Narrative Cross-Dressing in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor

Abstract

Abstract Charlotte Brontë's novel The Professor is usually regarded as a failure. The reasons for this failure, have, however, never been closely examined. The essay tries to prove that the main reason why the novel fails to convince the reader lies in the narrative form the author chose. Narrative cross-dressing was a very rare phenomenon in the nineteenth century, so Charlotte Brontë's reasons for choosing a male first-person narrator will be examined in a first step. After that, the essay elucidates the weaknesses in the narrative construction of the novel. The doubts about the hero's masculinity will be verified by various contextual and narrative aspects: the narrator's attitude towards sexuality, his language, and the manner in which he describes other protagonists all contribute to cause a gender instability in the novel. Instead of having a liberating effect, this gender instability undermines the credulity of the narrator-persona and thus explains the inadequacy of the novel noted by so many critics.