SOURCE: “Charlotte Brontë: ‘If You Knew My Thoughts. …’” In The Brontës: Branwell, Anne, Emily, Charlotte, Continuum, 1991, pp. 133-82.

[In the following excerpt, Knapp examines the hatred between brothers Edward and William Crimsworth in The Professor and discusses the impact this has upon William's anima and his relationships with women.]

Written with the grace and charm of many a Victorian novel, The Professor also possesses a psychologically fascinating quality of its own. Unlike Wuthering Heights, neither the happenings nor the characters emanate from the author's archetypal depths; they are not, therefore, mythical in stature. More like Agnes Grey, The Professor is a structured and rationally conceived work, an attempt on the author's part to perfect and restrain the formerly effulgent style of her juvenilia.

The writing of The Professor may have served as a means to clarify Charlotte's thoughts concerning the art of the novelist. Every move and thought of the protagonists, within a set framework and ambiance, gives the impression of having been churned and rechurned, sifted, fleshed out, and evaluated in the author's logical mind and within the preconceived plot line. Although spontaneous events do occur at strategic moments in the novel, they are designed to illuminate the characters' own weaknesses and foibles, thus giving them another chance to pursue the best and most righteous of courses. As in Agnes Grey, integrity and forthrightness are uppermost in the outlook of hero and heroine. Nevertheless, the power of passion pulsates, albeit in diminished and most always controlled sequences. Although hatred, jealousy, anger, and the purest and most naive of notions are interwoven in the very fabric of The Professor, these emotions are used as literary strategies designed to heighten or slacken suspense. So thought out is The Professor that the feelings motivating the protagonists' actions give the impression of having been built into the very lining of their personalities, thus divesting them of any authenticity. Still, the touches of morbidity and the sequences focusing on the male protagonist's sexual awakening are sufficiently complex to give the reader pause.

Like Marcel Proust who, in Remembrance of Things Past, transformed many a male into a female character and vice versa, thus enabling him to conceal certain anomalies, so Charlotte, unwilling to lay bare tendencies embedded within her own psyche that could possibly be offensive to Victorian readers, altered the sexual identities of her characters. She seemed to feel greater ease using a male protagonist as spokesman to disclose her feelings and thoughts than a female.

Most arresting in The Professor is the in-depth psychological study of hatred existing between two brothers, Edward and William Crimsworth. So understanding is the author of the problems involved, so sensitive is she to the nuances of their needs and motivations that one is inclined to consider them somewhat auto-biographical in nature. Is the seething antagonism implicit in The Professor a manifestation of her relationship with Emily and Anne? Or are the two brothers to be viewed as doubles—concretizations of polarities buried within her own psyche? The theme of the double is not without precedent, as, for example, Poe's “William Wilson,” Dostoyevsky's The Double, and Gogol's Diary of a Madman.

BROTHER HATRED: AN OPERATIVE SHADOW

The first part of The Professor, which takes place in England, focuses on the bitter enmity existing between Edward and William Crimsworth. Such hostility, viewed psychologically, occurs when a shadow projection is operative.

The shadow is that part of the unconscious personality containing inferior characteristics that the individual is unwilling or as yet unable to recognize as his own and, therefore, projects onto another or others. William, the narrator, is oblivious to the fact that the “evils” he condemns in his brother are the very ones he detests and seeks to annihilate in himself. Condemning Edward freely and without any self-examination, William maintains his own sense of integrity and righteousness on the surface at least. More serious is the fact that the longer he attributes to his brother characteristics he cannot or is unwilling to accept as his own—allowing hatred, rage, and antagonism to be meted out freely to Edward—there can be no increase in self-knowledge on his part.

What is the basis of the hatred existing between the two brothers? Both are orphans. Their father, having failed as a mill owner, died six months before William's birth; the mother succumbed in childbirth. Having been repudiated by their wealthy and aristocratic maternal family, who had never forgiven Mrs. Crimsworth for having married beneath her station, the brothers were brought up with the minimum of charity by their father's uncles. Only by dint of threats from other members of the family does William receive support and go to Eton. Unwilling to enter the church upon his graduation, the twenty-year-old William opts for a business career. To this end, he seeks out his thirty-year-old brother, Edward, who through hard work, ingenuity, and a good marriage, has become a successful mill owner at Bigben Close in the North of England. Jealous of William's Etonian education, Edward harbors no warmth for his brother, and offers him a relatively low job—a second clerkship—for someone so well educated.

Although both brothers had been orphaned, Edward was ten when his parents died, and had suffered most grievously from their loss, while William had never really known them. On the other hand, Edward had benefited from his mother's love, whereas William, deprived of all maternal feeling, had been divested of all sense of belonging, warmth, and well-being. Did Edward unconsciously consider William a murderer, blaming him for his mother's demise, since she died in childbirth?

Edward's overtly destructive responses to William may be viewed as projections of negative characteristics lodged deeply within William and not necessarily contents belonging to the wealthy mill owner. It may be suggested that both Edward and William are split-offs of one person—the shadow side of each juxtaposed to the positive aspects of the other. Since Edward is the more emotional of the two, and affects usually emerge when adaptation is weakest, his uncontrollable behavioral patterns disclose an inability to cope with his sense of inferiority.¹

The day after his first visit to Crimsworth Hall, Edward's “Good Morning” to William was abrupt, after which he “snatched” a newspaper from the table and began reading it “with the air of a master who seizes a pretext to escape the bore of conversing with an underling.” There was no dialogue between the two. William repressed his hurt. As he was cogitating about how best he could endure his brother's insults while maintaining, at least on the outside, a courteous stance, he happened to see Edward's reflection in the mirror. But was it actually Edward's countenance that he had viewed? Or was he in fact looking upon those secret and unacceptable qualities within his own self that he had projected onto his brother? But then, William rationalized, the qualities in which his brother excelled were merely physical or “animal.” As an intellectual, the younger brother considered himself superior to the business man, and has decided to “force” his mind to learn to cope with the situation at hand. As a thinking person, he was determined to force his will to dominate any emotional encounter and any unconscious pulsations that might spin off from their meeting. To assess his brother's personality might yield positive results; it would not only give William the key to his future comportment, but would help him extricate himself from an unpleasant present situation. For example, he understood that he could expect no “lion-like generosity” from his brother; nor did Edward's stern and forbidding manner augur well for the birth of any kind of relationship between the two. The consideration of both brothers as dual aspects of a single personality, foretells incompatibility within that one individual.

Because “Caution, Tact, Observation” determined William's behavioral patterns, his life became increasingly solitary. His practice of self-analysis, however, encouraged him to question his motives, needs, and desires, and to listen to his inner voice for “a clear notion” of what he was, what he wanted, and how much unhappiness he would be able to endure. He came to understand finally that were he to remain for any length of time in his brother's employ, he would not only not derive any emotional compensation from his work, but would, on the contrary, stagnate and even regress. Neither warmth nor understanding nor even a texture of friendship could be expected. The psychological condition of stasis he was suffering is reflected in the iciness of his rented room, in which the maid always forgot to light an evening fire. Without fire, an agent of transformation, no feelings or love could be born. Only rigidity.

Two factors intervened encouraging William to change his course. The first was William's chance meeting with Mr. Hunsden, a manufacturer and mill owner who saw how diligent a worker he was and how ill-treated he had been by his brother. In Hunsden's rooms, the “bright grate was filled with a genuine—shire fire, red, clear, and generous.” It was Hunsden, a fire principle, who advised William to strike out on his own. What career would be to his liking? was the question. Teaching was the answer. Whereupon, Mr. Hunsden wrote a letter of introduction to a well-placed man in Brussels, who might be in a position to offer William a post as a teacher. The second event precipitating William's departure was his brutal and unjust dismissal by Edward whose wrath had been aroused by the rumor that William had spoken ill of him.

Only one object had arrested William's attention during the three months he spent working for his brother: the portrait of his mother hanging at Crimsworth Hall. So important had it become for him that it symbolically pointed to the next step in his maturing process: the seeking out the mother image, the carrier and embodiment of the feminine principle—known as anima in the male.

ANIMA AS FEMININE PRINCIPLE

The personification of the feminine principle, the anima, as previously defined, is “an autonomous psychic content in the male personality”; an inner woman, or the “psychic representation of the contrasexual elements in man.”² When a man's anima is projected onto a living woman, it leads him to fall in love. If he is involved with a willful, devouring, and demonic type, and if his projection is unconscious, his ego may be submerged by the power she has over him and reduce him to a state of paralysis or childlike obedience to her. If, on the other hand, he is conscious of his anima, and his ego is sufficiently developed, she may lead him to know a meaningful and profound relationship.

A NEGATIVE ANIMA

Upon his arrival in Brussels, and thanks to Hunsden's intervention, William obtains a post as English and Latin teacher in a boy's school directed and owned by a M. Pelet. Although surprised by the mediocre intellectual level of the students, William enjoys his new post and earns respect and confidence. He pleasures in Mr. Pelet's company and is able to relate to this “clever and witty” Frenchman.

One of the windows of William's room overlooked the garden of the girl's school opposite, and decency had dictated that it should be boarded to prevent a prying eye from peering into feminine mysteries. Utterly naïve in matters of sex or anything remotely identified with womankind, William was excited about the very thought of such an interdict. When alone, he tried to find some chink or hole in the boarded-up window that might allow him to “peep at the consecrated ground.” Although his efforts were to no avail, the thought of the “allée defendue” aroused sexual awareness in him. How much he would have enjoyed spying on these forbidden delights is conveyed metaphorically—as a beautiful garden with flowers and trees, somewhat reminiscent of a Garden of Eden.

So one-sided was William's upbringing, so identified was he with the spirit rather than with anything relating to the human sphere, that when Mr. Pelet's mother invites him to goûter, he is convinced that she seeks to make love to him! Mrs. Pelet's invitation is, however, business-oriented, and leads to the contrived offer to William of a position as English teacher at the “Pensionnat des demoiselles” adjacent to Mr. Pelet's academy. “I shall now at last see the mysterious garden, I shall gaze both on the angels and their Eden,” William thinks.

Zoraide Reuter, director of the girls' pensionnat, was an anima figure: a seductress capable of leading William step-by-step into the world of feminine mysteries. Bewitching by her demeanor from the very outset, she, like the goddesses of antiquity, aroused in William hitherto unknown sensations of love.

In reality, Zoraide was an illusion-creating anima figure who sought, perhaps unconsciously at first, then with open determination, to envelop, embrace, and devour her prey. A negative feminine principle, she represented danger to the naïve, deception to the morally sound, and suffering to the gullible. It was only a matter of time before William would be caught in her web, and left there to strangle helplessly.

Unaware of her power over him, however, William blithely became enticed by Zoraide's bewitching feminine charm. Each time he returned from the girl's school, happiness rather than his usual somberness was imprinted on his features and his confidence and competence as a teacher also improved.

Mr. Pelet, aware of William's naïveté in terms of the opposite sex, was quick to point out to him that “any woman, sinking her shaft deep enough, will at last reach a fathomless spring of sensibility in thy breast.” Believing that God's light was shining upon him and Zoraide, William was all the more unprepared for the cruel deception that was forthcoming: leaning out of his window one evening to look down on the very spot that had witnessed the first and most delectable discussion with his ladylove, he overheard a conversation between her and Mr. Pelet, which revealed that they were secretly engaged and had encouraged his infatuation simply for amusement. So deeply shocked is William that he swears to maintain henceforth a stone-cold countenance toward Zoraide.

Perplexed, because she cannot account for the sudden change in William's behavior, Zoraide becomes attracted to his invulnerability and impassibility. Using her wiles, she does her best to soften his hostility; and to impress him with her altruism, she tells of her kindness toward a poor young English-Swiss seamstress in the school's employ, Frances Evans Henri.

A POSITIVE ANIMA

If Zoraide may be considered a negative anima type, interested only in gratifying her own desires and calculating how best to ensnare and then devour her prey, Frances Evans Henri was her antithesis. Natural, innocent, methodical, and candid, she also possessed a certain winsomeness. Although spiritually oriented, she was firmly rooted to this earth, but had no illusions about life or people. She conformed to expectations both as an employee in the school and in the city, but being ambitious, she sought to improve her command of the English language and eventually gain access to better employment.

As anima, she embodied William's suprapersonal values or ideal. Like the femme inspiratrice, she would unconsciously play an indispensable role in his world, knowing instinctively how to focus on her own goals, and at the same time help William to function at his best under dismal circumstances. As anima, her qualities reflected his own rich unconscious feminine side.

Frances would not only play the role of the beloved, but also that of a nourishing and kindly mother figure. She would fill the void in William's heart, which had been created when he looked so longingly at the portrait of his mother hanging in Edward's home. Coincidentally, it was this very painting that Mr. Hunsden, on a visit to Brussels, had brought to William, telling him that he had bought it at an auction sale following Edward's bankruptcy.

William becomes increasingly impressed by Frances's intelligence and her beautiful character traits. Unspoiled, demure, even shy at times, she is endowed with perseverance, a sense of duty, and an extraordinary ability to contend with life's difficulties. Her integrity is antipodal to the moral unsoundness of Zoraide who, now jealous of Frances, summarily dismisses her. The “perfidious” vamp, dominated by a “vice-polluted soul,” resorts to the lie, telling William that the little seamstress employed by the school has resigned her post and left no forwarding address.

Fruitlessly, William makes inquiry everywhere hoping to discover Frances's whereabouts. Finally resigning his teaching post, he sets out in search of her in the city, visiting even the Protestant cemetery in Brussels. It is there that he finds her, beside the grave of her last living relative, her recently departed aunt. Although William realizes he is in love with Frances, he cannot propose to her until he finds a new situation. Disheartening weeks follow. Finally, thanks to the father of one of his former students whom he had saved from drowning, he obtains a fine teaching position, proposes to Frances, and is accepted.

Accustomed to supporting herself in life, Frances—a good feminist—is determined to keep on working as a lacemaker and mender, even after marriage, despite William's wish that she remain a homebody. Her determined refusal is quiet but steadfast. No human power could bend her will. “Think of my marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it—and how dull my days would be!” By dint of the couple's hard work, in ten years time they amassed sufficient capital to enable them and their son, Victor, to retire to England, Frances's “Promised Land.”

Charlotte's expository discourse in The Professor concludes without being judgmental. She succeeded in cutting open the bruised soul of her protagonist—a manifestation of her own—but she did not know how to express the workings of the masculine psyche. William's needs and ideations seem contrived, awkward, and conveyed in stilted language, and, as the reviewer for the North British Review wrote:

It is quite obvious to any reader who attends to the sketch of the character of the Professor, that the Professor is a woman in disguise, … for she is quite properly stripped of her male costume … There is a shyness, a sulky tenderness, and a disposition to coquet manifest in the Professor's relations with his friend … which betrays to us at once that the picture is drawn from a lady's experience of her friendship with the other sex.³

Notes

1. C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung, p. 145.

2. Edward Edinger, “An Outline of Analytical Psychology,” p. 10.

3. Earl A. Knies, The Art of Charlotte Brontë. From “Novels by the Authoress of ‘John Halifax,’” North British Review, 29 (1858), pp. 474-475.