Endnotes are in brackets. References in parentheses are page numbers is the readily accessible Penguin edition edited by Heather Glen.
Charlotte Brontë’s
earliest work for publication The Professor remained unpublished until
after the author’s death. Perhaps the
most prominent difference between The Professor and Villette,
which she wrote next using portions of the earlier story, is the shift from a
male to a female narrator, but the two works begin with markedly different
perspectives as well. Whereas the later
novel opens with Lucy Snow’s first-person adolescent reminiscences, the first
chapter of the earlier work, titled “Introductory,” covers similar ground, but
in the form of a letter. Both novels,
however, end using the device of a slip in the narrative voice from past to
present tense. The Professor has
been taken by some critics to be a premature false start as Brontë
developed her professional writing skills, and the unusual device employed in
the first pages of the book has been called “clumsy and artificial” and “an
early gaucherie” by critics. [1]
The opening
letter might seem a vestige of the epistolary practice of Richardson and
Smollett. In earlier novels the pretense
of the letter form supports the historicity of the text, reinforced by the
reduction of some place names to initials as though to protect the characters’
privacy. While a few novels like Robinson
Crusoe that adopted the pose of recording literal truth were actually
accepted by some readers as fact, once the device became familiar, it had the
dialectic effect of representing a known literary artifice depicting lived reality,
thus suggesting truth and falsity at once.
Yet Brontë’s use of this device has peculiar characteristics. She would have the reader believe that Crimsworth
came across the copy of a letter when he simply “found” it in his desk, and
that this discovery of an aborted memoir led him to complete the story.
The fact that the
letter was written, not received, by the persona telling the story shifts the
reader’s perception more directly on its author. Few enough people maintain copies of their
own correspondence that this presentation alone draws attention. Charles, the intended recipient of the
letter, never appears at all, and the letter was never delivered as thee writer’s
old schoolmate had moved. Why had the
narrator felt drawn to send an account of his life to this long-ago
“acquaintance,” as Crimsworth calls him?
One effect of this
device is to emphasize the focus on the protagonist whose ego is a primary theme
Brontë is to develop. The letter is a
curious document. Though the point of
the letter is to renew a relationship with an old schoolmate, it opens by
declaring that neither of the two had been popular, Charles “sarcastic and
cold-blooded,” and William “not strikingly attractive.” Though exclusion by others might make the
basis for the two outsiders to ally, Crimsworth says he cannot understand what
“animal magnetism” joined them. What is
more, he declares that he felt (and presumably feels) himself superior. He has no interest in the affairs of his
correspondent. “What you have been doing
I know not, but you shall hear “how the world has wagged with me” he says imperiously. The solipsistic letter goes on to detail his
rebellion against the injustice he suffered at the hands of his brother.
He notes at the
end of the “Introductory’ chapter that, having leisure in retirement, he had, apparently motivated by
generosity, intended to describe his life for the “private benefit” of his
acquaintance Charles. Frustrated in that
goal, he determined that his tale would have value “for the public at large,”
in particular for the use of other educators for whom his experience, he
believes, will prove instructive. The presumption
is palpable.
The persona
considers the account of his career a sort of self-help book, inspiring others
to rise through discipline and work to affluence. In this partial truth the tale bears some
resemblance to the stories of Horatio Alger heroes and the deserving waifs of Charles
Dickens, though in these cases the heroes’ ascents often depend on
providentially charitable patrons, while William Crimsworth has only his own
ambition. Thus he represents a model of a
kind of Calvinist capitalist, prospering through self-denial and looking out
for the main chance. Though his story is
in part a guide to overcoming obstacles and climbing the economic ladder,
Crimsworth is, as a recent editor noted a “disquieting” hero. [2] While his calculating moves do bring him success,
he often appears as unattractive, selfish, or aggressive.
He must, it seems,
strive against the world to attain his own felicity, suppressing his own
feelings in pursuit of his larger worldly ends.
This includes the rejection of his relatives who suggest for him a
marriage and settled living, then after a time of his brother with whom his
relations had always been prickly but
from whom he had accepted a position. Seeking
his fortune by himself in the world, he succeeds as a schoolteacher (in French
a professeur) first with M. Pelet and then with Mlle. Reuter through his
forceful manner with the students. His
“system” for instructing pupils he found to have “dense intelligence” and
“feeble reflective powers” was to lower his expectations radically, but then, “having
brought down my lesson to the lowest level of my slowest student’s capacity,”
to become suddenly a “despot,” insisting on “submission and acknowledgement of
error, or ignominious expulsion.” (98)
Even his love
affair with Frances Henri is described in the same manner. He is the master; she the faithful
server. Even so, she is obliged
sometimes to object, “Monsieur, vous me faites mal; de grâce
lâchez
un peu ma main droite.” She addresses him as Master. To him “reproofs suited her best of all”
(204). He has no interest in her
feelings; their relationship is plainly portrayed in physical terms of
domination and submission. “My arm, it
is true, still detained her, but with a restraint that was gentle enough, as
long as no opposition tightened it.” His
heart, he says, is wholly taken up with “its own content” which he finds
“fathomless.” (248-9) The happy ending’s evidence of his success
are the acquisition of a devoted wife and child, hard-earned, without a
doubt.
The price, then
of worldly success for this wronged orphan is to “resist” any “impulse” to
be “warmer” or “more expressive” (204),
and to be governed instead by “perseverance and sense of duty.” (159) The darker elements of his state of mind are
suggested by Crimsworth’s xenophobia and contempt for Catholicism as well as,
more deeply, his susceptibility to depression, or “Hypochondria” (254)
A similar tension
is evident in the book’s other generic conventions. The plot follows the form of classic comedy
in that a couple overcome obstacles, marry, and find a settled and serene
life. Yet it is evident that the love
portrayed in The Professor is flawed, though perhaps only because it is
all too human. From another angle, the
story is about how to succeed in business, a story of a clever lad who through
determined efforts of his own, accomplished much. Yet the reader will wonder whether the stern
pedagogy and cagey dealings with employers are really to be recommended. An anodyne slogan like “Hope smiles on
Effort!” elides the issue of what sort of effort. (206)
In spite of all
the conventional paradigms of a hero’s path to love and worldly prosperity, Brontë
claims that her book is straightforward, unadorned realism. She opens a chapter with a declaration that
could open a manifesto. “Novelists
should never allow themselves to weary of the study of everyday life.” (186) In the novel’s preface Charlotte, writing
under her pseudonym Currer Bell claims, “I said to myself that my hero should
work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” (37) In the preface of 1851, she says, as an
explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed
almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have
had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain
and homely.” The spare style of realism established
in the opening letter asserts the book’s veracity.
The slide into
the present tense in the last pages
(from 288) has the effect of casting the concluding scene as constant, a “happy
ever after,” as though nothing of significance would later occur. Such a coda
resembles the way some pop songs, instead of ending with an appropriate musical
phrase, simply fade to silence or a final movie shot that rises into the air
over the last scene. While marking the
end of the work in a conventional and recognizable way, at the same time the
concluding present tense adopts the pose of portraying a scene immediately
before the observer’s eyes, leaving the reader poised in the end as in the
beginning between realism and convention, symbolic commentary and bare facts.
Both opening and
closing of The Professor indicate the tension between natural and
artificial. The reader must wonder
whether Crimsworth is seeking to “live his dream,” as a modern idiom would have
it, to fully become himself and escape from the limitations of his birth, or
whether his ambition has led him to make a tortured topiary of his soul, in the
effort losing real love, and perhaps a genuinely successful classroom as
well.
The framing of
the story in fact highlights its difference from Villette. The opening pages reveal a far less
attractive protagonist than Lucy Snow.
Crimsworth’s asperities reappear in Villette, though transferred
to M. Emanuel. Though Lucy may seem more
deserving, her love affair ends, at best, in separation and ambiguity. The Professor concludes with images of
connubial bliss (though the reader may suspect that the real picture is more
complex), while Villette ends in a note of sinister foreboding with
howling banshees signaling lethal storms.
In spite of the common ground of the plots and even of the language, the
first two novels Charlotte Brontë completed are for the reader independent of
each other in direction and theme, though, had The Professor been
published, Villette would never
have been written.
1. Carl Plasa, “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery
and Sexuality in ‘The Professor,’” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30,
No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-28 “For many
critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is
both clumsy and artificial.”
2. Heather Glen in her introduction to the Penguin Classic
edition. Glen provides as well useful
background on early nineteenth century self-help books.
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