SOURCE: “The Professor.” In The Cover of the Mask: The Autobiographers in Charlotte Brontë's Fiction, University of Victoria, 1982, pp. 20-41.

[In the following excerpt, Tromly reviews the contemporary reception of Brontë's The Professor and surveys the plot, characterization, and imagery in the novel.]

From its earliest reviews onward, critics have accorded The Professor the same reception which greeted the return of Milton's Satan to Hell: “a dismal universal hiss.” Only one voice has disturbed this reassuring critical certitude; and the dissenting voice has belonged to the person who is apparently least qualified to speak. Charlotte Brontë herself seems not to have faltered in her commitment to her first novel. She tried nine times to get The Professor published (it originally was rejected by six publishers), renewing her effort each time one of her other novels was more sympathetically received.¹ Brontë even attempted to use Jane Eyre's popularity as a coat-tail by which her earlier narrative might be introduced to the reading public. Her efforts failed; it was not until after her death that George Smith decided to publish The Professor—only because he realized that nothing else was forthcoming.

Brontë described, in the “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” written for the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and selected poems, her bitter disappointment at the book's reception: “Currer Bell's book found acceptance nowhere, nor any acknowledgement of merit, so that something like the chill of despair began to invade his heart.”² The consensus that Jane Eyre was far superior to The Professor she took adamant exception to. The middle and latter portions of The Professor, she insisted, contained “more pith, more substance, more reality” than much of Jane Eyre.³ But if Brontë's defence of The Professor was fervid, critics' attacks have been equally so. They have either disregarded Brontë's opinions, or, in one telling instance, denounced them. Referring to Brontë's statement about the novel's value, one critic has declared that the author is “in certain ways, as much of a hypocrite as William Crimsworth,” the novel's narrator.⁴

Lying behind the animadversions against the book (in varying degrees of explicitness) are assumptions about its relation to Brontë's biography. First, critics have generally seen this maiden, unpublishable novel as a product of Brontë's artistic immaturity, the “work of a beginner.”⁵ (As a result, the need to make judgments about the novel—to locate signs of Brontë's apprenticeship—has too often taken precedence over the desire to understand it.) More specifically, some critics have seen the author as incompletely detached from her book, compromising its moral vision by her personal entanglements with the characters. Thus they believe that William Crimsworth, a “wholly decent young man,”⁶ makes his way in a tough world by voicing directly the opinions of Charlotte Brontë.⁷ Even those critics who have attempted to detach Crimsworth from Brontë (and have seen him as an essentially unreliable narrator) have not found credible artistic reasons for his limitations.⁸ And similarly, Frances Henri has been seen as an idealized projection of Brontë herself.⁹ Inevitably, most critics have fallen back on the shibboleth of Brontë's biography to dismiss what they consider to be The Professor's shortcomings. Charlotte must have been, in the last year of correspondence with Heger, exorcising the frustrations of an unrequited love;¹⁰ as a result, she wrote an uncontrolled novel.

No one would want to deny that traces of Charlotte Brontë's private world are present in the novel. In certain sections, particularly the chapters on Belgium, Brontë renders the raw materials of her own experience intensely. But if she appropriated certain materials from her life, she did not do so in any simple way. The Professor is not, above all, Brontë's unmediated autobiography. It is, however, William Crimsworth's autobiography. A careful examination of The Professor reveals a primary interest in the motives and processes of self-presentation; the book is informed by its exploration of the issue. By means of a thoroughly obtrusive and essentially unreliable narrative voice, Brontë explores the reasons and the ways that an autobiographer presents himself to the world. Decades after Brontë's death, Leslie Stephen observed that “distortions of the truth belong to the values of autobiography and are as revealing as the truth.”¹¹The Professor is a novel about these distortions.

The beginning of The Professor has always been an irritant to critics. William Crimsworth's letter to “Charles”—who neither answers the letter nor receives it, and does not appear again in the novel—certainly seems arbitrary and contrived. It is not surprising that one critic has called the letter a “clumsy piece of narrative technique.”¹² Yet in being both clumsy and irritating, Crimsworth's letter, sent to nowhere, serves its purpose well. The reader does not get very far into the novel before he is forced to ask questions about the teller of the tale. What kind of person would begin his autobiography by quoting himself at length? Why does he adopt such a self-absorbed and callous tone to his old friend? Why does he write the unsolicited letter in the first place? Why is he clearly more interested in telling his story than in communicating with Charles? Surely Brontë is asking her reader, from the book's first moments, to be aware of the centrality of the narrative voice. William Crimsworth, writing from his study at Daisy Lane, is meant to be an emphatic presence.

Throughout the novel Brontë continues to obtrude Crimsworth onto the reader's attention; the narrator's handling of events continually calls attention to his shaping presence. In a number of instances Crimsworth, by means of brief or oblique allusions, passes over or underplays significant events in his life. Thus toward the end of the book he inserts the birth of his only son as an afterthought. Similarly, he downplays his rescue of Jean Baptiste Vandenhuten (who is introduced only as a means of explaining his progress in the search for employment), and skips completely his own professional experience throughout the years of his marriage. But perhaps the most tantalizing of these manipulations of significant events is his allusion to having once observed a “modern French novel”:

Now, modern French novels are not to my taste, either practically or theoretically. Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about this example, I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle; those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple recollection acted as a most wholesome antidote to temptation.¹³

We hear no more of what must have been a formative experience for Crimsworth. His reticence about this and other matters points to a mind which is deliberately shaping its story. The reader is forced to wonder just what Crimsworth's principles of inclusion are.

If Crimsworth can de-emphasize the important experience, he can also inflate the unimportant. Under his pen the story of his life often unfolds as a series of significant inner moments struck into high relief largely by the force of his narrative determination. After leaving his job in Bigben Close, for example, he describes his walk into the country. He designates a fastflowing river as his symbol-for-the-moment, and takes pains to impress it on both his memory and ours: “… I watched the rapid rush of its waves. I desired memory to take a clear and permanent impression of the scene, and treasure it for future years” (194). At other times the meanings Crimsworth imposes on his experience are more difficult to achieve. When he thinks he has lost Frances through the machinations of Zoraïde Reuter, he offers a long disquisition which begins with the proper sphere of the novelist, passes through the dangers of sensual indulgence, glances quickly at suffering, and finally alights on the consolation of Religion to the hopeless man (277-78). And all of this, he instructs the reader, so that we might infer that—being a reasonable man—he was able to control his grief. The sheer energy Crimsworth expends in imposing a rationale on his life suggests that we should be wary of sharing his perceptions.

Crimsworth's significant moments most often take the form of inner conflicts between moral abstractions. He regrets having resigned his teaching job, for example, when he realizes that he is not in a position to approach the now-employed Frances. But Conscience helpfully intervenes:

“Down, stupid tormentors!” cried she; “the man has done his duty; you shall not bait him thus by thoughts of what might have been; he relinquished a temporary and contingent good to avoid a permanent and certain evil; he did well. Let him reflect now, and when your blinding dust and deafening hum subside, he will discover a path.”

(305)

Shortly afterward, on the night that he longs to give in to his desire to see Frances, Imagination is the “sweet temptress” which he manages to repel. There are many such moments in the novel. It is difficult to imagine that, had The Professor been illustrated,¹⁴ Crimsworth would not have been represented with demons on one shoulder and angels on the other; his moral universe is thoroughly dichotomized.

Brontë presents her narrator, then, as the central problem of the novel. William Crimsworth the autobiographer is everywhere present, giving shape and emphasis to his story. And Crimsworth's autobiographical manipulations become morally questionable because of his pronounced tendency to self-inflation. The abstractions through which he filters his inner conflicts, for example, impart a self-serving suggestiveness to the events of his life. He elevates his personal significance by means of the patterns he imposes.

If, however, Crimsworth's version of his life gratifies the autobiographer, it suggests something quite different to the reader. What we note in Crimsworth's account—in his omissions, emphases, and interpretations of events—is its decided simplification of complexities. If Crimsworth expands his life's meaning in his own eyes, he contracts it in ours. His act of writing becomes an act of enclosure, an act of imposing a personal mythology upon a life. And through a network of images in the novel, Brontë further undercuts Crimsworth's self-portrait. Images of physical enclosure echo the mental enclosure which lies behind Crimsworth's autobiographical impulse.

I. CRIMSWORTH: AN ISRAELITE IN BROBDINGNAG

Fastidious, hypersensitive William Crimsworth (the name has a Dickensian aural appropriateness) expends a great deal of energy guarding himself against assault: assault by other people, assault by his own impulses, assault by all the untidy circumstances that disrupt a remarkably quotidian existence. Enclosure is his characteristic way of dealing with a world too threatening for his insecure psychic constitution. Crimsworth assumes a defensive self-protectiveness against most of his associates. He finds satisfaction in hiding his real self from his tyrannical brother's gaze: “… I felt as secure against his scrutiny as if I had had on a casque with the visor down …” (176). Similarly, he handles his students with dispatch: “In less than five minutes they had thus revealed to me their characters, and in less than five minutes I had buckled on a breast-plate of steely indifference, and let down a visor of impassible austerity” (223). When uneasy, Crimsworth seeks places which are small and closed-in; after most events of consequence, he walks in “narrow chambers,” or shuts out “intruders” (including, at times, the reader). By shutting himself up, or the world out, then, he manages to maintain a fragile state of equilibrium.

Just how fragile this state is, however, becomes most clear when the intruder is one of his own feelings. The scene mentioned earlier, in which he copes with his grief for the lost (misplaced) Frances, is a good example:

being a steady, reasonable man, I did not allow the resentment, disappointment, and grief, engendered in my mind by this evil chance, to grow there to any monstrous size; nor did I allow them to monopolise the whole space of my heart; I pent them, on the contrary, in one strait and secret nook. In the daytime, too, when I was about my duties, I put them on the silent system; and it was only after I had closed the door of my chamber at night that I somewhat relaxed my severity towards these morose nurslings, and allowed vent to their language of murmurs; then, in revenge, they sat on my pillow, haunted my bed, and kept me awake with their long, midnight cry.

(278)

Crimsworth's fear that without his “strait and secret nook” his feelings will grow monstrous is a consequence of his repression; the syndrome has become common coinage in the psychological currency of our day. And as familiar is the ironical result: the sheer act of forceful control defeats its own purpose. The feelings are unearthed in a more painful way—transformed to a morbid state. The strained, hyperbolical, frenzied language in which Crimsworth describes the revenge of his “morose nurslings” is apt. He is clearly so out of touch with his feelings that he can deal with them—and enjoy them—only when they are dressed up in elaborate metaphor. Most of Crimsworth's psychic life can be characterized in terms of a similar tension: an excessive need for control along with its inevitable opposite.

Other enclosure images emphasize Crimsworth's unwholesome emotional obsessions. Sitting “alone near midnight” writing his autobiography at Daisy Lane, he attempts to capture his past. His memories rise before him like ghosts in a graveyard:¹⁵

Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods—haloed most of them—but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments. Farewell, luminous phantoms!

(201)

As his griefs are pent in a “strait and secret nook,” so his memories have been sealed in urns; both images represent a mind which immures the spacious potential of emotional experience. And in spite of this allusion to sinking phantoms, Crimsworth will never realize how thoroughly unsuccessful he is at resurrecting his past. As we shall see, his autobiography does not succeed in liberating his sealed memories; their forms will always remain indistinct to him.

As Crimsworth embalms his memories, so he enshrines his love:

I loved the movement with which she confided her hand to my hand; I loved her as she stood there, penniless and parentless; for a sensualist charmless, for me a treasure—my best object of sympathy on earth, thinking such thoughts as I thought, feeling such feelings as I felt; my ideal of the shrine in which to seal my stores of love. …

(285)

The woman he chooses is an “object” to contain his love; and he can describe his “ideal” only in terms of the gratifications she will provide for him. Crimsworth's brand of idealism, then, is as constricted as his repressed desires, his love enclosed as tightly as his grief and his memories. As we shall see, this strange person, whose thoughts are avowedly turned heavenward, becomes capable of the grimmest kind of mean-mindedness.

Crimsworth's tendency to enclose is so thoroughgoing that it undermines his perceptions altogether. He perceives his world as a series of pictures; his reliance on the visual arts is the most persistent peculiarity of his language. He consistently represents places (such as Belgium and the river in Grovetown mentioned above) as pictures. And virtually all the people he meets, from an anonymous Flemish housemaid who reminds him of “the female figures in certain Dutch paintings” (202-03) to his good friend Yorke Hunsden, whose “features might have done well on canvas but indifferently in marble” (186) are subjected to the scrutinizing eye of a self-conscious artist. Crimsworth takes great pains when presenting his pictures; they are often overloaded with descriptive minutiae. His efforts at verisimilitude, however, reveal more about the artist than his subjects. Rather than rendering faithful images of the people he describes, Crimsworth avoids or distorts the issue of who they really are. Preoccupation with physical characteristics sometimes permits him to avoid more significant attributes of character. But more serious, perhaps, is his tendency to create simple equations between the outer person and the inner character. His student Eulalie is an example:

Eulalie was tall, and very finely shaped: she was fair, and her features were those of a Low Country Madonna; many a ‘figure de Vierge’ have I seen in Dutch pictures exactly resembling hers; there were no angles in her shape or in her face, all was curve and roundness—neither thought, sentiment, nor passion disturbed by line or flush the equality of her pale, clear skin; her noble bust heaved with her regular breathing, her eyes moved a little—by these evidences of life alone could I have distinguished her from some large handsome figure moulded in wax.

(222)

Crimsworth submits Eulalie to a process of reduction in several ways. First, by associating her with works of art he is able to distance himself from her. Second, in relying on the stock associations of a type of painted figure, he is forcing Eulalie into an easy and pre-existent category. And finally, the blandness of character he attributes to her on the basis of her physical type is predicated on a questionable relation between the inner and the outer person. Interpreting people as works of art enables Crimsworth to categorize his world far too neatly. Once enclosed in frames, his images become easier to control.

Crimsworth depicts himself as well as others. Even as the novel opens, he is speaking (in the letter to Charles) of his own “portrait.” And in the most explicit summary he gives us of his past, his life becomes a gallery:

Three—nay four—pictures line the four-walled cell where are stored for me the records of the past. First, Eton. All in that picture is in far perspective, receding, diminutive; but freshly coloured, green, dewy, with a spring sky, piled with glittering yet showery clouds; for my childhood was not all sunshine—it had its overcast, its cold, its stormy hours. Second, X———, huge, dingy, the canvas cracked and smoked; a yellow sky, sooty clouds; no sun, no azure; the verdure of the suburbs blighted and sullied—a very dreary scene.

Third, Belgium; and I will pause before this landscape. As to the fourth, a curtain covers it, which I may hereafter withdraw, or may not, as suits my convenience and capacity. At any rate, for the present it must hang undisturbed.

(200)

In deliberately figuring his past as a gallery of pictures, Crimsworth, characteristically, claims an inflated meaning for his private experience. He presents his past, by analogy, as something that partakes of the heightened significance of paintings. Yet as he inflates, he also deflates. The frames around his past, like the urns that hold his memories, are enclosures. Even the gallery itself is a claustrophobic, four-walled cell. And Crimsworth chooses a curious kind of picture to represent his life. Each painting in the gallery might be titled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape”; missing from the canvas is Crimsworth himself. Eulalie, then, is not the only figure who is dehumanized and regarded with detachment; Crimsworth also maintains a disturbing distance from himself. The mysterious fourth, curtained, picture is never alluded to again.¹⁶ But as we shall see, despite Crimsworth's secrecy, it does not hang undisturbed.

From time to time Crimsworth reminds the reader that the pictures he is framing as he tells his story are corrected versions of the inaccurate pictures of his youth. An interesting dynamic develops as Crimsworth the Autobiographer, writing from Daisy Lane, enjoys contemplating his formerly callow perceptions:

This is Belgium, reader. Look! don't call the picture a flat or a dull one—it was neither flat nor dull to me when I first beheld it. When I left Ostend on a mild February morning, and found myself on the road to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me. My sense of enjoyment possessed an edge whetted to the finest, untouched, keen, exquisite. I was young; I had good health; pleasure and I had never met. … Well! and what did I see? I will tell you faithfully. Green, reedy swamps; fields, fertile but flat, cultivated in patches that made them look like magnified kitchen-gardens; belts of cut trees, formal as pollard willows, skirting the horizon; narrow canals, gliding slow by the road-side; painted Flemish farmhouses; some very dirty hovels; a gray, dead sky; wet road, wet fields, wet housetops: not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route; yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque.

(201-02)

Yet behind Crimsworth's gentle irony against his younger self is a much tougher irony which the narrator fails to see. Brontë would have us note that in correcting the perceptions of his younger self, Crimsworth often encloses himself more tightly into a set of highly inadequate attitudes.

We see these ironies operating in Crimsworth's feelings about the students of Zoraïde Reuter's school. Noticing that the window in his room which opens onto the girls' garden is boarded up (an enclosure image of his young blindness), he feels a strong desire to see behind the boards. He imagines the ground in the garden to be “consecrated,” a paradise where angels play. When he is finally hired to teach at the girls' school, he is delighted. “‘I shall now at last see the mysterious garden: I shall gaze both on the angels and their Eden’” (216). All the humour of the delusion is enjoyed by Crimsworth the narrator. He describes his process of disillusionment with the girls:

Daily, as I continued my attendance at the seminary of Mdlle. Reuter, did I find fresh occasions to compare the ideal with the real. What had I known of female character previously to my arrival at Brussels? Precious little. And what was my notion of it? Something vague, slight, gauzy, glittering; now when I came in contact with it I found it to be a palpable substance enough; very hard too sometimes, and often heavy; there was metal in it, both lead and iron.

(231)

But the quasi-objective tone of Crimsworth's voice of experience immediately gives itself the lie. He offers to “open his portfolio” (231) to sketch a few students, and proceeds to reveal his barely suppressed disgust and rage at the girls. His three pictures “from the life” (234) are painted by a vengeful, moralistic hand. One girl he refers to as an “unnatural-looking being,” “Gorgon-like,” who practises “panther-like deceit” (232). He seems capable of only the crudest kind of adversary relationship with the girls (the way they look at him is their “artillery” [233]), and falls back on his oversimplified moral abstractions in order to place them within his scheme (“Mutiny” and “Hate” are graved on Juanna's brow [234]). When Crimsworth physically confines one of the girls (locks her up in a cabinet), he is only echoing the mental confinement that his descriptions reflect.

What his attitude toward the girls reveals, then, is the constriction of Crimsworth's ostensibly maturing perceptions. Crimsworth approaches his students with naïve idealism; when forced to adjust, he castigates the real rather than tempering the ideal. As we shall see, his ideal remains intact—pent, perhaps, in another strait and secret nook—waiting only for the appropriate woman to be forced into its contracted boundaries.

Before turning to a consideration of the other main characters in the book, it would be useful to note a final pair of images which corroborates the idea of Crimsworth's mental enclosure. As I have noted, the pictures Crimsworth frames of his world are idiosyncratic—a personalized way of imposing a rationale on a perplexing life. Crimsworth is aware of the differences between himself and other people. Early in the novel, he reveals his feelings of separateness to Hunsden with a certain smug satisfaction: “‘I must follow my own devices—I must till the day of my death; because I can neither comprehend, adopt, nor work out those of other people’” (198). Crimsworth's image for himself in the novel's early chapters is as an Israelite in Egypt. Orphaned, confined to drudgery in the counting-house of his unsympathetic brother Edward, he characterizes his work as a “task thankless and bitter as that of the Israelite crawling over the sun-baked fields of Egypt in search of straw and stubble wherewith to accomplish his tale of bricks” (190). The image is apt in several ways. His work is futile; he lives in bondage. But most important, Crimsworth is elevating his separateness into the virtue of a martyr. As an Israelite, he is not only victim, but chosen one. A large part of his self-delusion pertains to a puritanical notion of himself as an anti-sensualist in a world of flesh-pots. Beginning with a reference to his wealthy cousins in the letter to Charles, Crimsworth sets himself apart from women whose attractions he considers himself above. Not for him are the base sexual yearnings of the normal man.¹⁷ (The pronounced element of twisted sexuality in his accounts of his students is an ironic contradiction of his high-mindedness.) But his attitude toward women is only one important element in Crimsworth's Israelite conception of himself. The notion of his own special nature exists in Crimsworth's mind as a means by which to exempt himself, with self-congratulatory glibness, from the humbling exigencies of self-knowledge.

Set off against the Israelite in Crimsworth's mind is a parallel image in the reader's. Brontë very delicately introduces an association between Crimsworth and another literary figure, one not quite so sombre as the Israelite in Egypt. When Crimsworth refers, while observing the Belgian landscape, to a “Brobdignagian [sic] kitchen-garden” (282), we realize that he is not so unlike another fellow-traveller. Associated with Gulliver's innocence, sexual repression, fastidiousness, and, above all, pride, William Crimsworth becomes a figure considerably less elevated than the Israelite. Like Gulliver's, Crimsworth's innocence is not ennobling, but constricting—his pride not a source of dignity, but of self-aggrandizement. The two images coexist, then, as suggestively ironic pieces in the puzzle of Crimsworth's character. Lurking just on the surface is Brontë's suggestion that Crimsworth's idea of his separateness may transform him from his own sublime into the reader's ridiculous. Crimsworth leaves England—his Egypt—in search of the Canaan which he not only feels he deserves but also can use to vindicate his uniqueness. But the reader has discovered that the Israelite's bondage was considerably more than physical.

II. HUNSDEN, REUTER, AND FRANCES HENRI: PORTRAIT AND PENTIMENTO

Although he enjoys portraying his life as a series of pictures, William Crimsworth remains oblivious to the pentimento which complicates his literary self-portraiture. The personal myth he constructs seems to the reader to be superimposed upon a life which is far less tidy than Crimsworth himself will acknowledge. Presented with the official Crimsworth, we remain constantly aware—though the outlines are never distinct—of the traces of a second image beneath. In the portraits of the other main characters in the novel—Hunsden, Zoraïde Reuter, and Frances Henri—the pentimento is equally pronounced, and equally indistinct. We are presented with their images as seen through the eyes of Crimsworth; yet the shadows of images that Crimsworth does not see flicker always before us.

Although Hunsden Yorke Hunsden is a friend of long standing (he is the only character besides Crimsworth to exist all the way through the novel), Crimsworth's attitude to him is always acrimonious. He presents Hunsden as a presumptuous, eccentric person—a person who seems not to know that he is meant to be of secondary importance in the Crimsworth autobiography. The man who seems irritatingly idiosyncratic to Crimsworth, however, strikes the reader as ironically appropriate. For, viewed in relation to Crimsworth, Hunsden is a running commentary on the protagonist's limitations. Like Crimsworth, he has both the tradesman and the aristocrat in his lineage—but unlike Crimsworth, he is at home in the world. Like Crimsworth, he is a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics—but unlike Crimsworth, he has the confidence to address aggressively a challenging world. Where Crimsworth is fastidious and constricted, Hunsden is generous and expansive (though the misanthropic directness of Hunsden's speech seems to Crimsworth to be far less kindly than his own minced words). Like Crimsworth, Hunsden has a feminine ideal—but unlike Crimsworth, his ideal coexists with a strong strain of practicality. He can live enthusiastically with the ideal unfulfilled. And finally, like Crimsworth, Hunsden is unique—but whereas Crimsworth's uniqueness exists only in his mind, as a means of separating himself from a tawdry world, Hunsden's uniqueness is palpable. Perhaps that is why he defies even Crimsworth's self-confident descriptive powers: “There is no use in attempting to describe,” says Crimsworth, “what is indescribable” (308). The close similarities—and awesome differences—between the two men explain why Crimsworth is so perpetually vulnerable to his friend.

Hunsden is responsible for almost all the good fortune in Crimsworth's career; but he can also be called Crimsworth's nemesis. For reasons which are not quite clear, his early interest in Crimsworth abides throughout the novel. He precipitates the release from Edward's tyranny, makes the crucial referral for a teaching job in Belgium, and buys the only one of Crimsworth's pictures which is ever really important—that of his mother—as an unsolicited gift. But Hunsden's generosity is always resented by Crimsworth. In an interesting juxtaposition of scenes, Brontë demonstrates the ease with which Crimsworth can accept favours from another benefactor, Victor Vandenhuten, as compared with the bitterness that Hunsden's help always elicits. From Crimsworth's description of Vandenhuten, we infer the cause: “in short our characters dovetailed, but my mind having more fire and action than his, instinctively assumed and kept the predominance” (317). With Hunsden, Crimsworth can never keep the predominance; something within him must realize that his friend represents the authentic product of which he is himself only an unconvincing reproduction. The ironic connections between the two men are never completely brought to the consciousness of Crimsworth the narrator—nor, as we shall see, is the implicit threat that Hunsden poses to the autobiographer's happy ending.

Crimsworth's first love, Zoraïde Reuter, is also a victim of his misanthropy. The process of disillusionment which Crimsworth underwent with his students is echoed with Reuter. And echoed as well are the aging Crimsworth's sage amusement at the naïveté of his younger self, and the reader's distance from both narrators. Even at her best, Reuter hardly resembles the Angels in their Eden; she taxes even Crimsworth's ability to idealize. Yet, with great effort, the young man manages to rationalize his love. At their first meeting, he is patronizingly amused by the business talent of a young woman. He must be growing wiser, he feels, since he can admire the “crafty little politician” (226). And if Reuter does not quite fit the “female character as depicted in Poetry and Fiction” (226), she is only a more interesting challenge. When pressed for a rationale by which to justify himself, young Crimsworth is ingenious enough to fall back on religious prejudice: “She has been brought up a Catholic: had she been born an Englishwoman, and reared a Protestant, might she not have added straight integrity to all her other excellences? Supposing she were to marry an English and Protestant husband, would she not, rational, sensible, as she is, quickly acknowledge the superiority of right over expediency, honesty over policy?” (240). The scene in which Crimsworth conveys his strongest moment of infatuation takes place in that touchstone of his romantic imagination, the garden of the Pensionnat:

In another minute I and the directress were walking side by side down the valley bordered with fruit-trees, whose white blossoms were then in full blow as well as their tender green leaves. The sky was blue, the air still, the May afternoon was full of brightness and fragrance. Released from the stifling class, surrounded with flowers and foliage, with a pleasing, smiling, affable woman at my side—how did I feel? Why, very enviably. It seemed as if the romantic visions my imagination had suggested of this garden, while it was yet hidden from me by the jealous boards, were more than realised; and, when a turn in the alley shut out the view of the house, and some tall shrubs excluded M. Pelet's mansion, and screened us momentarily from the other houses, rising amphitheatre-like round this green spot, I gave my arm to Mdlle. Reuter, and led her to a garden-chair, nestled under some lilacs near. She sat down; I took my place at her side. She went on talking to me with that ease which communicates ease, and, as I listened, a revelation dawned in my mind that I was on the brink of falling in love.

(238)

Writing from Daisy Lane, Crimsworth contrives the scene of his young delusion neatly. In retrospect, he sees the garden as the perfect location for the growth of his younger, callow self from innocence to experience.¹⁸ For the reader, however, the garden is yet another enclosure, reflecting ironically upon both the young lover and his wiser, older self. And the author's irony becomes more stringent when, after the inevitable disillusionment, young and old Crimsworth agree in their interpretation of the event.

Appropriately, the disillusionment takes place in the same garden. Crimsworth, dreaming of Reuter at his now unboarded window, hears voices below. It is Reuter and Pelet, talking of their wedding plans, and of him. Neither the old nor the young Crimsworth understands the inadequacy of his response to his disillusionment. The love arose solely from Crimsworth's romantic mind. Yet both Crimsworths view the overheard conversation as an act of treachery, strong enough to extinguish all “faith in love and friendship” (242). The shared vision of old and young Crimsworth is demonstrated through the mixing of past and present tenses:

Not that I nursed vengeance—no; but the sense of insult and treachery lived in me like a kindling, though as yet smothered coal. God knows I am not by nature vindictive; I would not hurt a man because I can no longer trust or like him; but neither my reason nor feelings are of the vacillating order—they are not of that sand-like sort where impressions, if soon made, are as soon effaced. Once convinced that my friend's disposition is incompatible with my own, once assured that he is indelibly stained with certain defects obnoxious to my principles, and I dissolve the connection.

(242-43)

Also echoed here are the familiar tones of Crimsworth's moralism: his castigation of whatever fails to live up to his mind-forged ideals, and his claims to a special, exalted nature. As we would expect, he calls on an abstraction—Reason—to be his physician after suffering the blow. Regardless of what his older self may think, Crimsworth has not learned much; his mind remains as sealed off as Mlle Reuter's “allée défendue.”

Thenceforward, Crimsworth's bitterness and distrust regarding Zoraïde Reuter are extreme. Though Reuter continues to be crafty and manipulative, she apparently falls in love with Crimsworth and is treated very cruelly indeed. (The garden again becomes an emblem of Crimsworth's constricted perceptions.) By the time Reuter fires Frances Henri (probably with at least some justification), Crimsworth's disdain for the directress has turned into loathing. He has successfully reduced a complicated woman to the status of a bad angel.

In Crimsworth's mind, Reuter is an unattractive foil for his heart's desire, Frances. He sees Reuter as fully engaged in her world, Frances as an outsider; Reuter as manipulative, Frances as passive; Reuter as hardened, Frances as tender; Reuter as contrived, Frances as natural; Reuter as self-protective, Frances as vulnerable. Yet the novel suggests that as telling as the differences between the two women are their similarities. First, their careers are parallel: Frances, like Reuter, will become the directress of her own school. But more important, Reuter makes guarded suggestions of deeper similarities between them. “‘Her present position,’” she says, “‘has once been mine, or nearly so; it is then but natural I should sympathise with her …’” (254). Within this enigmatic comment, and also within the feelings of animosity between the two women, lurks the possibility, borne out by more direct evidence elsewhere, that Frances Henri is not what Crimsworth believes her to be.

Although critics have tended to see only Crimsworth's romanticized portrait of Frances, there is ample evidence in The Professor that Brontë's portrait, which lurks behind Crimsworth's, is meant to be considerably more subtle, complicated, and ambiguous. First, there are a number of hints that Frances may not always have lived the sheltered, virginal life which Crimsworth complacently assumes she has. Early in their acquaintance, Frances describes her life in Switzerland as being “‘in a circle; I walked the same round every day’” (266). She speaks of knowing something of the “‘bourgeois of Geneva’” and of Brussels (266). And echoing the suggestiveness of these remarks is Reuter's; the older woman says of Frances that she does “‘not like her going out in all weathers’” (276). Later, Frances mentions the frustrations of “‘people who are only in each other's company for amusement’” (328-29). And on several occasions she calmly entertains Crimsworth in her apartment alone.¹⁹

The evidence for Frances' questionable past is not obtrusive. Rather it is composed of delicately suggestive allusions which only hint at something Crimsworth cannot see. Whether or not she has had a sexual past, though, Frances certainly has had some kind of experience in her life that Crimsworth has not. Both her pronounced independence and her unmistakable emotional separateness from him do not correspond to Crimsworth's portrait of her. The very moment she accepts his proposal of marriage, for example, Frances asks to be allowed to continue teaching (327-28). This hard-headed practicality, as well as her tears on her wedding day (342), indicates that for Frances the choice to marry is far from simple. Although Hunsden may be able to live successfully on his own, Frances does not have the male option of a completely independent life; she must know that spending life alone would mean abandoning her career ambitions. It is clear, then, that Frances' view of the marriage has complications that Crimsworth does not dream of; it is likely that she accepts the marriage proposal as the most attractive of several very limited options open to her.

Frances' “Jane” poem indicates that her need for a “master”—the side of her which Crimsworth emphasizes—is a substantial part of her nature. But as Brontë skillfully demonstrates through suggestive details, the deluded Crimsworth never understands the intricacies of his wife's position. He places her on the conventional pedestal, a pedestal which fits nicely into the myth he is creating of his own “successful” life. Yet Frances knows much more of the world than does her “master.” When Crimsworth says of her that “I knew how the more dangerous flame [of passion] burned safely under the eye of reason” (285), he speaks as a puritan; he has no notion of how clearly that eye of reason really sees.

Part of what makes Frances particularly suitable to Crimsworth's autobiographical designs is the fact that she is as homeless as he. Their mutual rootlessness enables Crimsworth to circumvent a certain kind of social definition; it is another means by which Crimsworth can define himself as a man outside—and above—the rest of the world. He delights in Frances' devoir about the emigrant and is sensitive to her expressed desire for her own Canaan. The Israelite image which he adopted in the early chapters is appropriately transformed. Crimsworth's Egypt (England) becomes Frances' Canaan, and by means of a letter from Hunsden, the entire notion is ironically reversed. Hunsden imagines Crimsworth as an Israelite in Belgium, not England: “‘sitting like a black-haired, tawny-skinned, long-nosed Israelite by the flesh-pots of Egypt’” (302). The implication is that Crimsworth would be a displaced Israelite wherever he lived; for him, exile is a state of mind. In choosing Frances, Crimsworth can cling to his feelings of being unique, and therefore special. As he speaks of Hunsden's knowledge of him, this need is apparent: “nor could he, keen-sighted as he was, penetrate into my heart, search my brain, and read my peculiar sympathies and antipathies; he had not known me long enough, or well enough, to perceive how long my feelings would ebb under some influences, powerful over most minds; how high, how fast they would flow under other influences, that perhaps acted with the more intense force on me, because they acted on me alone” (312).

If Frances' homelessness is a convenience for Crimsworth, so too is her role as his student. Brontë's frequent use of the teacher-student relationship has prompted many critics to suggest a questionable equivalence between the art and the life. Thus Inga-Stina Ewbank has called the teaching situation “an image of the ideal relationship” for Brontë.²⁰ In The Professor, however, teacher-student relationships are far from ideal: they are based, for the most part, on tyranny. As I have mentioned, Crimsworth relates to his students as an adversary: through his descriptions of the girls in Reuter's school he reveals both his constricted sexual nature and his related need for power. The same kind of problem is a factor in his relationship with Frances. Her status as a social and educational inferior provides easy superiority for Crimsworth; it enables him, through his autobiographical myth, to enclose her emotions into an even smaller nook than his own. There are several scenes when Crimsworth, forcing Frances to speak English with the ostensible purpose of benefiting her language development, becomes almost sadistic in his treatment of her. (And one such scene is the proposal scene.) The kind of dominance over Frances that Crimsworth seems to need is ironically undercut both by the specifics of their relationship and by the echoes of earlier student relationships.

Frances Henri, then, is just what Crimsworth needs. She has—on the surface, at least—precisely those qualities which enable him to impose a gratifying rationale on his life story. She is socially inferior, educationally disadvantaged, and rootless; a difficult life has made her both tractable and desperate for security. But complications arise for Crimsworth. In order to create the picture of his life in the way which gratifies him most, he must do something very earnest, very real: he must take a wife. The shaky foundations of his psychosexual nature catch up with him only moments after he proposes to Frances. His attack of hypochondria is one of Brontë's most interesting ways of revealing the irony of his mental enclosure.

In reading The Professor as a straightforward success story, most critics have had difficulty accounting for Crimsworth's bout of hypochondria. Robert Martin, for example, finds it to be “without any apparent relevance,” and objects to its coming at a time when “Crimsworth's psychic health has never been better.”²¹ And Inga-Stina Ewbank reverts to Brontë biography to justify the scene: “Powerful in itself, this passage has no justification in plot or character; there is nothing either before or after to suggest such nervous sensibilities in the very sensible hero. His breakdown here is introduced, it would seem, only to give an excuse for what is a welling-up from the suppressed ego of the author.”²² These critical discussions, however, leave out what seems to me to be Brontë's major effort in the novel. Crimsworth is telling his own story, or, rather, presenting his own myth. While ostensibly creating art which will reflect his life, he is in reality moulding the life to fit the art. But, as Roy Pascal has observed about autobiography, “Consistent misrepresentation of oneself is not easy.”²³ Like the other loose ends which Brontë insinuates before us, Crimsworth's attack of hypochondria qualifies his personal mythology. It represents, in Pascal's terms, a “gap” in his self-portrait, or, in James' terms, a “leakage” in his ostensibly watertight scheme. The attack of hypochondria may seem inconsistent to Crimsworth, but for the reader it is part of the pentimento.

Crimsworth's myth about himself, as I have mentioned, is based largely on his feelings of being different from others. An essential part of this difference is his view of himself as an anti-sensualist (a view which the reader has always discredited on the basis of his descriptions of his students). But just after proposing to Frances, he discovers that he is in fact strongly attracted physically to her. As he confesses to the reader: “It appeared then, that I too was a sensualist in my temperate and fastidious way” (329). Crimsworth's acceptance of his own sexual nature is followed immediately by the attack of hypochondria. Apparently his righteous self-delusions do not die easily. It is appropriate that the attack is described as claustrophobic, and as sexual. Crimsworth is imprisoned by hypochondria, who has the bony arms of a death-cold concubine:

She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone. …

I repulsed her as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband's heart towards his young bride; in vain; she kept her sway over me for that night and the next day, and eight succeeding days.

(330-31)

Crimsworth's amazement that the attack should come at this point in his life—“why did hypochondria accost me now?” (331)—is not shared by the reader. Having abandoned the safety of his clearly-defined self-image, he is bound to suffer greatly. Marriage to Frances (who is surely represented in part by the concubine) will of necessity involve psychic and physical realities which he has never before had to face.

If Crimsworth's pre-marital forebodings are complex, those of his new bride are even more so. During the early descriptions of their relationship, as I have noted, the reader continually senses that Crimsworth is not telling the entire story about Frances. Frances' behaviour strengthens this doubt. Perhaps the height of the reader's wonder about her comes in the remarkable scene when she meets Hunsden. Crimsworth takes a seat on the periphery of the room, thus characteristically removing himself and framing the participants in the spectacle. As he watches in supercilious amusement, his deferential, resigned, often vapid Frances suddenly becomes, as she converses with Hunsden, vital, daring, even sexual.

Animated by degrees, she began to change, just as a grave night-sky changes at the approach of sunrise: first it seemed as if her forehead cleared, then her eyes glittered, her features relaxed, and became quite mobile; her subdued complexion grew warm and transparent; to me, she now looked pretty; before, she had only looked ladylike.

She had many things to say to the Englishman just fresh from his island-country, and she urged him with an enthusiasm of curiosity, which ere long thawed Hunsden's reserve as fire thaws a congealed viper. I use this not very flattering comparison because he vividly reminded me of a snake waking from torpor, as he erected his tall form, reared his head, before a little declined, and putting back his hair from his broad Saxon forehead, showed unshaded the gleam of almost savage satire which his interlocutor's tone of eagerness and look of ardour had suffered at once to kindle in his soul and elicit from his eyes: he was himself, as Frances was herself, and in none but his own language would he now address her.

(335)

Strangely, Frances' metamorphosis into a person of warmth, relaxation, and beauty does not threaten the complacent Crimsworth. Neither does the vitality of Hunsden who, imaged as a snake who is tempted by Frances, both ironically undercuts the couple's allegedly invulnerable love and also foreshadows their peculiar future. The scene closes with two literary references, both of which serve a purpose similar to that of the passage above. First, a reference to Othello reinforces the delicate suggestions of a love (between Frances and Crimsworth) built on a shaky foundation. And second, Hunsden's Byronic farewell, and Frances' positive response to it, emphasize again the potential she has for stepping outside the rigid frame in which Crimsworth has enclosed her.

Throughout the Crimsworths' married life, Brontë continues her intimations that Frances' feelings differ from her husband's. What Crimsworth describes is his pleasure at Frances' continual deference to him, his pride in his own generosity (in allowing Frances to open her school), and his delight at playfully subduing her spirit when he “frequently dosed her with Wordsworth” (348). But though Frances' surface reactions may be just as Crimsworth sees them, they indicate, by now, a great deal more to the reader than they do to Crimsworth. Perhaps the clearest signals Brontë sends to the reader in the novel's final chapters come through the passages about young Victor. When Frances leaves Crimsworth's side to visit her sleeping baby, she “abandons” him. When Victor's dog Yorke is exposed to rabies, Crimsworth coldly shoots it, leaves the body for his young son to find, and then describes the entire scene with sanctimonious relish. As he turns away from Victor's grief, it is Frances who comforts their distraught child. And finally, when Crimsworth discusses his son's treatment at the hands of his gentle mother, we feel the full force of his puritanical rage:

though Frances will not make a milksop of her son, she will accustom him to a style of treatment, a forbearance, a congenial tenderness, he will meet with from none else. She sees, as I also see, a something in Victor's temper—a kind of electrical ardour and power—which emits, now and then, ominous sparks; Hunsden calls it his spirit, and says it should not be curbed. I call it the leaven of the offending Adam, and consider that it should be, if not whipped out of him, at least soundly disciplined; and that he will be cheap of any amount of either bodily or mental suffering which will ground him radically in the art of self-control … for that cloud on his bony brow—for that compression of his statuesque lips, the lad will some day get blows instead of blandishments—kicks instead of kisses; then for the fit of mute fury which will sicken his body and madden his soul; then for the ordeal of merited and salutary suffering, out of which he will come (I trust) a wiser and a better man.

(357-58)

Crimsworth contemplates his son's suffering with chilling complacency. Frances, though she hides it from her husband, clearly has an independent relationship with—and independent opinions on—the boy. Frances seems, then, to have the same wider vision at the end of the novel that she has had throughout. She evidently goes through the motions of living up to Crimsworth's happy ending—but were she to tell the story, we feel certain that her version would be vastly different.

If the relations of the three Crimsworths to each other are ambiguous at the end of the novel, the relations of all of them to Yorke Hunsden are even more so. Hunsden is a strange presence in the Crimsworth family; Hunsden Wood, with its “winding ways,” would seem to be a suggestive image of the tangled relations that may exist there. At several points, for instance, Crimsworth refers to the mutual affection between his son and Hunsden. Toward the end of the novel, he observes the two together:

I see him now; he stands by Hunsden, who is seated on the lawn under the beech; Hunsden's hand rests on the boy's collar, and he is instilling God knows what principles into his ear. … Victor has a preference for Hunsden, full as strong as I deem desirable, being considerably more potent, decided, and indiscriminating, than any I ever entertained for that personage myself.

(358)

As Crimsworth looks on at his son and Hunsden, apparently not deeply threatened when he witnesses their strong bond, we are reminded of the earlier scene in which he observed Hunsden and Frances with a similar complacency as they engaged in animated, almost sexually provocative, conversation. Earlier, Hunsden played the role of lover to Frances; in this scene, he would seem to be acting, at least metaphorically, as father to Victor. Indeed, the reader—accustomed by now to the alternative possibilities which lurk beneath Crimsworth's narrative—might even wonder whether the father-son relationship between Hunsden and Victor is only metaphorical. Perhaps, unbeknownst to Crimsworth, there is another family tree in Hunsden Wood in addition to his own. But whatever the actual relationships among Victor, Frances, and Hunsden may be—and no doubt we are not meant to be certain—Hunsden continues to be a dominant presence for all three members of the Crimsworth family. And, characteristically, Crimsworth continues to be oblivious to the complexities that surround him.

The moral universe of The Professor is decidedly postlapsarian. Crimsworth is the innocent of the novel; all the other characters are at home in a world of compromised ideals and limited expectations. Yet—realist that she was—Brontë does not castigate her characters for being less than perfect. It is Crimsworth's brand of innocence, which refuses to recognize the mixed state of humankind and retreats into complacency, that receives the sharpest blows. Only gradually does the reader realize that the novel's moral landscape borrows much of its dark tone from the short-sighted eyes through which it is perceived.

III. THE FOURTH PICTURE: A “GOLDEN HALO OF FICTION”

In the novel's final moments, Crimsworth stops framing pictures; instead, he paints one. Although he makes no explicit reference to the fourth picture in the gallery of his life, the final pages in fact represent its unveiling. Crimsworth's fourth picture completes his presentation of his autobiographical myth. He construes an image of his life at Daisy Lane as his final Eden—the family living in an unsullied region, in a “picturesque and not too spacious dwelling” (351), surrounded by roses and ivy. Having discovered, as he thinks, the pitfalls of artificial gardens²⁴ and the snares of false delusions, he can now envisage his married life as the real paradise. In evoking his ostensible paradise, however, Crimsworth intensifies the dehumanizing natural images he has used throughout the novel's latter sections of his wife and son; they become birds, plants which he tends, or fruit. He had earlier enjoyed characterizing Frances to Hunsden as “an unique fruit, growing wild,” tantalizingly natural in contrast to his friend's “hot-house grapes” (313). Now, having transplanted Frances into a rural setting, he revels in the appropriateness of the pastoral life he has created for his “dove,” his “butterfly,” his “precious plant.”

Brontë's ironic manipulation of prelapsarian imagery did not begin with The Professor. In one of the earlier novelettes (Caroline Vernon, 1839), her unhappy heroine is banished to Eden-Cottage, near Fidena. For Caroline, the cottage becomes a prison; she flees from Eden into the unscrupulous arms of Zamorna.²⁵ Though not so extreme a torture, Daisy Lane must be for Frances considerably less Edenic than it is for her husband.

The love between Frances and Crimsworth began with the teacher finding his lost student mourning her aunt's death in a cemetery. Leading her from the graveyard, Crimsworth saw himself as effecting a rebirth—a victory over the forces of poverty, death, and an antagonistic world. But after rescuing Frances from the walled-in cemetery, Crimsworth merely substitutes one enclosure—his doubtful Paradise—for another. The thought of Frances and her lifelong partner is unsettling; Brontë might have been describing a Crimsworth when she wrote to Ellen Nussey that “a man with a weak brain, chill affections and a strong will—is merely an intractable fiend—you can have no hold of him—you can never lead him right.”²⁶ With a husband, then, whose illusions require great tact to maintain, a son whose equilibrium is constantly threatened, and the emphatic figure of the serpent-like Hunsden lurking about the “winding ways” of the forest, Frances must find life at Daisy Lane considerably less than spacious.

Such is not the case for Crimsworth. The final enclosure he creates—the pastoral life at Daisy Lane—fulfills his need for an autobiographical rationale as satisfactorily as have all his other techniques for containing experience. Virtually every critic who has written on The Professor has commented on Crimsworth's growth during the course of the novel.²⁷ Yet Crimsworth has not changed essentially since the letter to Charles; only his situation is different. The ironic thrust of Crimsworth's success story is based upon the tension between worldly success and personal delusion. Crimsworth's need to superimpose his mental enclosures onto the world around him has resulted in appalling insensitivity. In the world of The Professor, innocence can be considerably darker than experience.

Midway through the novel, in a passage often used to characterize The Professor, Crimsworth states his opinion on the kinds of pictures novelists should paint:

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade. …

(277)

Brontë's success in giving us real life is achieved by means of Crimsworth's failure; in spite of himself, he manages nothing but a “golden halo of fiction” (299). As he ends his story, art appropriately catches up to life, and in fact overtakes it. Crimsworth writes his last page at the moment he lives it; the presence by his side of Frances, who is waiting tea for him, is as pleasant, he says, “as the perfume of the fresh hay and spicy flowers, as the glow of the westering sun, as the repose of the midsummer eve are to my senses” (359). We are not surprised to find Crimsworth so much more engaged in the appearance on his page than in the reality at his elbow. At the penultimate moment, as throughout the tale, art is more real to him than life. “But Hunsden comes.” As this familiar intruder forces his presence into the room which frames the family (“disturbing,” as Crimsworth writes, “two bees and a butterfly”), we note once again the instability of the autobiographer's smug portrait of blissful domesticity. Crimsworth's hackneyed ending, like all his autobiographical efforts, defeats its own purpose.

Notes

1. See [Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës (New York: Collier, 1977)] p. 88.

2. Quoted in [Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975)] p. 305.

3. [The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships & Correspondence in Four Volumes (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1932), hereafter as LFC] II, 161.

4. Winnifrith, p. 101.

5. W. A. Craik, The Brontë Novels (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 48.

6. [Robert Martin, The Accents of Persuasion (London: Faber and Faber, 1966)] p. 34.

7. Martin, p. 41.

8. See, for example, the chapters on the novel in Winnifrith and [Lawrence Jay Dessner, The Homely Web of Truth: A Study of Charlotte Brontës Novels.

9. See Margaret Blom, Charlotte Brontë, Twayne's English Authors Series (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), p. 79.

10. Winifred Gérin advances this argument quite explicitly. See Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 316-32.

11. Quoted in [Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960)], p. 62.

12. Winnifrith, p. 90.

13. Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ed. Phyllis Bentley (London: Collins, 1954), p. 299; hereafter cited in the text.

14. See LFC, II, 161, for Brontë's comments to W. S. Williams about illustrating her novels: “… I hope no one will be at the trouble to make portraits of my characters.” Considering the intentional ambiguities in Brontë's conception of her characters, it is fortunate that drawings were not done; visual images would necessarily have oversimplified the characters. Smith, Elder and Co. honoured Brontë's wishes in their 1875 edition of the Life and Works of Charlotte Brontë and her Sisters: they illustrated only landscapes and houses.

15. The notion of memories sealed in urns has at least two notable historical precedents which may have implications for Brontë's use. Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Urne-Buriall” (“Hydriotaphia,” in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977], pp. 261-315), emphasized the vanity of earthly memorials and the futility of man's hopes for immortality by means of these memorials. And John Locke, in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Raymond Wilburn [London: Dent, 1947]), discussed, using the same image, the fallibility of memory: “Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away” (p. 56). Brontë's self-deluded autobiographers, all of whom bury and hope to resurrect their pasts, partake of both the vanity which Browne deplores and the faulty recollection of the past which Locke attributes to all men.

16. Robert Martin sees the absence of further reference to the fourth picture as a flaw in the novel: “The author's red herrings succeed only in calling unproductive attention to herself and in distracting the reader from his involvement in the novel” (p. 38).

17. Lawrence Dessner discusses Crimsworth's psychosexual impulses as they are manifested in a number of his relationships (pp. 49-63).

18. Cynthia A. Linder, in her Romantic Imagery in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (London: Macmillan, 1978), discusses Crimsworth's movement from Reuter's artificial garden to Daisy Lane's natural one (pp. 25ff.). In my opinion, Linder's discussion of this image and others neglects the novels' ironies. As I attempt to demonstrate, there are often discrepancies between the autobiographers' figurative purposes and the author's.

19. F. T. Flahiff has suggested that the several references in the novel to things that are green (such as the doormat by Frances' flat and her carpet) allude to her possible promiscuity.

20. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 200.

21. Martin, p. 40.

22. Ewbank, p. 188.

23. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, pp. 189-90.

24. See Linder's discussion of nature imagery in the novel (pp. 29ff.).

25. Charlotte Brontë, Five Novelettes: Passing Events, Julia, Mina Laury, Captain Henry Hastings, Caroline Vernon, ed. Winifred Gérin (London: The Folio Press, 1971).

26. LFC, II, 136.

27. For example, Tom Winnifrith, whose position on the question of Crimsworth's development is more cautious than most, argues that “Crimsworth is a pitiful creature at the beginning of the novel and is perhaps unduly complacent at the end, but at any rate, The Professor traces some pattern of spiritual growth” (p. 96). Elsewhere (p. 51) Winnifrith notes that the Crimsworth of Daisy Lane is much changed from his former self.