SOURCE: “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in The Professor.” In Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter, 2000, pp. 1-28.

[In the following essay, Plasa discusses the figurative representation of colonialism found in The Professor. The critic also explores Crimsworth's self-contained sexuality.]

As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to read it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (59)

The opening chapter of Charlotte Brontë's first novel, The Professor (completed in 1846 but published only posthumously in 1857), features a “copy of a letter, sent […] a year since” by William Crimsworth, the novel's first-person narrator and central protagonist, to Charles, “an old school-acquaintance” (5) whom he had known at Eton. While the letter is designed to furnish Charles with an account of its writer's post-Etonian existence, such a purpose remains unrealized. As Crimsworth explains at the end of the chapter, his missive meets with no reply because its desired. recipient is at home no longer:

To this letter I never got an answer—before my old friend received it, he had accepted a government appointment in one of the colonies, and was already on his way to the scene of his official labours. What has become of him since I know not.

(14)

Charles's silent withdrawal to an unspecified colonial margin provides Crimsworth with the opportunity to take up where the letter leaves off, regaling “the public at large” with the autobiography—in the shape of the novel itself—originally begun for the “private benefit” (14) of his mysteriously estranged correspondent. The story of his professional and personal fortunes that Crimsworth recounts has three distinct phases. The first sees him moving from the south of England to the north, where he is employed as “second clerk” in the Yorkshire textile mill owned by the entrepreneurial Edward, his elder brother and “manage[s] the foreign correspondence of the House” (18). Dissatisfied with the task of “copying and translating business-letters” and feeling victimized, in particular, by the “Antipathy” (30) his employer/brother demonstrates toward him, Crimsworth invokes the translator's prerogative, converts his linguistic mobility into geographic form, and travels to Belgium. Here he teaches English as a foreign language, first to male and then female students in boarding-schools run by Monsieur Pelet and Zoraïde Reuter, respectively. It is here, also, through a combination of endeavour and chance, that he eventually secures his financial independence. In the novel's brief final stage, Crimsworth returns to England, accompanied by his Anglo-Swiss wife and former pupil, Frances Evans Henri and their refractory young son, Victor.

For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both artificial and clumsy. It is, they argue, the sign of an early gaucherie on the part of a would-be novelist perilously aspiring—like Charles and Crimsworth in their own spheres—to secure a professional status within the male-dominated literary establishment of mid nineteenth-century England. Yet as Brontë informs the reader in the “Preface” to The Professor, the faults of her “little book” should not be excused on the basis of a “first attempt […] as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn down a good deal in a practice of some years” (3). The principal allusion here is to the vast and sprawling body of Brontë's Angrian writings, produced in collaboration with her brother, Branwell, between 1829 and 1839 and situated in a phantasmagoric colonial space “carved,” in the words of Juliet Barker, “out of the interior of Africa” (Juvenilia 270). It is thus apparent that the divergence of career between Charles and Crimsworth with which The Professor begins at the same time enacts a certain shift, inaugurated by The Professor itself, in Brontë's own fictional trajectory: like Crimsworth, her novels will remain, for the rest of her career, securely located within English and/or continental borders.

Yet if colonialism is excluded as a literal presence in Brontë's post-Angrian fiction—no longer setting the “scene” for her own “official labours,” as it were—it continues to return in a number of significant unofficial forms. In the case of The Professor, Crimsworth's practice as “English Master” (67) in Belgium “can easily be viewed,” as Firdous Azim has argued, “against the class-bound and colonial tradition that accompanies the teaching of English” (163). In this respect, the severed epistolary exchange with which the novel opens is ironically inverted, as a correspondence with colonial margins is implicitly maintained: Crimsworth's supremacist assumptions about his own language and culture take their place alongside those informing the kind of colonial pedagogy beginning to emerge in the context of British expansion in India and most notoriously advocated, for example, in Thomas Babington Macaulay's “Minute on Indian Education” of 2 February 1835.¹

Azim's reading of The Professor is an important one, not least because it represents the first sustained attempt to situate Brontë's novel within the archive of a colonial history. At the same time, however, there are two respects in which The Professor enables a development of the approach initiated by Azim. The first of these relates to the reemergence of the colonial as textual resource. The unequal power-relations that the novel charts in the contexts of class and gender are repeatedly figured in terms of a slavery only recently abolished in Britain's colonies, and still institutionalized in the American South, when the novel was first composed. In this way, it becomes evident that The Professor's rhetorical operations are involved in a politics of identification that is highly problematic. The second concerns the way in which, more broadly, questions of nation and race come to be played out in the register of sexuality. As he struggles, throughout the narrative, to negotiate his own desires—and those of others—Crimsworth consistently associates sexuality with forms of foreignness, whether these be continental or Oriental, thus constituting it as something that threatens to infect and undo his sense of himself as an Englishman. Although he claims not to know “What has become” of his friend in the wake of his colonial posting, Crimsworth's own traveller's tale dramatizes fears and fantasies of contamination analogous to those entailed in the colonial project itself. The Professor's use of slavery as figure implies an identification with the other whose impetus reverses, in the context of sexuality, into flight and defence.

“FALSE PROFESSIONS AND DOUBLE-DEALING”: SLAVERY AND THE POLITICS OF METAPHOR

In the “Preface” to The Professor, Brontë records her “surprise” (3) at the unfavourable response that her novel has elicited (it was rejected nine times in total [xxiii]). Having deliberately eschewed “the ornamented and redundant in composition” in preference for the “plain and homely,” and “adopted a set of principles on the subject of incident &c.” (3) that is stringently realist, she discovers that the novel's prospective “Publishers […] scarcely approved this system” and, it transpires, “would have liked something more imaginative and poetical” (4) than the worldly tale of self-advancement that she tells. This unexpected situation leads to a reflection on the deceptiveness of appearances in which gender-stereotypes are over-turned. Herself concealed behind the masculine persona of “Currer Bell” (5), Brontë remarks:

until an author has tried to dispose of a M.S. of this kind he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures. Men in business are usually thought to prefer the real—on trial this idea will be found fallacious: a passionate preference for the wild wonderful and thrilling—the strange, startling and harrowing agitates divers souls that shew a calm and sober surface.

(4)

For Brontë's text to be judged by “Men” who are the (feminized) opposites of what they seem is oddly appropriate for, as Penny Boumelha has argued, “The Professor's is a world of doubleness” in which “Virtually every major character is radically divided” (38).

In changing the original title of her novel from The Master to The Professor (xxx), Brontë appears to signal this sense of “doubleness” and radical self-division. In one respect, the new title might be considered to be something of a misnomer. As Crimsworth soon comes to learn from Mr. Brown, his contact on arriving in Belgium, the appellation bestowed on him does not possess quite the same meaning—or cachet—as in England. It translates differently: “The word professor struck me. ‘I am not a professor,’ said I. ‘Oh,’ returned Mr. Brown—‘Professor, here in Belgium, means a teacher—that is all’” (60). Yet if “[t]he word professor” distorts and inflates Crimsworth's standing within the pedagogical hierarchies of the schools run by Pelet and Zoraïde alike, it is, at the same time, an accurate designation. Like several of the other key figures in the text, Crimsworth is precisely a “professor” in the alternative, or non-professional, sense defined by Boumelha, repeatedly “manifesting one motive, feeling or state of mind but also privately harbouring another” (38).

Crimsworth's tendency—in that lightly pleonastic phrase—to make “false professions” (181) is evident not just in the context of the personal images that he shapes for others (as for himself) in the course of the narrative. It is also to be discerned in terms of his textual practices as an autobiographer and, in particular, his habitual use of metaphor, a trope itself traditionally linked to notions of deception and duplicity. Especially in The Professor's first six chapters, metaphor functions as the figurative vehicle for the return of the colonialism seemingly jettisoned so pointedly at the novel's outset, as Crimsworth draws on a historically burdened language of mastery and enslavement in order to represent the fraternal and class conflicts in which he is initially implicated. As his unread introductory letter attests, Crimsworth is the product of a marriage that crosses class boundaries: his mother is of aristocratic descent, with a “rare […] class of face” (14), while his father is a “—shire Manufacturer” who becomes “bankrupt a short time previous to his death.” On the demise of his mother, “some six months” (7) after these events, Crimsworth is entrusted to the care of the affluent “maternal uncles” (6) who will later fund his education. By subsequently rejecting their patronage, he is forced to enter the realm of mercantile capitalism in which Edward is “fast making a fortune” (8). At the end of chapter 4, Crimsworth returns to his “lodgings” to prepare for the next day's labours, flooded with “regrets” (39) as to the unpromising position to which he has been relegated. He is further agitated by the repeated “goading” (37) of Hunsden Yorke Hunsden. As his palindromically shaped name suggests, Hunsden's unpredictable appearances in the text are typically marked by an enigmatic poise that contrasts sharply with the uncertainty of Crimsworth's own prospects:

Why did I make myself a tradesman? Why did I enter Hunsden's house this evening? Why, at dawn to-morrow, must I repair to Crimsworth's Mill? All that night did I ask myself these questions and all that night fiercely demanded of my soul an answer. I got no sleep, my head burned, my feet froze; at last the factory-bells rang and I sprung from my bed with other slaves.

(39)

The “bells” that ring here are literal and metaphorical at once. Crimsworth's participation in the routines of the factory worker is evidently for him the cue for other echoes and resonances, prompting a crossracial identification with the disciplined body of the slave.

In summoning the worker/slave to his duties, those “bells” would seem to reverberate with the promise that the capitalist order of things will be renewed and soundly maintained. Yet equally, if obliquely, they constitute a call to insurrection that finds its response, in personal if not collective terms, in the next chapter. Crimsworth's literal dawn rising, in the passage above, prefigures what he refers to as “‘The Climax’” (40), the moment of his rebellion against the oppressor/brother. Violently accused of spreading slanders about Edward that are subsequently traced back to Hunsden, Crimsworth is finally moved to liberate himself from the “yoke” (59) of his brother's employ:

“Come, Edward Crimsworth, enough of this. It is time you and I wound up accounts. I have now given your service three months' trial and I find it the most nauseous slavery under the sun. Seek another clerk—I stay no longer.”

“What! Do you dare to give me notice? Stop at least for your wages.” He took down the heavy gig-whip hanging beside his Mackintosh.

(42-43)

Crimsworth's rebellious turning against Edward is also a linguistic one, again performing, as it does, a troping of class in terms of race, the domestic in terms of the colonial.

The presence of slavery as metaphor in The Professor has some curious effects, the first of which relates to Crimsworth's role as “tradesman.” While his decisive altercation with Edward clearly confirms Hunsden's taunting prophecy that “[he]'ll never be a tradesman” (38), there is a sense in which Crimsworth's vocation as metaphorist at the same time both reinterprets and challenges Hunsden's assertion: his trade is in language, regulated by the exchange of the literal meanings of words for figurative ones. The second effect is to qualify the stylistic claims that Brontë makes in her “Preface,” as the novel turns out to be much less “plain and homely” than she takes it to be. Not only is Crimsworth's narrative recurrently “ornamented,” quite plainly, by a particular figure of speech, but the figure in question is one that entails a kind of departure from the “homely” also. For metaphor, as Eric Cheyfitz points out, is a rhetorical operation in which words are transferred from literal to figurative usages, travelling from familiar to foreign destinations (36).² If Crimsworth will, for the bulk of the novel, be an Englishman abroad, there is a sense in which such a spatial relocation only recapitulates the itinerary laid down in advance by his own language.

Even as they question Brontë's understanding of her own text, Crimsworth's rhetorical strategies cast a different kind of doubt on themselves. The essential problem with his rituals of metaphorical self-representation is that, ultimately, they can only seem like hyperbolic gestures, variously ironized by the unstated historical truths that The Professor encrypts within itself. To compare class relations in the north of England to slavery would seem, on the one hand, to be an effective means of underscoring the oppression and injustice to which the worker is subjected by early to mid nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Yet, on the other hand, Crimsworth's self-figuration carries out its own injustice. The “other slaves” whom he blithely fashions out of metaphor have their counterparts in the shape of black subjects literally enslaved either in the context of the British West Indies or the American South. As several critics, from Marx to Fanon and beyond, have argued, it is the regulated bodies of these other “other slaves,” so to speak, that drive the capitalist economy from which Crimsworth freely withdraws his labour.³ In identifying himself with the figure of the slave, Crimsworth in effect performs a metaphorical colonization, or colonization through metaphor, expropriating the racial other for his own self-serving ends.

The discrepancies between Crimsworth and the slave in terms of whom he sees himself are most visible, of course, with regard to the privileges that accrue to him by virtue of what Macaulay calls the “aristocracy of skin” (qtd. in Blackburn 448)—the fact of Crimsworth's whiteness. Although he has not followed the obscure colonial career of the correspondent alluded to in the novel's first chapter, Crimsworth nonetheless shares the assumed racial superiority on which such a career is predicated. Both figures are in turn racially elevated above the white creole pupil, the 15-year-old Juanna Trista, whom Crimsworth encounters in Zoraïde's school. As a “girl […] of mixed Belgian and Spanish origin” who is born “in the—Isles” (100), Juanna is not quite to be included in the same racial echelon as her “English Master.” Even so, as she leaves Europe to return to her father's unnamed West Indian estate, she does so “exulting in the thought that she should there have slaves whom, as she said, she could kick and strike at will.”⁴ With “the legible graving of […] Mutiny and Hate” on her “brow” (101), Juanna's celebration of her future role as colonial dominatrix underscores the dubious politics of Crimsworth's figurative tendencies. Its effect is to expose the realities of colonial and racial conflict that the logic of metaphor—stressing sameness over difference—threatens to efface.

Crimsworth's metaphorical identifications open up The Professor to the kind of contrapuntal reading proposed by Said in the epigraph above, inviting themselves to be placed and considered, for example, in relation to Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Douglass's text is exactly contemporary with the writing of Brontë's novel and, as one of the formative works in the African-American autobiographical tradition, centrally concerned, like The Professor, with processes of self-making. These processes are encapsulated in the famous liberatory chiasmus of Douglass's “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (47). They are subsequently initiated by the pivotal physical “battle” (50) between Douglass and the “‘nigger-breaker’” (42), Edward Covey. From this conflict, lasting “nearly two hours,” Douglass emerges triumphant, his “sense of […] manhood” both “revived” and transfigured in a “glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (50). Douglass's account of his experiences provides a powerful counterpoint to the terms in which Crimsworth likes to frame his own, driving his metaphors back toward their literal ground. If Crimsworth's “brazen face” fails to “blush black” (44) during the course of his brother's verbal assault, his narrative is characterized, it would seem, by rhetorical displays that are their own impertinence.

Douglass goes on to offer a more explicit corrective to the dangerous affront of slavery as trope in another context. In the course of a lecture given to a meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne on 3 August 1846, Douglass defines it as his “duty to direct […] attention to the character of slavery, as it is in the United States.” He proceeds to inform his audience of the urgency of his task:

I am the more anxious to do this, since I find the subject of slavery identified with many other systems, in such a manner, as in my opinion, to detract to some extent from the horror with which slavery in the United States is so justly contemplated. I have been frequently asked, since coming into this country, “why agitate the question of American slavery in this land; we have slavery here, we are slaves here.” I have heard intemperance called slavery, I have heard your military system, and a number of other things called slavery, which were very well calculated to detract from the dreadful horror with which you at a distance contemplate the institution of American slavery.

(Frederick Douglass Papers 317)

Here Douglass spells out the potential ironies that attend the slave trope. The language of a domestic politics needs to be properly disciplined if it is not simultaneously to collude with, diminish and perpetuate a “horror” that, even “at a distance,” seems “dreadful.”

Whether the effects are “calculated” or not, The Professor deploys slavery as a trope in the context not only of class- but also gender-relations. At several junctures, white female figures are associated—either by Crimsworth or themselves—with rebel slaves and/or a violent blackness. This is the way, for example, in chapter 10, in which Caroline de Blémont, one of the three self-crowned “queens” in Zoraïde's school, forces herself upon her teacher's attention:

Caroline shook her loose ringlets of abundant but somewhat coarse hair over her rolling black eyes; parting her lips, as full as those of a hot-blooded Maroon, she showed her well-set teeth sparkling between them and treated me at the same time to a smile “de sa façon”.

(86)

In this passage (whose syntax is almost as “loose” as Caroline's “ringlets”), Crimsworth's vision is a double one. The danger embodied in white female sexuality is represented as a colonial rebellion signalled in the allusion to the “hot-blooded Maroon.”⁵ If the allusion is defensively misogynist in its figuring of white female sexuality in terms of slave revolt, it is at the same time racist, as the stereotypical traits of blackness slide between Caroline and “Maroon” alike. Both have “lips” described as “full,” while the former has “rolling black eyes” and a characteristic “smile” that discloses, in those “well-set teeth,” a cannibalistic appetite.

It is not only the sexually excessive female who comes to be identified with a rebellious blackness but the conventionally feminine Frances also. In the novel's final chapter, after Crimsworth and Frances have been married for some ten years, he speculates on what might have become of his “good and dear wife” had she married “a profligate, a prodigal, a drunkard or a tyrant.” To Crimsworth's insistent pursuit of these curious possibilities, Frances responds, with an equally “strange kind of spirit in her eye”: “if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to,” Frances asserts, “marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt” (255). The potential for (un)wifely revolt that Frances hints at here is still more emphatically associated with blackness in the previous chapter (Meyer 62). During an exchange concerning the merits and demerits of her native land, Frances tells Hunsden that if he were to “take a wife out of Switzerland” and subsequently impugn her nation—as he has indeed just done, for example, by “mention[ing] the word ass in the same breath with the name Tell”—his insolence would meet with lethal consequences: his “Mountain Maid” would “some night smother” him, “even as […] Shakspeare's Othello smothered Desdemona.” As if immediately to partake in the reprisal imagined against Hunsden, the future “plan” that Frances “sketche[s]” involves an attack on a figure central to Hunsden's sense of his own cultural supremacy. Frances's revisionary drama is, as he himself recognizes, “a travesty of the Moor and his gentle lady in which the parts [are] reversed” (242), as white female revenge shockingly weds the monstrosity of black male violence.

“MIXED UP IN FOREIGN HODGE-PODGE”: SEXUALITY, NATION, RACE

At the beginning of chapter 3, Crimsworth recalls his time as a subject under surveillance in his brother's mill:

I served Edward as his second clerk faithfully, punctually, diligently. What was given to me to do, I had the power and the determination to do well. Mr. Crimsworth watched sharply for defects but found none; he set Timothy Steighton, his favourite and head-man, to watch also, Tim was baffled; I was as exact as himself, and quicker: Mr. Crimsworth made enquiries as to how I lived, whether I got into debt—no—my accounts with my landlady were always straight; I had hired small lodgings which I contrived to pay for out of a slender fund—the accumulated savings of my Eton pocket-money; for as it had ever been abhorrent to my nature to ask pecuniary assistance, I had early acquired habits of self-denying economy; husbanding my monthly allowance with anxious care.

(22)

All the values that define a bourgeois masculinity are operating here, “faithfully, punctually, diligently” present and correct—from “industry and perseverance,” in Heather Glen's taxonomy, to “self-reliance and independence, self-respect and self-control” (11). By internalizing these values, Crimsworth necessarily leaves Edward and his “head-man” “baffled”: in true Foucauldian fashion, he subjects himself to the strategies of surveillance deployed against him.⁶

With regard to his own language, however, Crimsworth's powers of self-surveillance prove less efficient. Running counter to the thrift on which he prides himself is a textual excess that disturbs the studied calculus of his self-representation, as the literal spills into the metaphorical. The “accumulated savings,” “habits of self-denying economy” and “husbanding” of his “monthly allowance” to which Crimsworth alludes literally refer to his talents of financial self-management. Yet at the same time, the terms he uses have a vital currency in contemporary medical discourses, where they circulate as figures for the ways in which male sexuality is ideally to be ordered. The locus classicus for such discourses is William Acton's The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life Considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations, published in the same year as Brontë's novel. Despite the apparent comprehensiveness of its title, Acton's inquiry is, as Steven Marcus points out, almost exclusively concerned with the sexual economy of the male (13). Within this economy, Acton defines semen as a kind of inner resource that, to adopt Crimsworth's term, requires careful “husbanding” both prior to and during marriage. Sexual expenditure occurring outside marital intercourse—especially in the baleful shape of masturbation—is simply a waste. Summarizing Acton's linkage of the sexual and the financial, Marcus writes:

The fantasies that are at work here have to do with economics; the body is regarded as a productive system with only a limited amount of material at its disposal. And the model on which the notion of semen is formed is clearly that of money. Science, in the shape of Acton, is thus still expressing what had for long been a popular fantasy: up until the end of the nineteenth century the chief English colloquial expression for the orgasm was “to spend.”

(22)

Given this discursive construction of male sexuality, the “anxious care” with which Crimsworth disposes of his “Eton pocket-money” takes on a new significance. The latter phrase is a covertly sexual coinage: both metonymically and metaphorically, it unites the genital and the financial.

Crimsworth's investment in the kind of sexual self-control obliquely figured in his restrained monetary “habits” is not surprising. To lose such mastery—as Acton and other medical commentators repeatedly insist—is for the male subject to become increasingly implicated in a range of moral, psychic and bodily disorders, resulting, ultimately, in madness and/or death. For Crimsworth, though, such a loss also entails something else. If Pelet's description of Crimsworth, in chapter 11, as a “cold frigid Islander!” (96) makes the connection between sexual repression and English masculinity explicit, Crimsworth, for his part, establishes an equally emphatic and complementary link between sexual licence and Pelet's identity as Frenchman:

He was not married and I soon perceived he had all a Frenchman's, all a Parisian's notions about matrimony and women; I suspected a degree of laxity in his code of morals, there was something so cold and blasé in his tone whenever he alluded to, what he called, “le beau sexe”; but he was too gentleman-like to intrude topics I did not invite, and as he was really intelligent and really fond of intellectual subjects of discourse, he and I always found enough to talk about, without seeking themes in the mire—I hated his fashion of mentioning Love, I abhorred, from my soul, mere Licentiousness, he felt the difference of our notions and, by mutual consent, we kept off ground debateable.

(70)

The “difference of […] notions” between these mutually consenting interlocutors resolves itself into a difference of nations, as Crimsworth scrupulously retreats from the lavish expenditures of a continental sexuality. Yet while Crimsworth is “willing,” at this point in their acquaintance at least, “to take Pelet for what he seemed” (70), he himself less frequently earns the same favours from the reader. As one whose monetary and sexual customs are marked alike by “habits of self-denying economy,” Crimsworth is necessarily a subject self-divided. The self-control that he arrogates to himself throughout the novel is simultaneously a mask for and symptom of an inner split. As Sally Shuttleworth argues:

The picture [Brontë] draws is not of an innate, assured masculinity, but rather of a social and gender identity created and sustained only through violence: the violence of self-repression and of repudiation of all who might threaten the carefully nurtured illusion of self-control.

(132)

Difference between is difference within. The oppositions by which Crimsworth recognizes and defines himself—between English and continental masculinities, sexual probity and “mere Licentiousness,” self and other—are the objectification of internal conflicts. These conflicts make of Crimsworth's own subjectivity a peculiarly vexed site, itself a “ground debateable.” What he claims to have “perceived” in the other is, more properly, the projection, or exportation, of what he represses in himself.

For Crimsworth, a deregulated sexuality is a national scandal, as the border, or “‘l'allée défendue’” (108), between English and continental masculinities is crossed and violated. Yet the self-protective stance he adopts toward Pelet is ultimately the sign of anxieties concerning racial as well as national contamination. These are manifested in the context of The Professor's treatment of miscegenation, no doubt one of the “themes” Crimsworth would want to consign firmly to his “mire.” Contemplating the physical charms of Caroline, Pelet treats himself to a fleeting fantasy of interracial desire in which she is Orientalized: “Ah there is beauty! beauty in perfection,” he exclaims, “what a cloud of sable curls about the face of a houri! What fascinating lips! What glorious black eyes!” (95-96). Despite his own previous figuration of Caroline in terms of a furious blackness, Crimsworth predictably recoils from these imaginings, debunking them merely as the product of an artificial “enthusiasm” and hearing “something in [Pelet's] tone which indicated got-up raptures” (96). This recoil parallels a gesture originally made in chapter 1, when the fantasy of miscegenation first articulates itself. In this version of the fantasy, gender-identities are transposed across the lines of race. Introduced to his brother's “handsome young wife,” Crimsworth “peruse[s] the fair page of [her] face” and finds it wanting:

I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity—coquetry, look out through its iris, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul. I am no Oriental, white necks—carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright curls do not suffice for me without that Promethean spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, the burnished hair grown grey.

(13)

Crimsworth's discriminatory assertion that “[he is] no Oriental” is one instance of what Glen calls the “insistent negativism” (13) of the novel's prose. But the negation operating here is not only stylistic but also psychic. It is suggestive of the kind of defensive strategy elaborated by Freud:

To negate something in a judgement is, at bottom, to say: “This is something which I should prefer to repress.” A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its “no” is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin—like, let us say, “Made in Germany”.

(438)

Crimsworth's revealingly fleshly claim that he has no desire for female bodies that withhold “a glimpse of soul” and are not supplemented by the classically enduring “Promethean spark,” is thus an admission of just such a desire, albeit in disguised or antithetical form. But what is particularly important about the self-cancelling logic in which Crimsworth is enmeshed is not so much the desires it discloses as where those desires are located. The sexuality he renounces is not of European origin—something “‘Made in Germany,’” Belgium or France, for example—but of more exotic provenance. Sexual desire thus poses a double problem for Crimsworth. On the one hand, it threatens to make him a male counterpart to those girls whom he teaches and classifies as “continental English.” These are “the daughters chiefly of broken adventures” (102), whose exilic exposure to European culture has imbued them with “an imbecile indifference to every sentiment that can elevate humanity” (103). On the other, it confronts him with the more alienating possibility of his own Orientalization.

Crimsworth's projection/exportation of his own desires onto the figures of Pelet and the imaginary “Oriental” is a process repeated in the context of his relations to the female other. The desires for the female body that Crimsworth represses return to him in the distorted form of a persecutory female sexuality. The central scene for this drama of repression and return is Zoraïde's “‘Pensionnat de demoiselles’” (61), where the erotic seems thoroughly to saturate the pedagogical. Its presence is immediately registered, in chapter 10, in the prurient comedy of the preparations Crimsworth makes before introducing himself to his class for their first lesson. Entering Zoraïde's “sanctum sanctorum” (83) and noting “a large tableau of wood painted black and varnished,” “a thick crayon of white chalk” and “a wet spunge,” Crimsworth comments:

having handled the crayon, looked back at the tableau, fingered the spunge in order to ascertain that it was in a right state of moisture—I found myself cool enough to admit of looking calmly up and gazing deliberately round me.

(84)

What Crimsworth sees, on raising his eyes, is an array of girls and young women, aged between “fourteen” and “twenty,” whose “forms [are] full even to solidity” (84). These superabundant figures are neither the prelapsarian “angels” (76), nor even “half-angels” (85), to whom he typically dedicates his “sentimental reflections” (66). Quickly “relieved” of such a “fond and oppressive fancy” (85), Crimsworth comes to view his female pupils, by chapter 12, as “a swinish tumult” (101). With the “isolated” exception of the “British English,” with their “grave and modest countenances” and “general air of native propriety and decency” (103), his class becomes the object of a violent disgust:

They were each and all supposed to have been reared in utter unconsciousness of vice—the precautions used to keep them ignorant, if not innocent, were innumerable; how was it then that scarcely one of those girls having attained the age of fourteen could look a man in the face with modesty and propriety? An air of bold, impudent flirtation or a loose, silly leer was sure to answer the most ordinary glance from a masculine eye. I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman-Catholic religion and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in popish Countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome. I record what I have seen—these girls belonged to, what are called, the respectable ranks of society, they had all been carefully brought up, yet was the mass of them mentally depraved.

(98)

Here Crimsworth claims for himself a scientific or empirical objectivity—“I record what I have seen.” This enables him, with seeming authority, to trace the genealogy of the hypersexualized continental female back to its twisted “root” in “Romish wizard-craft” (102). Yet Crimsworth's narrative perspective is no more reliable at this point in the novel than elsewhere. On closer inspection, the “ordinary glance” cast by the “masculine eye” seems to bear witness less to the sexual truth of women who inhabit “popish Countries,” than to the “sexual paranoia” (Boumelha 41) of the Protestant subject from whom that glance first emanates. Despite his contempt for “the discipline […] of the Church of Rome,” Crimsworth, in this passage, is not unlike the confessor to Sylvie, “at once the ugliest and the most attentive” (87) of his students. Crimsworth hesitates to reward Sylvie's attentiveness by even the slightest physical gesture for fear that such a “token of approbation” will be subsequently “misinterpreted and poisoned” (121) by her confessor as a sign of sexual impropriety. Yet he himself engages in just such an erroneous and overcharged hermeneutics. The depravity Crimsworth claims to behold in the collective visage of the schoolgirls “under [his] eye” (97) is a reflex of the sexuality he refuses to confront in himself.

In relation to Zoraïde's schoolgirls, Crimsworth is, paradoxically, the very source of the contamination by which he feels himself to be endangered. Such a paradoxical position is similarly evident in the context of his relation to Zoraïde herself. Despite her imminent marriage to Pelet, and Crimsworth's own increasing love for Frances, Zoraïde continues in her efforts to seduce the “English Master.” Just before the marriage is “solemnized” (198), Crimsworth outlines the “singular effect” that Zoraïde produces upon him:

her presence and manner […] sealed up all that was good, elicited all that was noxious in my nature; sometimes they enervated my senses, but they always hardened my heart. I was aware of the detriment done, and quarrelled with myself for the change. 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—I endured her homage sometimes, sometimes I rebuked it—my indifference or harshness served equally to increase the evil I desired to check.

(184)

This passage looks back to an earlier point in the text, where Pelet speculates that Zoraïde will “leave the print of her stealing steps on [Crimsworth's] heart” (94). It also reintroduces the slave trope, while rerouting it from British colonial/American contexts into the realms of the Oriental. Zoraïde is figured here as a “slave” because she readily submits herself to her own desires, to which—as much as to Crimsworth—she is “self-given.” Far from being the paragon of “abstract reason” she appears to be at first, Zoraïde is ultimately subject to the euphemistic rule of “strong propensities” (90). Yet her self-Orientalization is a means to gain mastery over Crimsworth, precisely by subjugating him to the role of “tyrant” over her. What is so “singular” about Zoraïde's “effect” is that it brings to light Crimsworth's own doubleness, as he struggles between the repression of and the yielding to desire. By the same token, it underlines the ways in which the contradictory elements of Crimsworth's “nature” are organized in terms of racial categories. If Crimsworth is “transform[ed] […] into what [he] abhor[s],” the reversal in question involves not only the dissolution into “gratification” and “pleasure” of his customary “Scipio-like self-control” (119). It is also figured as the assumption of a “noxious” Oriental identity, as he becomes “at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.”

Against the sexual menace of Zoraïde—her “body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul”—Frances functions, for Crimsworth, as antitype or perhaps even “antidote” (187). At the same time, she elicits from her teacher/lover and eventual spouse a desire that is distinctly narcissistic. In this way, she confirms Crimsworth's belief that nothing “pleases egotistical human beings so much as a softened and refined likeness of themselves” (24). In the first of a series of doublings, Frances, like Crimsworth, subscribes openly to the bourgeois ideology of self-improvement, initially attending his lessons “in order to perfect her knowledge of English” and so “qualify herself for a higher department of education” than that of the “lace-mending” and “ornamental needle-work” (116) by which she earns her living. In the course of her “instruction in English” (which, in rapid turn, is co-opted by Crimsworth as “a channel for instruction in literature” [146]), Frances proves herself to possess “Perseverance and a Sense of duty” to “a somewhat remarkable degree” (131). In this respect, indeed, she succeeds where her teacher, during his apprenticeship as “tradesman,” had failed: Frances's approach to her studies is genuinely resolute, while Crimsworth soon recognizes he is unable to “set up” even the simulacra of resolution—“the image of Duty [and] the fetish of Perseverance”—as his “household gods” (30). Her ambitions are finally rewarded when, like Crimsworth again, she becomes a successful teacher. The most significant of the doublings between the two figures occurs, finally, in terms of sexual taste. What makes Frances “for a sensualist—charmless,” is what defines her, for Crimsworth, as “a treasure” (168). As “the personification […] of self-denial and self-control” (169), Crimsworth's “best object” (168) reflects back to him the qualities that are the “guardians” and “trusty keepers” of his own sexuality and integral—for a middle-class Victorian ideology—to “the sanctuary of home” (169).

As Crimsworth's double, however, Frances necessarily also reproduces, rather than resolves, the sexual contradictions by which he is beset. In her culturally hybrid status as the daughter of an English mother and a French-speaking Swiss father, she is a living embodiment of the conflict between the sexual restraint and sexual excess associated, in this text, with English and French/continental identities, respectively. Crimsworth's repeated demands, at the beginning of the first of their “conferences” (138), that Frances “Speak English […]. English. […] keep to English” (139), instead of lapsing into the French that is her penchant, are thus not simply the sign of a certain linguistic colonization. At the same time, they connote a drive not only to quarantine Frances from the rabidly libidinized bodies of her classmates but also rid “that Genevese girl,” as she is at one point called (176), of the sexuality Crimsworth strives to exile from himself. The prosecution of such sexually repressive policies under the guise of linguistic instruction is at its clearest in the moment of Crimsworth's marriage proposal. Even as he acknowledges that French is “the language of [Frances's] own heart” (216), he nonetheless insists, once again, that his “pupil […]. Speak English” when replying to the offer of his hand. By the same token, in agreeing to “pass her life” (224) with Crimsworth, Frances, in the same breath, also consents to a different kind of passing: as wife and mother, she will continue to play the role of the “well-educated lady in Essex or Middlesex” (126) for whom Crimsworth, on first hearing her voice, had (mis)taken her—even to the point, it seems, of learning “how to make a cup of tea in rational English style” (246).

By means of the disciplinary techniques of a pedagogy and courtship often indistinguishable from one another, Crimsworth would appear to have refined his “young Genevese” (252) into an ideally desexualized partner. Yet the prospect of marriage to the “serviceable” (217) Frances works, paradoxically, only to uncover the sexual degradation he both fears in himself and projects onto others. Following their betrothal, Crimsworth uncharacteristically confesses that he appreciates Frances not only because of her “mental points”—her intellectual and moral virtues—but also for “the graces of her person,” even endowing her with the “well-set teeth” previously seen, in the “Maroon”-like Caroline, to be the mark of a racialized sexuality. Recognizing that he derives “a pleasure purely material” from Frances's “delicate form,” he is forced into belated acknowledgement of the similarities between himself and those he otherwise detests—Pelet, his schoolgirls, Zoraïde: “It appeared then, that I too was a sensualist, in my temperate and fastidious way.”

The signs of Crimsworth's sensuality are subsequently manifested in the erotic fantasies precipitated by thoughts of carnal union with Frances in marriage. Although these fantasies are textually censored, they are deducible from the nocturnal restlessness that takes hold of Crimsworth as the immediate result of securing Frances as wife. As he returns to his rooms and tries to sleep, Crimsworth discovers that the “sweet delirium” of “the last few hours” (227) will not “subside” and continues, indeed, “till long after midnight” to break his “rest” with “troubled ecstacy.” What he also discovers, however, is that sleep itself is the means by which his troubles only ramify:

At last I dozed, but not for long; it was yet quite dark when I awoke and my waking was like that of Job when a spirit passed before his face, and like him, “The hair of my flesh stood up.” I might continue the parallel, for in truth, though I saw nothing yet “A thing was secretly brought unto me, and mine ear received a little thereof; there was silence and I heard a voice,” saying:

“In the midst of Life, we are in Death.”

(228)

While Crimsworth's sudden “waking” propels him into identification with the Biblical Job, the terms in which he couches his return to consciousness bring it into “parallel” with a different kind of arousal. The implication—crude but coded—is that it is not just “‘The hair of [his] flesh’” but the “flesh” itself that “st[ands] up” here. The language spoken by the hallucinatory “voice” is similarly risqué in its combination of climactic pleasure with extinction. Its death-in-life ejaculation is a double entendre, hinting at the discharge in the “midst” of whose occurrence Crimsworth, on stirring, is alarmed to find himself located.

Crimsworth's elided dream of Frances is thus adulterated by the vagaries of the masturbatory body. This is a reading confirmed by the manner in which his nocturnal ordeals develop, as the sexual intimacies he both anticipates and prematurely enjoys effect a disruptive return of the past upon the present. In one of The Professor's strangest and most haunting sequences, Crimsworth describes how, in the aftermath to his solitary blisses, he feels his “chamber invaded by one [he] had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed.” Identifying this revenant as the feminized figure of “Hypochondria,” he goes on to detail their first encounters:

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 eat with me, she walked out with me, shewing 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. What tales she would tell me, at such hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would discourse to me of her own Country—The Grave—and again and again promise to conduct me there erelong; and drawing me to the very brink of a black, sullen river, shew me on the other side, shores unequal with mound, monument and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight. “Necropolis!” she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add “It contains a mansion, prepared for you.”

(228)

As both Azim (155-56) and Shuttleworth (141-44) suggest, the “Hypochondria” that “accost[s]” Crimsworth “now” and “then” (229) is a symptom whose aetiology, in contemporary medical discourse, is frequently linked, precisely, to the practice of masturbation. Just as it is the protocol of the symptom—according to psychoanalysis—both to disguise and disclose its cause, so Crimsworth's prose might be said to operate in terms of a symptomatic logic. This is evidenced by the way that the specifically sexual nature of the hidden origin from which his condition first arises and then recurs is flagrantly exhibited by the language in which the condition itself is articulated. In both past and present incarnations, “Hypochondria” figures as mistress. As the “acquaintance, nay […] guest” of Crimsworth's pubescence, she is pursued and possessed in “secret” across a range of erogenous zones. These stretch from domestic locations (“bed and board”) to the wilder scenes of “nooks in woods” and “hollows in hills” that themselves map out, in Shuttleworth's phrase, “the symbolic terrain of the female body” (141). Similarly, on her subsequent advent, “Hypochondria” takes the form of “a dreaded and ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband's heart towards his young bride.” As if to underwrite the continuity between past and present, her second coming is stimulated by the anonymous “caress of a soft hand” (229). Is this the “hand” of marriage or masturbation, belonging to Frances or Crimsworth?

The Professor's own “discourse” on “Hypochondria” is consistent with contemporary medical assumptions about the deleterious effects of masturbation upon the male subject. Even as Crimsworth remembers himself as initially enjoying his symptom, “Hypochondria” is soon revealed to be an agent of destruction rather than jouissance, or rather destruction through jouissance. She is less mistress than femme fatale and, ultimately, grave-tender. The “Necropolis” to which she threatens finally to “conduct” her young charge is a concrete symbol for the terrifying dead end for which, according to Victorian sexual ideology, the self-abusive male is destined. At the same time, it functions as another site in which the novel's association of sexuality with forms of foreignness is dramatized. By describing “The Grave” over which “Hypochondria” presides as “her own Country,” Crimsworth implies that the prospective burial-ground of a misspent youth is located in an alien space or terra incognita. His psychic geography is further exoticized by “Hypochondria”'s second visit, in which she takes the form of “concubine.” In this latter guise, she seems much like one of the “oriental odalisques” (26) with whom Hunsden associates aristocratic women in chapter 3. More disturbingly, she seems, also, to resemble the Zoraïde whom Crimsworth has renounced for Frances and whose “soft step” leads out toward an Oriental space.

After some nine days of struggle against his “evil spirit,” Crimsworth begins slowly to regain his equilibrium and, within a “fortnight,” declares himself fit to “seek Frances and sit at her side” once more. Yet even as he resists the “sway” of his foreign cum Oriental “demon” (229), Crimsworth's married life with Frances is not quite patterned according to the symmetry of mutual restraint for which he might have hoped. Much to his chagrin, it bears a somewhat closer resemblance to the adulterous geometry of the “Modern French novel” (187) in which he suspects Zoraïde will entangle him after her marriage to Pelet. For in Frances, Crimsworth seems, as he puts it, “to possess two wives” (250). Moving from English to French, Frances simultaneously translates herself across the fragile border between sexual self-control and sexual excess. Her mimicry of Crimsworth, that “man of regular life and rational mind” (159), is also a mockery:

Talk French to me she would, and many a punishment she has had for her wilfulness—I fear the choice of chastisement must have been injudicious, for instead of correcting the fault, it seemed to encourage its renewal. […] In those moments […] she would shew me what she had of vivacity, of mirth, of originality in her well-dowered nature. She would shew too some stores of raillery, of “malice”, and would vex, tease, pique me sometimes about what she called my “bizarreries anglaises”, my “caprices insulaires”, with a wild and witty wickedness that made a perfect white demon of her while it lasted. This was rare, however, and the elfish freak was always short: sometimes when driven a little hard in the war of words, for her tongue did ample justice to the pith, the point, the delicacy of her native French, in which language she always attacked me—I used to turn upon her with my old decision, and arrest bodily the sprite that teased me. Vain idea! no sooner had I grasped hand or arm, than the elf was gone; the provocative smile quenched in the expressive brown eyes, and a ray of gentle homage shone under the lids in its place: I had seized a mere vexing fairy and found a submissive and supplicating little mortal woman in my arms. Then I made her get a book, and read English to me for an hour by way of penance. I frequently dosed her with Wordsworth in this way and Wordsworth steadied her soon.

(252-53)

In this long passage, language is the sado-masochistic medium in which questions of sexuality, nation and race are fused. When Frances “Talk[s] French” to her husband, she disrupts the “illusion” Crimsworth has carefully built around her. On these occasions, she behaves less like the “fair-complexioned, English-looking girl” (174) of his repressive fantasies than the “arrant coquettes” (95) of the daymares suffered at Zoraïde's school. Such linguistic lapses are also implicitly sexual ones, as Frances unnervingly changes from angel in the house to “perfect white demon.”

In the “war of words” between husband and wife, Crimsworth will always be the loser, not least because the language in which he recounts their struggle is—as much as Frances and her aggressively capable “tongue”—beyond his control. This loss of linguistic mastery is marked in two ways, the first of which relates to the glaring contradiction underpinning Crimsworth's marital pedagogy. By being forced to “read English […] for an hour” and “frequently dosed […] with Wordsworth,” Frances, Crimsworth claims, is “steadied […] soon.” Yet this itself is surely an extravagant assertion, since it has already been conceded that “the choice of chastisement” is “injudicious” and “correcting the fault” of Frances's linguistic and sexual orientations merely “encourage[s] its renewal.” The authority of Frances's embattled “English professor” (252) is challenged, secondly, by the silent misdemeanours of allusion. While Frances earlier consciously rewrites Othello with “parts […] reversed,” Crimsworth here rehearses Shakespeare's play with the main roles more conventionally—if unconsciously—distributed, as the striking disciplinary failures of his marriage parallel those of Othello's relation to Desdemona (whose own name is half-echoed in the figuring of Frances as “demon”). According to Stephen J. Greenblatt, “rather than confirming male authority, [Desdemona's] submission eroticizes everything to which it responds,” including even the “mistreatment” she receives from her husband (80). As she herself muses, confiding to Emilia: “my love doth so approve [Othello], / That even his stubbornness, his checks and frowns,— / Prithee, unpin me,—have grace and favour in them” (4. 3. 19-21). In the same way, the “punishment”—in the shape of Wordsworth—to which Crimsworth resorts simply results in further wrongdoing, making him the victim of an irony that is, in fact, Shakespearean.

In the novel's closing scenes, Crimsworth, now permanently resident with his family in England, turns his attentions—and the reader's—toward the question of his son. Victor—“soon [to] go to Eton” (265), like his father before him—is a figure stranger even than the child of a “strange hybrid race” who, as Hunsden speculates, is the potential “progeny” (203) of Zoraïde's marriage to Pelet. There is, his father complains:

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.

(266)

In figuring the “something in Victor's temper” as “the leaven of the offending Adam,” Crimsworth diagnoses in his son a condition that covers a multitude of sins, ranging from the vices of a generalized carnality to the more personal falls of his own “boyhood.” From this perspective, the “sparks” periodically emitted by Victor are “ominous” indeed: they are the first signs of an implicit sexual impurity that is the mark, in turn, of national and racial infections. Victor must be “soundly disciplined,” body and mind, in order that his Englishness, already compromised by the line of a double-speaking mother, be insulated against further violation.

Notes

1. As Harlow and Carter observe, Macaulay's “Minute” is “a critical […] contribution to the debate on the respective roles of Indian and English traditions in the issues of government and instruction” (62). For a detailed analysis of this debate and, in particular, the role of English literature as an instrument of colonial domination, see Viswanathan.

2. For further theoretical analyses of the relations between race and metaphor see Lloyd passim and Meyer 1-28.

3. See, for example, Marx's comment, in Capital, that “Liverpool waxed fat on the slavetrade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. […] The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world” (qtd. in Fryer 12). See also Fanon 81. The intricate relations between slavery and economic wealth in Brontë's Yorkshire—together with her own and Emily Brontë's meticulous fictional reworkings of these relations—are minutely excavated in Heywood.

4. In his Jamaican diary entry for 9 April 1818, Matthew Lewis provides a graphically non-fictional version of the kind of colonial domination to which Juanna looks forward, while at the same time making the female the object rather than agent of abuse. Refuting the opinion “that conduct so savage occurs rarely in any country,” Lewis writes: “I have not passed six months in Jamaica, and I have already found on one of my estates a woman who had been kicked in the womb by a white book-keeper, by which she was crippled herself, and on another of my estates another woman who had been kicked in the womb by another white book-keeper, by which he had crippled the child. […] and thus, as my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say, from my own knowledge (i.e. speaking literally, observe), that ‘white book-keepers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other’” (241).

5. The politically charged nature of the figure of the “Maroon” is noted, in a brief discussion of this passage, by Meyer 61 n.5.

6. A similar point is made by Shuttleworth 127. For a useful overview of the Foucauldian elements running through The Professor as a whole, see Glen 18-19.

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