The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Because Charlotte Brontë’s first full-length novel, The Professor, is narrated by male protagonist William Crimsworth, the novel lacks the “confessional intensity” that characterizes Brontë’s other novels. Like other women writers who choose to write from a male perspective, Brontë’s anxiety plays out even as it drives Brontë’s exploration of “the problem of the literally and figuratively disinherited female in a patriarchal society” (317).

Crimsworth’s descriptions of male characters in his world are noteworthy for what they reveal about Brontë’s perspective. His uncles are “beastly,” and his brother Edward is particularly loathsome, yet Victorian patriarchy appears to reward him for being a tyrant. Crimsworth’s character combines male and female characteristics; he desires women, but he is not like the other men in the book. His family’s disapproval of his career also makes him an outsider to the male world, and his orphan status renders him as powerless as a woman.

Crimsworth takes a position teaching at a Catholic girls’ boarding school in Brussels, where he is a foreigner. His position as a classroom leader of girls means he has access to the “mystery of female identity” (322). Both his outsider status and his proximity to young women cause him to resemble a female.