SOURCE: Introduction to The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë, edited by Heather Glen, Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 7-31.

[In the following essay, Glen disputes earlier critics’ claims that The Professor is an amateur or apprentice work, arguing instead that it provides a “coherent imaginative interrogation of values and assumptions” regarding masculinity and society.]

The Professor was the first of Charlotte Brontë's four novels to be written. It is also by far the least known. Completed, probably, at some time in 1846, it was one of the ‘three distinct and unconnected tales’ that the Brontë sisters, as ‘Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’, began in that year to send out to publishers as ‘a work of fiction in 3 vols’. But unlike the other two of those tales, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, it failed to appear in its author's lifetime. Nine times, in all, it was rejected by publishers: the rejections continued even after the success of Jane Eyre had made Charlotte Brontë a household name. And when, in 1857, her widower prepared the manuscript for publication, it was with some misgivings and in a slightly bowdlerized form.

For The Professor is not a novel to which readers have been indifferent. It has generally been adjudged an unpleasant and oddly disquieting book. Mrs Gaskell, reading it for the first time in manuscript, was uneasy: ‘[it] is disfigured by more coarseness—& profanity in quoting texts of Scripture disagreeably than in any of her other works’. On its first publication, an anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum found that ‘the impression left on the reader’ was ‘one of pain and incompleteness’: subsequent critics have concurred in finding it the least satisfactory and certainly the least attractive of Charlotte Brontë's novels. The usual explanation is that this novel is merely a piece of prentice-work, written before its author found her mature fictional voice. Thus, early reviewers—indeed, Charlotte Brontë's publisher himself—saw The Professor as an abortive draft of Villette, cruder, clumsier, less finished. More recent critics have taken up this theme, often tracing the novel's ‘flaws’ to the fact that it is the only one of Charlotte Brontë's published works to adopt the point of view of a male narrator. The similarity between the main events of Crimsworth's story—the journey to Brussels to become a teacher, the struggle for economic independence, the longed-for love affair between master and pupil—and some of the facts of Charlotte Brontë's life has led them to see The Professor as a rather clumsy fictionalization of autobiographical concerns—concerns to which Charlotte Brontë later gave more successful expression through the female voices of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe.

Yet Charlotte Brontë herself did not see it thus. In December 1847, two months after the publication of Jane Eyre, she replied to her publisher's request for a second, serial novel with the suggestion that she should ‘recast’ The Professor:

the middle and latter portion of the work, all that relates to Brussels, the Belgian school etc. is as good as I can write; it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre. It gives, I think, a new view of a grade, an occupation, and a class of characters—all very common-place, very insignificant in themselves, but not more so than the materials composing that portion of Jane Eyre which seems to please most generally—.

For several years after she had become a famous, indeed, a best-selling novelist, she continued to work over the manuscript with a view to publication. She drafted two prefaces. And when, in February 1851, her publishers Smith, Elder & Co. for a third time responded unenthusiastically, she humorously but definitively refused their suggestion that they take custody of the manuscript, and once again spoke up for her much rejected work:

of course my feelings towards it can only be paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child. Its merit—I plainly perceive—will never be owned by anybody but Mr Williams and me; very particular and unique must be our penetration, and I think highly of us both accordingly. You may allege that that merit is not visible to the naked eye. Granted; but the smaller the commodity—the more inestimable its value.

It seems unlikely that the novelist who had written, only six months before (in reply to the critics who had seen Wuthering Heights as ‘an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre’), that ‘that writer who could attempt to palm off an inferior and immature production under cover of one successful effort, must indeed be unduly eager after the secondary and sordid result of authorship, and pitiably indifferent to its true and honourable meed’¹ should thus re-work and defend and endeavour to publish a novel that she herself regarded as immature, or as superseded by her own later achievement.

Was this merely authorial partiality? Is The Professor the assured and achieved work of art that Charlotte Brontë believed it to be? Or is it of interest today merely because it is a relatively unknown work by a major and much loved novelist? In this introduction I wish to argue that the charge of ‘unpleasantness’ that has so often been brought against this novel provides a more important clue to its nature than does the patronizing judgement that dismisses it as an immature failure. For much in The Professor that appears ‘unpleasant’ is in fact significant: part of a coherent imaginative interrogation of values and assumptions, which Charlotte Brontë is often assumed to have shared.

It is, perhaps, worth considering how The Professor would have appeared to early Victorian readers had it been published in 1846, when Charlotte Brontë first submitted it, and not as it appeared from the perspective provided by those later, more obviously compelling works, Jane Eyre and Villette, and by that most haunting of literary biographies, Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. For to see The Professor simply as an earlier (or, as Terry Eagleton has argued, a ‘more dishonest and idealized’) version of Villette, or as a clumsy attempt to explore its author's own experiences through the awkward disguise of a male narrator, is essentially to fail to see the kind of thing it is. In one respect, at least, it is very different from Villette. For it is offered to the reader less as the confessional autobiography of a peculiar individual than as a fictional example of a quite distinct and influential contemporary genre—that of the exemplary biography of the self-made man. Such lives, usually in shorter versions, would have been very familiar by the middle years of the 1840s. In 1829 the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had launched its Library of Entertaining Knowledge with the publication of George Lillie Craik's The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, a compendium of biographies of scientists, scholars, engineers and inventors, intended to serve as models for those without birth or connections who wished to make their way in the world. Craik's volume went into several editions (one re-cast ‘with female examples’) in the 1830s and 1840s, and was well known enough to be mocked by Thackeray in Vanity Fair (Chapter 37). Similar ‘lives’ quickly become popular in periodicals such as Chamber's Edinburgh Journal and the Penny Magazine. It was not until 1859 that the genre reached its peak, with the publication of the phenomenally best-selling Self-Help by one of Craik's more admiring readers, Samuel Smiles. But the origins of Self-Help lay in the 1840s. The lectures that formed the basis of that classic were first delivered to a young men's mutual improvement society in Leeds in 1845—the year following that in which the Brontë sisters, only a few miles away, had produced the prospectus for the boarding-school that they had hoped would make them independent, and the year in which, very probably, Charlotte Brontë began to write this novel.

Many features of Charlotte Brontë's narrative may be paralleled in the writing of Smiles and his precursors. The commitment to sober realism announced in her preface—‘I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs’—reads like a description of their subject-matter: ‘the ordinary business and pursuits of common life … examples of conduct and character drawn from reading, observation and experience’. Like the heroes of Craik and Smiles, of Chamber's Journal and the Penny Magazine, her Crimsworth succeeds not because of birth or good fortune but despite handicaps, and through his own unaided efforts. The values he invokes are the classic values of the Self-Help tradition—industry and perseverance, self-reliance and independence, self-respect and self-control. And his story—the story of a young man who must make his own way in the world, who labours first as a clerk and then as a school-master, who works his way up until he owns his own school, and in the process makes a suitable marriage (rejecting a less prudent sexual adventure)—seems to be one in which those virtues are demonstrated and vindicated. When one sets it within this context, The Professor seems less a clumsy attempt to hide its author's ‘real’, feminine concerns behind the mask of a male narrator than a fictional imitation of a genre that (despite Craik's ‘female examples’) was overwhelmingly masculine.

Yet, unlike the classics of that genre, it failed—and has continued to fail—to win popularity. For, as generations of readers have noted, there is something oddly disagreeable, even repellent, about Crimsworth's story. It seems altogether more disturbing than one might expect of a simple tale of obstacles surmounted and victory won—full of suggestions of a barely suppressed violence, a peculiarly sadistic sexuality. And Crimsworth himself is a more disquieting character than the heroes of the Self-Help tradition—anxiously watchful, coolly domineering, a prey to ‘Hypochondria’. There seems to be a curious disjunction between his own self-image, of independence and success, and the overall effect of his narrative.

One way of accounting for this has been to cite Charlotte Brontë's inexperience as a novelist, the uncertainty she must have felt in the use of the masculine voice. Yet the reality, I think, is altogether more interesting than this. And here, once again, her preface provides a clue. For in the opening sentence of that preface she takes pains to deny that this is in any way ‘a first attempt’, and announces that ‘the pen which wrote it had been previously worn a good deal in a practice of some years’. And if one turns to what survives of that ‘practice’, to the extraordinary body of childhood and adolescent writings that were her contribution to the Brontë children's shared fantasy world, one sees a kind of literary experimentation which dispels the notion that the author of The Professor was an inexperienced amateur, clumsily seeking expression for her own personal concerns. For fifteen years before she came to write this novel, Charlotte Brontë had been playing with different kinds of narrative voice. The majority of her early stories are told from the points of view of male narrators, narrators who are themselves often seen with a highly sophisticated irony. A favourite, for instance, is Lord Charles Wellesley, a bombastic but uncertain, cynical but vulnerable, world-weary would-be Byronic hero: even as he swaggers and postures, his pretensions are exposed and mocked and his insecurities revealed. The voice of the first person in these tales is not simply one of special pleading, but is itself objectified and questioned. From a very early age, Charlotte Brontë seems to have been using the male narrator not as a ‘disguise’ but as a means of exploring the logic and the limitations of a particular kind of contemporary masculine stance.

To look at The Professor from the perspective provided by these writings is to begin to see a novel rather different from the awkward piece of prentice-work it has often been taken to be. The oddities of Crimsworth's narrative cannot, it seems, be attributed simply to Charlotte Brontë's inexperience in handling the masculine voice. Rather, they appear to be part of an astute and highly critical exploration of the nature and the implications of the existential stance he exemplifies—that existential stance which in mid-Victorian England was enshrined and celebrated in the tradition of Self-Help.

The first chapter of The Professor consists of a letter, which, the narrator explains, was ‘sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance’; thereafter, the epistolary form is abruptly abandoned for a straight first-person narrative. But this apparent false start does not seem to be the result of authorial ineptness. For its effect is distinctive and powerful; and it is reinforced and elaborated in the novel that follows. We learn at the end of the first chapter that no answer to this letter was ever received; that by the time it arrived, its intended recipient had departed the country: ‘What has become of him since, I know not.’ The confidence and intimacy usually assumed by the first-person form thus receives a curious check at the outset of this narrative. Crimsworth announces, at the end of the chapter, that he will now ‘dedicate’ his tale to ‘the public at large’: but the opening image of the unreceived and unanswered letter to the now-vanished friend remains as a pendant to the rest. And as one examines the novel more closely, this seems less an awkward incongruity than an exact and ironic pointer to the import of the whole.

For the world that is introduced in this opening chapter is one in which there seems to be no possibility of positive human interaction at all. The first paragraph of Crimsworth's letter recalls and reconstructs the relation between himself and his friend in a prose whose insistent negativism suggests not expressive interrelation but unceasing defensive opposition:

What animal magnetism drew thee and me together I know not; certainly I never experienced anything of the Pylades and Orestes sentiment for you, and I have reason to believe that you, on your part, were equally free from all romantic regard to me … your sardonic coldness did not move me. I felt myself superior to that check then as I do now.

(p. 39)

‘I felt myself superior … then as … now’: the assertion of an unchanging and antagonistically ‘superior’ self against the threat that even a friendly other presents prefigures what is to follow. This, in a sense, is what this curious and chilling narrative of self-help is. And the final image, of separation and dead end, points towards some of the most peculiar features of that narrative.

From the very beginning, Crimsworth's story is framed in imagery of opposition, of antipathy, of rejection and resistance. The marked negativism of the prose is accompanied by a constant emphasis on refusal and denial: ‘his daughters, all of whom I greatly dislike’, ‘I declined both the Church and matrimony’, ‘I had had no thoughts of the sort’, ‘I do not think that my turn of mind qualifies me to make a good tradesman’, ‘my uncles did not remonstrate; they and I parted with mutual disgust’, ‘a resolution no more to take bread from hands which had refused to minister to the necessities of my dying mother’, ‘an irreparable breach’, ‘I repressed all—even mental comment on his note’, ‘I anticipated no overflowings of fraternal tenderness’, ‘my refusal of their proposals will, I fancy, operate as a barrier against all future intercourse’. These quotations are taken from the opening pages of the novel, but they are entirely characteristic of the whole. Not merely the narrator but all whom he meets habitually oppose, reject, repulse, resist, deny. Even supposedly non-hostile encounters are portrayed in terms of opposition and combat, from the first glimpse of Crimsworth's brother and his wife—‘she chid him, half playfully, half poutingly, for being late … Mr Crimsworth soon checked her animated scolding with a kiss … She and Edward talked much, always in a vein of playful contention …’ (p. 45, my italics)—to the closing portrait of the relation between Crimsworth and his son. The world of the novel is one in which awareness of difference leads not to interaction but to antagonism, rejection, separation. ‘Once convinced’, says Crimsworth, ‘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.’ Teaching is a battle: the task of the teacher is not to respond to her pupils but ‘to enter into conflict with this foreign will to endeavour to bend it into subjection to her own’. And the pupils thus confronted are ‘marked by a point-blank disregard of all forbearance towards each other or their teachers; an eager pursuit by each individual of her own interest and convenience; and a coarse indifference to the interest and convenience of every one else’.

Even the courtship between Frances and Crimsworth is imaged as a struggle for power. Thus, when he praises her work she appears to him not gratified but ‘triumphant’—a triumph that he feels impelled to check by ‘reproof’. The scene of his proposal to her is marked by a barely suppressed violence. He holds her in ‘a somewhat ruthless grasp’ and insists that she speaks his language rather than hers: she, for her part, is ‘as stirless in her happiness as a mouse in its terror’. And the moment in which the marriage ‘compact’ is ‘framed’ and ‘sealed’ is a moment not of intercommunion, or even of emotional expressiveness, but one that confirms the fundamental separateness of each:

she and I were silent, nor was our silence brief. Frances' thoughts, during this interval, I know not, nor did I attempt to guess them; I was not occupied in searching her countenance, nor in otherwise troubling her composure. The peace I felt, I wished her to feel; my arm, it is true, still detained her; but with a restraint that was gentle enough, so long as no opposition tightened it. My gaze was on the red fire; my heart was measuring its own content; it sounded and sounded, and found the depth fathomless.

(p. 249)

The only ‘peace’ that Crimsworth can offer is one of relief from his ‘troubling’ attention. His ‘content’ is a private treasure, to be reckoned and hoarded up within himself.

Again and again, and in a variety of ways, the novel emphasizes the absence of anything like positive feeling for others within the world projected by Crimsworth's narrative. Where such feeling is envisaged, its nature is suggested by the word that is several times applied to it—‘forbearance’: it is seen as depending on the suppression, rather than the expression, of impulse. Throughout the novel, rare moments of accord are marked by comments such as ‘I agreed with him, but did not say so’, ‘I put no obstacle in her way.’ Good will is either so arbitrary, so inexplicable, as to appear to be a kind of perversity (Hunsden's assistance to Crimsworth is presented thus), or it is part of the universal, self-interested struggle to maintain ‘the advantage’ (M. Vandenhuten assists Crimsworth because he is desirous of ‘discharging the obligation under which he affirmed I had laid him’). Such concord between individuals as there is seems simply an extension of egotism. Crimsworth and his wife, Frances, become a joint financial and educational enterprise; she describes patriotism approvingly as that which ‘spreads man's selfishness in wider circles’. The pervasive image of human relations is of conflict or, at best, friction between self-defensive and self-seeking individuals.

Yet if there is little positive interaction between them, the people in this world are far from impervious to one another. One and all watch each other continually. Charlotte Brontë's carefully structured prose—very different from the colourless prose of the self-help narratives—charts a pervasive process not merely of aggressive opposition but of constant mutual surveillance. Almost as prominent in the novel as its imagery of antagonism is its imagery of looking and being looked at. The account that Crimsworth gives of his employment as a clerk is in fact an account of others' attempts to find him out (the taskmaster's watchfulness, his brother's inquiries, his landlady's speculations, Hunsden's curiosity) and his own efforts to evade them: ‘I was guarded by three faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling and prying as was Edward's malignity, it could never baffle the lynx-eyes of these, my natural sentinels.’ The school to which he goes is a place of staring eyes—‘when I glanced around, behold all the boarders … were congregated within a yard or two of my desk, and stood staring with eyes and mouths wide open’—in which his central strategy is to watch more sharply and from a more ‘commanding’ position than they. ‘I carefully and deliberately made these observations before allowing myself to take one glance at the benches before me … I found myself cool enough to admit of looking calmly up and gazing deliberately about me.’ Interaction with others is a process of watching and counter-watching. Thus, Crimsworth's power struggle with Mlle Reuter begins with looks—‘Her look of affright I answered with one of composure’—and continues in the same manner:

her eye, fastened on my face, demanded of every feature the meaning of my changed and careless manner. ‘I will give her an answer,’ thought I; and, meeting her gaze full, arresting, fixing her glance, I shot into her eyes, from my own, a look, where there was no respect, no love, no tenderness, no gallantry.

(p. 142)

And his ‘war’ with the students is conducted in similar terms: ‘I found pleasure in answering the glance of vanity with the gaze of stoicism.’

But, more often, looking appears less as a mode than as a refusal of interaction. Again and again, at moments when another threatens in some way to impinge upon Crimsworth, that other is turned into an object of observation. Thus, as the ‘disgust’ inspired by his brother threatens his self-composure,

I looked at him: I measured his robust frame and powerful proportions; I saw my own reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece; I amused myself with comparing the two pictures … As an animal, Edward excelled me far; should he prove as paramount in mind as in person I must be a slave … his cold, avaricious eye, his stern, forbidding manner told me he would not spare.

(p. 49)

The interview in which Hunsden challenges his efforts to become a tradesman stirs him deeply; but instead of betraying himself to this other he employs himself in ‘a rapid scrutiny of his physiognomy’, reading the signs of character in his face and lineaments. When Hunsden appears unexpectedly in his room in Belgium, his first act—even before speaking to his visitor—is to polish his spectacles and examine the other's ‘mien and countenance’: ‘I was sitting in the window-seat, with my back to the light, and I had him vis-à-vis: a position he would much rather have had reversed; for, at any time, he preferred scrutinizing to being scrutinized.’ ‘Her gaze was ever waiting for mine, and it frequently succeeded in arresting it,’ he says of Adèle, his ‘Gorgon-like’ pupil: but rather than allowing himself to be petrified by that gaze, he turns the face before him into an object of physiognomical observation—‘Suspicion, sullen ill-temper were on her forehead, vicious propensities in her eye, envy and panther-like deceit about her mouth.’

The objectifying language of physiognomy recurs throughout the novel. Even, or especially, when Crimsworth is moved by passion, this is his strategy. Admitting that he is ‘on the brink of falling in love’ with the fascinating Mlle Reuter, he decides to renew his ‘observations’ of her, and marvels at ‘how calm she is under scrutiny’: he spies on her, secretly, from the vantage-point of the window whose unboarding he has requested. Such imagery reaches its climax in his account of his developing relation with his future wife. At first she appears as a shadowy figure, of whom ‘I never had more than a passing glimpse … consequently I had no opportunity of studying her character, or even of observing her person much’; then she becomes a physiognomical specimen, whose ‘sentiments’ he attempts to ‘decipher in her countenance’. She looks at him; and his response is to scrutinize her—‘I saw the new pupil was puzzled at first … once or twice she looked at me with a sort of painful solicitude … She looked at me; her eye said most plainly, “I cannot follow you”’—and to turn away when communication is threatened—‘I disregarded the appeal.’ And these preliminaries are succeeded by a series of scenes in which Crimsworth spies on Frances, watching her grief in the cemetery, ‘eavesdropping’ on her landing before their marriage, observing her first encounter with Hunsden from ‘my position [from which] I could see them both’, following and watching as she bids her son goodnight years afterwards.

This imagery of looking and being looked at runs throughout the novel, chillingly replacing any more intimate conception of human interaction. And it points not merely to a peculiar strategy of the individual, Crimsworth, but to the essential nature of the world through which he moves. In an extraordinarily precise and consistent way, Charlotte Brontë seems to be exposing and articulating the logic of a whole society—a society whose essential dynamics are the same as those that Jeremy Bentham had sought to enshrine and objectify in his great plan for a ‘Panopticon’ some fifty years before. The Panopticon, it will be recalled, was an exemplary institution—a school or a madhouse, a factory or a prison—in which the inmates would be completely separated from one another within individual cells, and in which each would be clearly visible from a central inspection tower. It thus provides a peculiarly exact architectural image for those strategies of control through observation, through objectification of the other, that seem to dominate Crimsworth's world of individualistic achievement. As Michel Foucault, arguing for the centrality of such strategies in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French and English society, puts it: ‘The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.’² This principle is evident, of course, in the institutions depicted in this novel: in Edward's factory counting-house with its vigilant ‘taskmaster’, in the schoolroom with its disciplinary surveillance. But, as her ‘autobiographical’ form suggests, Charlotte Brontë is not primarily concerned with institutions. Rather, with an often quite chilling acuteness, she charts the operation of such strategies in the most intimate recesses of the personality. And, in doing so, she exposes their disquieting implications.

The fundamental assumption of Crimsworth's narrative—an assumption embedded in that informing imagery of controlling observation—is the primacy of the antagonistic individual perspective, a perspective opposed to rather than shaped or modified by that of others. And, as Charlotte Brontë carefully shows, the individual who defines himself thus is a problematic entity. For even the most ordinary situations in this avowedly ‘plain and homely’ novel are charged, in Crimsworth's telling, with a peculiar tension. Thus he describes his first day as a clerk in his brother's counting-house:

A sentiment of keen pleasure accompanied this first effort to earn my own living—a sentiment neither poisoned nor weakened by the presence of the taskmaster, who stood and watched me for some time as I wrote. I thought he was trying to read my character, but I felt as secure against his scrutiny as if I had had on a casque with the visor down—or rather I showed him my countenance with the confidence that one would show an unlearned man a letter written in Greek; he might see lines, and trace characters, but he could make nothing of them; my nature was not his nature, and its signs were to him like the words of an unknown tongue. Ere long he turned away abruptly, as if baffled, and left the counting-house …

(p. 53)

Ostensibly, the moment is one of some satisfaction; of ‘keen pleasure’, even of victory. Yet that ‘keen pleasure’—a pleasure less in the employment itself than in the fact that it is an ‘effort’ to become self-subsistent—is scarcely admitted before it seems to be threatened by the only other present, the watching ‘taskmaster’. Thus, even positive feeling takes on the character of an antagonism—‘neither poisoned nor weakened’. The taskmaster becomes first an enemy whose ‘scrutiny’ is like a military threat; and then an inferior, an ‘unlearned man’ who cannot read the signs of the speaker's nature. The self in this encounter is hidden, defended, watching but indecipherable; and the confrontation ends, like most confrontations in this novel, with an abrupt turning away.

Yet if Crimsworth asserts his impregnable superiority, the prose registers an altogether more disquieting state of affairs. For the paragraph and the chapter end not with an account of the narrator's feelings, or of the work he pursues in such superior isolation (such as might be expected if the novel were to take his own view of himself, of his ‘pleasure’ and ‘security’), but with an almost obsessive concentration on the actions of the antagonistic other in this scene:

he returned to it but twice in the course of that day; each time he mixed and swallowed a glass of brandy-and-water, the materials for making which he extracted from a cupboard on one side of the fireplace; having glanced at my translations—he could read both French and German—he went out again in silence.

(pp. 53-4)

The embattled, defensive self has shrunk to a mere watching point of consciousness; more concerned, it seems, with that which threatens it than with its own activity. And the next chapter begins as this ends, with a description of the efforts of those about to find him out:

Mr Crimsworth watched sharply for defects, but found none; he set Timothy Steighton, his favourite and head man, to watch also. Tim was baffled … Mr Crimsworth made inquiries as to how I lived, whether I got into debt … Mr Crimsworth employed Tim to find out whether my landlady had any complaint to make on the score of my morals; she answered that she believed I was a very religious man, and asked Tim, in her turn, if he thought I had any intention of going into the Church some day …

(p. 55)

The essential drama has become not the development of, or even the choices facing, the self, but the activity of these others and the strategies of the self to evade them.

What we see in this passage we see in the novel as a whole. Crimsworth's story, on one level a tale of self-respect vindicated, of self-sufficiency affirmed and rewarded, of individual success, is on another level—one that is carefully articulated through syntax, through imagery, through narrative structure—a tale not of triumphant achievement but of thwarting and conflict, not of security arrived at but of continuing and irresolvable unease. It is a tale not of competence and independence but of a self unable to change the world through which it moves and antagonistically bound to that which it would reject. And if it is a tale of ‘self-control’, it is one in which ‘self-control’ is exposed as a process of radical, indeed violent, self-division.

Thus, as Crimsworth sits in self-contained silence, awaiting his first meeting with his brother Edward and anticipating (he avows) ‘no overflowings of fraternal tenderness’, his hand—‘so utterly a stranger to the grasp of a kindred hand’—clenches itself ‘to repress the tremor with which impatience would fain have shaken it’. Thus, on the morning after his discovery of the liaison between Mlle Reuter and M. Pelet, he has to rise at dawn and take a cold bath before he can greet the latter with ‘an unchanged and tranquil countenance’, without betraying ‘the sense of insult and treachery [which] lived in me like a kindling though as yet smothered coal’. Thus, Mlle Reuter, disappointed in her attraction to Crimsworth, adopts a demeanour towards him that is ‘deficient neither in dignity nor propriety’; but her former feelings have not disappeared. ‘Decorum now repressed, and Policy masked it, but Opportunity would be too strong for either of these—Temptation would shiver their restraints.’ The emphasis is less on the surface of propriety and indifference than on the processes of repression and denial by which it is produced.

In one way, the negation of impulse appears as an assertion of choice and control. Thus Crimsworth, the penniless foreigner, discovering that the woman he desires is secretly ‘affianced’ to his employer, adopts a position of lordly self-restraint. ‘I had no intention of getting up a scene with M. Pelet, reproaching him with perfidy, sending him a challenge, or performing other gambadoes of the sort.’ To reject and deny is to exercise power—over one's actions, over one's feelings, over others. It is the primary assertion of individual separateness; that which enables a public mask to be different from the private self. Yet, as Freud has famously argued, and as the example just given demonstrates, the use of the negative exposes a self-division that is the reverse of ‘integrity’, or individual wholeness: to deny an intention is to reveal its unconscious presence. In literature, alone among the arts, that which is negated can be given its full imaginative weight. And here, in this novel dominated by negatives, Charlotte Brontë exploits this fact to striking effect. The repeated use of the negative, here and throughout Crimsworth's narrative, gives a peculiar fictional life to that whole seething drama of denied impulse that it is the function of ‘self-control’ to conceal. Thus, Mlle Reuter presents an impassive façade to the world:

she said nothing, and her face and forehead, clothed with a mask of purely negative expression, were as blank of comment as her lips. As neither surprise, pleasure, approbation, nor interest were evinced in her countenance, so no more were disdain, envy, annoyance, weariness.

(p. 177)

But the effect of this description is the reverse of quiescent. The reader is invited to entertain and reject a whole succession of conflicting impulses; and Mlle Reuter appears less as a coherent individual than as a mass of warring and suppressed potentialities. Thus Hunsden rebukes Crimsworth's apparent passivity:

‘What are you then? You sit at that desk in Crimsworth's counting-house day by day and week by week, scraping with a pen on paper, just like an automaton; you never get up; you never say you are tired; you never ask for a holiday; you never take change or relaxation; you give way to no excess of an evening; you neither keep wild company, nor indulge in strong drink.’

(p. 67)

And the sequence of negatives opens up a series of rejected possibilities, enacting in miniature that strategy of denial, of repression of impulse and refusal of expressiveness through which Crimsworth defines and maintains his social identity. It is not simply that he has a series of violent impulses that he restrains. In the peculiar centrifugal prose of his story, self itself appears to be held together by violence.

And if ‘integrity’ is thus imaginatively questioned, so too is that other cornerstone of the Self-Help tradition, the desired end of individual ‘independence’. For Crimsworth, as for those about him, self-reliance—not being in any way dependent on, or indebted to, others—is not merely the key to success: it is essential to his whole mode of being. The words that he uses to describe this ideal state—key-words of early Victorian economic individualism—carry this resonance within them. To be economically self-sufficient is to have a ‘competency’—not merely enough to live on but also the capacity to act, the power to be. To have an income is to have ‘an independency’—not just money but freedom and autonomy as well. When Crimsworth is penniless, his plight presents itself in both economic and existential terms as ‘a pang of mortification at the humility of my position, and the inadequacy of my means; while with that pang was born a strong desire to do more, earn more, be more, possess more’ (my italics). Yet within the world he describes, economic self-sufficiency depends, paradoxically, on self-denial:

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, in order to obviate the danger of being forced, in some moment of future exigency, to beg additional aid.

(p. 55)

The image is less one of freedom and autonomy than of anxious defence against constantly present threat. Analogously, on an existential plane, the self whose mode of existence is one of rejection and denial is the reverse of expressively self-actualizing or freely self-determining. For far more powerfully present than that which it is, or does, is that which it is not, or cannot, or will not do. The repeated entertainment of denied possibility by which Crimsworth's narrative proceeds does not merely challenge his own self-image of ‘straight integrity’: it complicates the onward thrust of his story with a constant, undertowing awareness of energies choked off and repressed. And the negatives and denials by which he defines himself produce a sense of self as neither separate nor superior but as inextricably bound to that which it seeks to reject. The ‘independent’ individual appears as ineluctably social, the product of a whole constellation of active, antagonistic relationships.

The contradiction around which Charlotte Brontë's imagination is working and the sharpness with which she realizes it in this novel might perhaps be focused by considering the ways in which she plays upon the opposing meanings of a single word: that ‘propriety’ which emerges as a dominant value in the world she presents. In one key passage, Crimsworth praises the ‘British English’ in the girls' school where he teaches for their ‘native propriety and decency’; ‘by this last circumstance alone’, he says, ‘I could at a glance distinguish the daughter of Albion and nursling of Protestantism from the foster-child of Rome.’ And the surrounding imagery all emphasizes a primary, and now obsolete, meaning of ‘propriety’, that of ‘property’; and a second, now rare, that of ‘essence or individuality’. The self is here a private possession to be defended against attack and preserved in its inviolable distinctiveness:

proud, too, was the aspect of these British girls … they warded off insult with austere civility, and met hate with mute disdain; they eschewed company-keeping, and in the midst of numbers seemed to dwell isolated.

(p. 132, my italics)

But this constellation of meanings is almost the opposite of that which the word had come to bear by Charlotte Brontë's time and that which she emphasizes, equally tellingly, elsewhere in the novel. Thus of Hunsden's first meeting with Frances, Crimsworth remarks,

I thought I had never seen two such models of propriety, for Hunsden (thanks to the constraint of the foreign tongue) was obliged to shape his phrases, and measure his sentences, with a care that forbade any eccentricity.

(p. 259, my italics)

Here the context stresses not individuality but its reverse; not self-possession but conformity to others' rules and requirements. In both cases the restraint of free expressiveness is the same, as is the word that is chosen to describe it—‘propriety’. The sense of self as isolated, inviolate, the ultimate piece of private property, thus appears inextricable from its opposite—the sense that the self is inexorably bound by others' conventions and prohibitions, that it has no independent existence at all. Unobtrusively but exactly, Charlotte Brontë seems to be highlighting a fundamental contradiction within that early Victorian philosophy of self-sufficient individualism that Crimsworth, in his tale of successful self-help, seeks to affirm.

For if The Professor is not a disguised autobiography of its author, neither is it merely an exploration of the psychology of a peculiar individual. In choosing to cast this, her first novel written for publication, as the story of a self-made man, Charlotte Brontë was appropriating a form which, in a quite naked and archetypal way, embodied and celebrated some of the central ideological assumptions of her society. Through her presentation of Crimsworth's narrative she offers not merely an exposure of the shortcomings of this particular teller but a coherent imaginative interrogation of those assumptions, and a disturbingly intimate exploration of their experiential implications. Like the lyrics of Blake's Songs of Experience, this finely articulated dramatization of a representative monologic voice embodies as acute a vision of the logic of a whole society as do many more obviously sociological analyses.

And that logic, as it is elaborated here, is very bleak indeed. For if the novel's insistent negatives delineate a field of conflicting possibilities, those possibilities are all denied. The energy is that of deadlock: no movement beyond it is envisaged. Although Crimsworth's is a linear narrative, in which effort leads to success, the novel's imaginative structure is claustrophobically circular. It begins with a description of a ‘friendship’ fuelled by antagonism and of a family divided by hostilities; and it ends with a similar, if more ambiguous set of images. Frances, we are told, loves her English professor ‘too absolutely to fear him much’ (my italics). Their domestic idyll is shot through with a kind of amorous antagonism: she, he says, ‘would vex, tease, pique me’, and he responds with a ‘chastisement’, which ‘instead of correcting the fault … seemed to encourage its renewal’. The only fruit of this union is the suggestively named Victor; he, like his father, is to be sent away to Eton, where he will be ‘soundly disciplined’ and given a radical grounding in ‘the art of self-control’. Crimsworth's story is ostensibly one not merely of success but also of requited love. But it ends as it began, with an isolated, watching individual: with a man who spies on his wife and relates to his child by trying to break his will. The feeling is less of the boundaries of the self being expanded than of the anxious separateness of the original self being confirmed.

In the private sphere, as it appears here, there seems little possibility of creative interaction between individuals. And similarly, such images of the larger society as there are are images of exclusion and conflict. The England of the novel is a place of competitive enterprise, in which ‘Concern’ has a one-dimensionally economic meaning; of domineering masters and resentful ‘slaves’. Belgium is a place of ‘Popish’ duplicity and suspicious watchfulness, in which ‘getting on’ means gaining and maintaining ‘the advantage’ over others. One is reminded of a famous passage from Carlyle's Past and Present, published three years before this novel was written:

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named ‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.³

Instead of Dickens's great metaphors of circulation and stoppage and George Eliot's of the social web, Charlotte Brontë offers images simply of repression and repulsion; instead of a connecting energy, she shows the tense balancing of denied impulse. The energies that animate Crimsworth's world seem, indeed, to work against anything we might call social bonding. His tale is one of successful self-help, but there is no sense of a supportive context for this achievement. The world of business is a world of ruthless competition, in which individuals such as Edward Crimsworth fail and make fortunes in seemingly arbitrary ways. The reasons, the processes, are not imagined. But if the individual life-trajectory remains the focus, this seems less the result of Charlotte Brontë's failure to imagine a social world than the expression of the logic of her vision. For what she suggests, with an exactitude that echoes Carlyle's more out-spoken protest, is that in a fundamental sense a society composed wholly of competing self-interested individuals has nothing but violence to hold it together at all.

The world of The Professor is a world of ominous instability. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the final chapter, where Crimsworth gives a picture of the success to which his efforts have led. The closing pages of the novel are full of apparently unconnected images of insecurity and violence. The narrator interrupts his portrait of married bliss to interrogate his wife as to ‘what she would have been had she married a harsh, envious, careless man—a profligate, a prodigal, a drunkard, or a tyrant’. Their friend Hunsden suddenly tells a story of thwarted love for a woman who looks as if she ‘once wore chains and broke them’. Crimsworth shoots his son's rabid dog, and Victor is repelled by his ‘cruelty’. The picture of the child lying on the dog's grave is succeeded by one of the ‘utter wretchedness’ he will have to suffer when he is sent to Eton, and the misery the parents feel at the prospect of this ‘fearful operation’. Within the Edenic haven of Daisy Lane the serpent lurks, in the shape of the provoking Hunsden. Victor's affection for this unpredictable friend causes his mother ‘unexpressed anxiety’: while he is by, ‘she roves with restless movement round, like a dove guarding its young from a hovering hawk’. And as the novel closes, the ‘hawk’ enters to disrupt domestic peace: ‘But Hunsden comes; I hear his step, and there he is, bending through the lattice, from which he has thrust away the woodbine with unsparing hand, disturbing two bees and a butterfly.’ (p. 290)

Like the unanswered letter of the opening chapter, these final images are more integrally related to the rest of the novel than might at first appear. For they articulate a disquiet that has, in fact, been present throughout—a sense of something volcanic and subversive, which constantly threatens to disrupt the uneasy stasis achieved by ‘self-control’, something whose violence can be held in check only by an answering violence. Beneath the surface of Crimsworth's tale of successful self-help lies another world, an ‘infernal world’ (the phrase is one of Charlotte Brontë's names for her childhood fantasy world) of untrusted impulse and barely controllable feeling, a world far more ‘strange, startling and harrowing’ than that of the ‘romance’ that the preface announces this novel is not. The manifestations of that world are disruptively various: the unexplained tears that Frances sheds on the morning of her wedding day, or the ‘eccentric vigour’ she occasionally, disconcertingly, displays; the ‘hypochondria’ that ‘accosts’ and ‘tyrannizes’ Crimsworth; the peculiar, half-repressed sensuality that disrupts his descriptions of Mlle Reuter; the ‘electrical ardour and power—which emits, now and then, ominous sparks’ from Victor. Yet if they disturb the coherence of Crimsworth's narrative, that is perhaps their point. For the social world of the novel is one in which spontaneous feeling cannot be creatively expressed, one that offers no context of ‘reason or love’ within which it can safely be entertained. When such feeling appears it is as a ‘fierce revolt’, which must be subdued by violence, not merely by the inner violence of ‘self-restraint’ but by an external violence whose nature is focused and objectified in Crimsworth's reflections on his son's education.

The presence of Victor in the concluding pages of the novel provides a suggestive indication of the nature of Charlotte Brontë's interest in her subject: an interest not merely in Crimsworth's individual life-trajectory but in how the world he inhabits is sustained and reproduced. For here the myth of the self-made man is interrupted by a disturbing image, an image of the human being not as ‘self-made’ but as shaped in social relations, not as an ‘independent’ adult with feelings held under tight control but as a dependent and defenceless child in the grip of uncontrollable feeling. Such an image has no place in the classic self-help narrative. Childhood there is dealt with perfunctorily, as preliminary to, rather than part of, the real business of life. In this novel, Crimsworth barely mentions his own childhood: it is only towards the close of his story, when describing his ‘Hypochondria’, that he admits that he was ‘lonely’ as well as ‘parentless’. Yet his treatment of his son Victor, exactly mirroring his own self-suppression, is an external image of that violence of inner ‘self-control’ that has been evident throughout. And in thus presenting it, Charlotte Brontë does not merely offer an acute analysis of a psychological mechanism that has in recent years begun to be exposed and explored—the violence of the process whereby the authoritarian personality is produced and reproduces itself.⁴ She also suggests, very powerfully, that it is in its treatment of childhood that the essential nature of a whole society is revealed. The rarely smiling Victor must, Crimsworth says, be separated from his mother; for ‘she will accustom him to a style of treatment, a forbearance, a congenial tenderness, he will meet with from none else’. Within the family, Victor may be ‘subjugated’ by love. But love is a poor preparation for life in this society. For, as Crimsworth asks, with a bleak directness that irradiates not merely his own assumptions but the world that sustains and is shaped by them, ‘will reason or love be the weapons with which in future the world will meet his violence?’ Thus the novel concludes: not with an affirmation of that individual self-sufficiency its narrator seeks to celebrate but with a disconcerting image of the ‘infernal’ violence, both within and without, on which that achievement is based.

And it is with a shock that one realizes that it was with the same resonant image—the image of the rebellious, ‘subjugated’ child—that Charlotte Brontë began her next, very different novel, Jane Eyre. There the focus is on ‘the need of being loved’ rather than on the drive towards independence, on a woman's experience rather than on a man's. Yet the juxtaposition is suggestive. And it indicates, I think, something of the importance of The Professor within Charlotte Brontë's total œuvre. For this, her first, stubbornly defended novel, poses a distinctive challenge to the still common view that she is, essentially, a novelist of autobiographical ‘special pleading’:⁵ one who used her fiction as a vehicle for the indirect but powerful expression of her own ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage’⁶—her longing for the love of an impossibly idealized man, her desire to affirm women's right to self-sustaining independence. The Professor suggests that her imaginative exploration of the presuppositions of her society was more searching, more flexible, more disinterestedly intelligent than this. For here, through a distinctively literary interrogation of the premises of the classic self-help narrative, she offers a disquieting vision of the construction and the cost of masculinity in that society and a chilling critique of some of its most cherished values. Here successful manhood appears not as charismatically powerful but as blinkered and crippled, the ideal of independence not as desirable but as fundamentally flawed. To read the later novels from the perspective provided by this is to perceive a rather different set of emphases in them from those that they have customarily been made to bear. And to read this, her first and least regarded novel, with a full alertness to the sophisticated literary intelligence that is manifest in its pages is to discover a different Charlotte Brontë from the unreflective novelist of private love and longing that she is all too often taken to be.

Notes

1. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, September 1850.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977, p 202.

3. ‘Gospel of Mammon’, Past and Present, Book Three, Chapter Two.

4. See, for example, Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing, translated by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, London, 1983.

5. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, London, 1970, p. 73.

6. Matthew Arnold, in a letter to Mrs Forster, 14 April 1853.