other case: Gender and narration in Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, The

Male novelists who use female narrators have been praised for their insights into "feminine psychology," yet we seldom expect women writers to represent masculinity from a male point of view. In her recent work on feminism and narratology, Susan Lanser considers "the social properties and political implications of narrative voice," claiming that "female voice"--the grammatical gender of the narrator--"is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practice" (4-5). This tension is conspicuous in novels published in the nineteenth century: a strict literary double-standard reflects a cultural double-standard that devalues feminine discourse in the public sphere. Like everything else, narrative voice corresponds to the cultural needs of Victorian society, and so an age comparatively rich in literary heroines (and in women writers) still finds the masculine voice more representative, and, supposedly, more rational, more "objective." Because narrative voice carries the burdens of Victorian gender polarization--in its representation of male or female language and the expectations it raises about masculine or feminine plots(1)--grammatical gender in a Victorian novel is as ideologically constructed as the gendered body inhabited by the author.

If narrative voice is a site of ideological tension, it is even more difficult to construe when a male voice is adapted selfconsciously by women writers who call themselves "Currer Bell" or "George Eliot." Indeed, because narrative authority conforms to rather than challenges "hierarchical, patriarchal norms" (Cohan & Shires 146) we can gain insight into the ways women who use male narrators understand gender relations, and how they reproduce masculinity--and with it, dominant discourse--in the choice of male language, preoccupations, and pursuits.

In her first novel, The Professor, Charlotte Bronte uses a first-person male narrator, and, as I will discuss, critics have tended to see this as both an artistic error and an elision of her feminist voice. But whether she takes a male or female narrator, Bronte is no less intent on examining the encoding of gender in nineteenth-century discourse. Specifically, the male voice provides an opening to confront a central issue for Bronte--power--which is different from her explorations of powerlessness in her later heroine-centered novels. In The Professor, she is learning what it is to have the power of authorship, and therefore it is consistent that she should go inside the system to attempt to represent the source of that power.(2)

Many psychoanalytic approaches to The Professor accept the "feminization" of the male narrator as the woman writer's personal experience of subordination translated into a pseudomale voice. Though this helps in understanding biographical issues and the so-called "female imagination," such readings tend to overlook how the appropriation of the male voice may challenge a tradition of androcentric narrative and Victorian patriarchal hegemony. As Terry Eagleton explains, one interpretation of feminism "is not just that women should have equality of power and status with men; it is a questioning- of all such power and status. It is not just that the world will be better off with more female participation in it; it is that without the 'feminization' of human history, the world is unlikely to survive" (150). Bronte engages this concern by using an intrinsically authoritative male voice to tell a story that is not about a heroine's traditional growth into power, but instead authorizes a masculine growth out of power by asserting the need to temper male authority with "feminine" social virtues, usefully defined by Susan Morgan as "gentleness, flexibility, openness to others, friendship, and love" (19). At the same time, however, Bronte describes the practical and psychological obstacles to this "feminization" for men who are subject to ideological constraints, particularly the insistence on sexual difference. For as Mary Poovey has persuasively argued, "[M]en were too thoroughly ensnared in the contradictions that characterized this ideology to be charged with being simple oppressors" (22). William Crimsworth, the hero-narrator of The Professor, represents a view of masculinity that differs entirely from Bronte's later portraits of attractive and powerful men who threaten the heroine's autonomy. In her first novel, Bronte attempts to be the autobiographical male, to imagine what he imagines, even to have a male body(3)--in other words, to treat the burdens of sex from the male point of view, and thereby explore the social consequences of her culture's constructions of gender.

Critics tend to speak summarily about The Professor, written in 1846 and published posthumously in 1857. It is "a rehearsal for Villebte "(Lane vii) or an early "failed" attempt to create a heroine like Jane Eyre (Basch 68-9). In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter mentions The Professor only briefly as an example of how "women writers internalized the values of their society" (136-7). Even critics who turn their full attention to the novel, such as Helene Moglen and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, are conscious of a tendency to make excuses for its flaws. Moglen sees Bronte's choice of a male narrator as evidence that she is still "bound to the ambivalent attitudes of adolescence," unable to associate a female voice with authority; Crimsworth's voice is the novel's most "crucial problem" (86-8). In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar concede that to discuss the novel as they have done "in terms merely of roles and repressions is...to trivialize the young novelist's achievement in her first full-length book" (335). Their description of The Professor as an extension of Bronte's "exotic 'male" Angrian tales full of "obsessive and involuntary" characterizations (313-15), and as a "pseudo-masculine Bildungsroman, " "literary male-impersonation, " and "male mimicry" (318-19) suggest that the novel's difficulties or flaws are linked to Bronte's handling of gender, especially the use of a male narrator. Instead of dismissing the narrator as a clumsy mistake by a young writer, Gilbert and Gubar at least try to make sense of the masculine voice, explaining that "by pretending to be a man, [the woman writer] can see herself as the crucial and powerful Other sees her" (317) . To put it differently, by pretending to be male, Bronte can better analyze what really concerns her: being female.