹ He earlier has confessed how he deplores Pelet's free allusions to “le beau sexe,” telling the reader, “I abhorred, from my soul, mere licentiousness” (59). Whereas these young women are abundantly female, they are not (with the exception of Frances) demurely feminine, and this is what Crimsworth both expects and requires. In fact, they are as rowdy as his male pupils: “when it came to shrieking the girls indisputably beat the boys hollow” (55). These deviants' sexual curiosity about him gives Crimsworth some relief from guilt about his voyeuristic fantasies. But finding his subjectivity challenged, he retrenches his power, he covers his emotional nakedness: “I had buckled on a breast-plate of steely indifference, and let down a visor of impossible austerity” (73). Thus psychologically armored, Crimsworth can reassert his subjective authority by repeatedly describing the now-repulsive physical features and the bold glances of his pupils (received “with the gaze of stoicism” [103]); he launches his erotic conquests over their sluggish minds instead of their bodies: “Owing to her education or her nature books are to her a nuisance, and she opens them with aversion, yet her teacher must instil into her mind the contents of these books; that mind resists the admission of grave information, it recoils, it grows restive …” (104). The use of the generic feminine pronoun in his discourse consolidates his subjective privilege.

This social form of power is based, of course, on the narrator's role as tutor; but it is equally based on gender (age is not much of a factor, since Crimsworth is only a few years older than his pupils) and is endowed with the eroticism that Brontë must certainly have felt simmering in the classrooms of the Pensionnat Heger, but which would have been unacceptable if described from a female point of view. Indeed, Crimsworth's insistence on his superiority to sexual temptation gives the lie to his professional disinterestedness, and only attests to the appreciable tensions of his situation. As if suspecting how impossible it is to believe a male teacher could show such self-control, he declares, “Know, O incredulous reader! that a master stands in a somewhat different relation toward a pretty, light-headed, probably ignorant girl, to that occupied by a partner at a ball, or a gallant on the promenade” (104). The incredulous (male) reader then receives privileged information about how women really are (or at least, how Belgian women really are). In those rare situations where prettiness and ignorance are not encouraged in order to attract male admiration, women are fully men's equals in aggressiveness and pride.

Crimsworth among the demoiselles seems an effort to correct patriarchy's appropriation and symbolization of women. At least twice Brontë deliberately calls attention to the fact that “female character as depicted in Poetry and Fiction” (76) is onesided and sentimental. Crimsworth must discover that women are not “earthly angels and human flowers” (83). It would be a misreading to suppose that here Brontë castigates her own sex as mendacious, foolish, and sensual. On the contrary, it is to insist on women's individuality and full participation in human life. “Give us back our suffering!” cries Florence Nightingale in Cassandra (29), meaning give us back our faults, our humanity. It could be the motto for Brontë's entire oeuvre.

When Zoraide Reuter, a forerunner of Madame Beck in Villette and a woman who uses seduction and flattery to achieve her political ends, tells Crimsworth, “men have so much more influence than women have—they argue more logically than we do; and you, Monsieur, in particular, have so paramount a power of making yourself obeyed” (112), Brontë displays her awareness of two ideological assumptions. First, that to possess power of any kind is a virtue, and second, that it is intrinsically a male privilege. Zoraide's remark is intended to appeal to Crimsworth's vanity; but it also serves to remind him of his complicity in male dominance and the unearned advantages of masculinity. Later, when she is debased by his rejection of her, Crimsworth has an important revelation about his capacity for despotism:

I had ever hated a tyrant; and behold, the possession of a slave, self-given, went near to transform me into what I abhorred! There was at once a sort of low gratification in receiving this luscious incense from an attractive and still young worshipper; and an irritating sense of degradation in the very experience of the pleasure. When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.

(162)

Brontë makes it clear that power is sexually stimulating (it is important that Zoraide is “attractive and still young”), and yet it is “irritating” to the masculine ego that he should derive pleasure from feminine submission. Nevertheless, Brontë obviously sees this intersection of power and pleasure as a defining factor in male socialization, and she is critical of the cultural myths that reinforce it, chiefly the doctrine of separate spheres and women's economic dependence. When Frances insists on giving lessons after they are married, for example, Crimsworth describes, in chivalric terms, the egotistical pleasure of controlling women: “There is something flattering to a man's strength, something consonant to his honourable pride, in the idea of becoming the providence of what he loves—feeding and clothing it, as God does the lilies of the field” (199-200). Here he does not feel a “demigod” compared with women, but God himself—“it” becomes his creation, just as “Woman” is an icon of Victorian patriarchy. Brontë, though, undermines the intense pleasure of the narrator's generosity and power: Crimsworth's God-like fantasy gives way, and he “permits” his wife to continue teaching. Physically, though, during these negotiations, Crimsworth keeps Frances on his knee with his arms tightly around her. He describes her as “a mouse in its terror” and says he holds her “with restraint that was gentle enough, so long as no opposition tightened it” (199).¹²

Allowing his wife to work is not much of a concession, given the fact that it is Frances's “pleasure, her joy to make me still the master in all things” (223). Unlike Rochester, Crimsworth does not undergo “the inevitable sufferings necessary when those in power are forced to release some of their power to those who previously had none” (Heilbrun 57). On the contrary, the “feminization” of the male narrator involves very little suffering. By the end of the narrative, Crimsworth even seems more manly and powerful than ever: he continues to conceal his emotional vulnerability, thinks of his love and his sexuality as a “gift” to confer on the “penniless and parentless” Frances (he later refers to himself as “a man of peculiar discernment” for finding a plain woman sexually appealing) and after they are married, continues to treat her as a “docile … well-trained child” (219). Eventually Crimsworth and Frances open a school, return to England, make sound investments, and retire with an independency. In this novel, to “feminize” the hero is clearly not to symbolically castrate him, nor have him killed during a voyage, nor have him submit to a woman's influence. Still, despite Crimsworth's mastery over his wife and his full participation in patriarchal hegemony, Brontë concludes The Professor with an important critique of the system that produces male privilege—produces, in effect, the disconcerting sexism of The Professor, a novel written only a year before Brontë's feminist manifesto, Jane Eyre. The real “masquerade” in the novel has not been Charlotte Brontë as William Crimsworth (Gilbert & Gubar 318), but the character of Crimsworth himself as a perfectly adjusted Victorian gentleman. Though he adopts a manly role—as master, squire, professor, husband, and, improbably, killer of rabid dogs—he finally questions the virtue of passing on a patriarchal legacy to his young son, Victor. Elaine Showalter writes, “Victor Crimsworth will learn self-mastery in an all-male world” (Literature 137). But Crimsworth's description of the all-male world of Eton is highly qualified, and the tone is clearly that of regret. Their neighbor, Hunsden, affirms that Victor's mother “is making a milksop”—but, Crimsworth gives us Frances's retort: “Better a thousand times he should be a milksop than what he, Hunsden, calls a ‘fine lad’” (232). “‘Good fellow,’” “‘fine fellow,’” “‘fine lad’”: by placing these epithets in inverted commas, Brontë exposes the artificiality of Victorian gender roles. Despite Hunsden's praise of the boy's manly potential, Victor has the “swelling germs of compassion, affection, fidelity” (235) which threaten to undermine his development as a genuine “good fellow.” But the suggestion that Eton will take care of these tendencies indicates that Brontë understands what an education in competition and mastery will produce, since after all, Crimsworth is a product of Eton, too. But Brontë also seems to understand that in a man's world such qualities are necessary to achieve material success—at the end of the novel we learn that Crimsworth's vicious older brother “is getting richer than Croesus by railway speculations” (237).

Descriptions of male mastery, voyeurism, or sexual suppression are not signs of Brontë's self-loathing, her disgust with the female body, or “a characteristically female desire to comprehend the mysteries of femaleness” (Gilbert & Gubar 321). On the contrary, the masculine voice of The Professor is a representation of Victorian masculinity. It is not a picture of unqualified heroism, nor is it an unqualified success as a realistic novel—I agree with those critics who find the narrator sometimes awkward, his choice of language occasionally only “the verbal equivalents of aggressiveness” (Taylor 7). But if we consider Brontë's limited experience, the novel is a fascinating transposition of her culture's construction of men as masters of their emotions, who are nonetheless driven by desires for power and sexual domination. Certain scenes seem remarkably insightful; for example, as a Victorian man who would have absorbed his culture's construction of the Other as virgin/whore, Crimsworth is fascinated with young women, but also ambivalent towards female sexuality. The attack of “Hypochondria” he suffers after he has proposed to Frances has been interpreted both as his fear of sexual initiation (Moglen 95-6), and as “guilt for unresolved boyhood desires for his mother” (Maynard 88). But his illness could also be provoked by the loss of his voyeuristic freedom: being sexually faithful to one woman significantly curtails his right to sexually dominate many women.

The sexual tensions of The Professor do reflect indirectly those felt by Victorian women; but the novel also attempts to comprehend the tensions felt by Victorian men who enjoyed the privilege of cultural subjectivity. For Brontë, such pleasure, linked to the exploitation of other human beings as “specimens,” were morally dangerous—“delusive and envenomed pleasure” as Crimsworth eventually concedes (166). The Professor is a remarkable early effort to confront how Victorian ideologies of gender both form and limit personality, for in using a male voice, Brontë uncovers how the gender of her character largely makes him who he is.

In this sense, Brontë's confidently masculine, objectifying, often misogynist voice itself embodies anxieties about Victorian sexuality. And although each of Brontë's novels confront issues of power, The Professor deals not with how to obtain power (the problem for Brontë's heroines), but how to outgrow the need for power. Crimsworth has the desire for power, but he also learns the terror of being powerful. It is specifically a masculine and middle-class problem, and perhaps the principle artistic inheritors of social privilege—middle-class male novelists—were unable to treat so studiously, from within a man's experience, their own complicity in Victorian society's treatment of women. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that any use of a male narrator is a reinscription of male authority and hence of male power—male narrators generally tend to be invested with authority, and this leaves the reader with the difficult question of how we evaluate a novelist's perspective on a first-person narrator. And it is certainly feasible—and probable—that Crimsworth's scorn for Belgian Catholics, for example, is an indirect expression of Brontë's feelings based on her experiences at M. Heger's pensionnat. Though these considerations are important, they do not, I think, on the whole obscure Brontë's interrogation of Victorian gender roles. The whole experience of socialized gender may have been more recognizable to women writers, who have not only felt social prejudice more acutely, but have a greater awareness of themselves as sexually defined members of society. In this sense, the mid-Victorian woman writing from the male perspective has the difficult task of reproducing a voice which trivializes her experiences, while at the same time maintaining an alternative, subtextual authority—her own—with its insider's knowledge of the conditions of women's lives. This double perspective in literature may be connected with her double consciousness as a middle-class woman living within a patriarchal, capitalist society; she is part of the dominant culture, but she occupies a place separate and inferior within it. If nothing else, because Brontë chooses in The Professor to negotiate, rather than ignore, this double perspective, she amplifies the importance of recognizing the gendered nature of all discourse.

Notes

1. These segregated terms seem to undercut any critique of gendered language or narrative that Brontë might have wished to engage. But a pervasive Victorian ideology of separate spheres has led modern readers quite naturally to construct readings of these texts largely based upon sexual difference. To refer to male or female language, male/quest or female/marriage plots, male or female Bildungsromane, etc., is almost unavoidable. What is interesting is how some women novelists who use male narrators still produce a heroine-centered story and a female plot. George Sand's Indiana (1832), for example, is narrated by a man, but the book belongs to the heroine entirely, as does, to a lesser extent, Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918). Brontë's eponymous narrator, on the other hand, is not telling a woman's story, he is telling his own; the heroine is secondary. This is important to keep in mind in an attempt to understand Victorian attitudes towards sexual polarity, since even the title of a novel may be an attempt to raise expectations in terms of plot, literary value, and even language. George Eliot's masculine titles (Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda) signal a male-centered story, though women are more often than not the psychological focus. Dealing with “masculine” and “feminine” language is difficult without falling into facile stereotypes. Brontë's narrator, however, uses language that is marked, sometimes exaggeratedly, as masculine according to Dale Spender's use of gender differences as described by linguists: men's speech is “forceful, efficient, blunt, authoritative, serious, effective, sparing and masterful” (Man Made Language 33). This is certainly the style of speech the narrator often adopts, usually as a way to hide certain “feminine” propensities.

2. Charlotte Brontë sought professional advice, and she wanted to be published. More than her sisters Emily and Anne, she wished to be a professional novelist, and “regardless of any woman writer's ambivalence toward authoritative institutions and ideologies, the act of writing a novel and seeking to publish it … is implicitly a quest for discursive authority: a quest to be heard, respected, believed, a hope of influence” (Lanser 7).

3. For a woman writer, to imagine what it is like to be a man seems difficult enough even today. When recently asked in an interview if she felt able to imagine what it is like to live in a male body, American novelist Mary Gordon said, “To be larger … Not to be afraid of being raped … No, I can't imagine it yet” (25; “Love Has Its Consequences,” The New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1993: 1+). This suggests that the greatest challenge for some women writers may be imagining personal security and control of the body in a society hostile to women. As Lanser explains, “the authorial mode has allowed women access to ‘male’ authority by separating the narrating ‘I’ from the female body” (18). But Brontë seems yet unable to separate her male “I” from her female body: it is significant that Crimsworth sometimes feels sexually threatened. Penny Boumelha has pointed out that in the episode where he is invited to tea with Madame Pelet and Madame Reuter “he undergoes a fantasy of rape-seduction far more fearful and explicit than anything Brontë assigns to her female characters” (43).

4. Beryl Gray's Afterword to the 1985 Virago edition briefly summarizes the novel's reception: Henry James called it a “jeu d'esprit,” Marghanita Lanski a “sadly poor supernatural story,” and Christopher Ricks “the weirdest fiction she ever wrote” (The Lifted Veil 69-70).

5. In the “Biographical Notice” to the 1849 edition of Wuthering Heights, Brontë wrote that she and her sisters chose pseudonyms “without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine.’” Most readers of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede did not doubt that “George Eliot” was a man (although Dickens was convinced the author was female), and her publisher, John Blackwood, continued to address Eliot as a man even after he knew her true identity. See Redinger, 332-4.

6. However much he despised Eton, his training there is instrumental to his status as hero, and comes in handy when the boat of one of his Flemish pupils capsizes: “I had not been brought up at Eton and boated and bathed and swam there for ten long years for nothing; it was a natural and easy act for me to leap to the rescue” (174).

7. In Chapter 7, when Lucy Snowe first arrives in the city, she is warned that it is too late “for a woman to go through the park alone”; she is subsequently followed by two insolent men whom she calls “my dreaded hunters.” They pursue her until she is “out of breath … my pulses throbbing in inevitable agitation” (125).

8. Brontë was severely critical of women's economic dependence within marriage. She wrote to Ellen Nussey (August 9, 1846), “I do not wish for you a very rich husband, I should not like you to be regarded by any man ever as ‘a sweet object of charity.’”

9. Lanser has observed that in Jane Eyre, the female voice is insistently and personally “in contact with a public narratee in the manner of the ‘engaging’ authorial narrator” (185), and I think this is true partly because, for most of the story, Jane's voice represents many voices: “Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot … Women feel just as men feel … It is thoughtless to condemn them …” (141). Rhetorically, personal contact with a reader who may be sceptical or complacent is crucial in Jane Eyre, for Brontë wants to change the reader's way of thinking about governesses, class privilege, beauty, even novel-writing. There are addresses to the reader in The Professor, but they do not have the same urgency for connection with an oppressed class.

10. Ruth Johnston views this episode, in the context of Lacan's theory of the production of the subject/reader, as another way of alienating the reader by withholding knowledge and the identification necessary in realism (370-1). But the scene is accessible if we think of the pressures of Victorian manliness. Brontë may have been describing the constraints for men in expressing their affections within the polarized bounds of “male” reason and “female” emotion. Of course, the scene can also be read as homosocial bonding.

11. Beth Newman's “‘The Situation of the Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights” uses Lacanian theory to discuss the implicit gendering of gaze, associating the female gaze with male castration anxiety.

12. Basch (165-66) and Moglen (64-77) identify a pattern in Brontë's fiction, based on her belief in romantic love, where the woman's pleasure is derived from feeling physically overpowered at the same time that she successfully asserts her autonomy.

Works Cited

Basch, Francoise. Relative Creatures. New York: Schocken, 1974.

Boumelha, Penny. Charlotte Brontë. New York: Harvester, 1990.

Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. 1857. London: Dent, 1969.

———. Jane Eyre. 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

———. Villette. 1853. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1952.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Criticism: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Gray, Beryl. Afterword. The Lifted Veil. By George Eliot. New York: Virago, 1985. 69-91.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. Towards a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Norton, 1973.

Johnston, Ruth D. “The Professor: Charlotte Brontë's Hysterical Text, or Realistic Narrative and the Ideology of the Subject from a Feminist Perspective.” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989): 353-80.

Kappeler, Susanne. The Pornography of Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Lane, Margaret. Introduction. The Professor. By Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent, 1969.

Lanser, Susan Sniader, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Maynard, John. Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: Norton, 1976.

Morgan, Susan. Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in 19th-Century British Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Newman, Beth. “‘The Situation of the Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights.” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 105 (1990): 1029-1042.

Newton, Judith Lowder. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981.

Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra. 1852. New York: Feminist Press, 1979.

Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1988.

Redinger, Ruby. George Eliot: The Emergent Self. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York: Norton, 1976.

Shorter, Clement. The Brontës: Life and Letters. 2 vols. 1908. New York: Haskell, 1969.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

———. “Women Writers and the Double Standard.” Woman in Sexist Society. Eds. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran. New York: Basic Books, 1971. 323-43.

Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. London: Routledge, 1980.

Taylor, Anne Robinson. Male Novelists and Their Female Voices: Literary Masquerades. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981.