both of us say there are laws to obey

I've picked up Charlotte Brontë's The Professor half a dozen times since high school, but never managed to finish it before. (The first chapter is very dull, and also I'm not sure one could read it successfully without knowing a little French, which until recently I did not.) And, indeed, I could scarcely finish it now. Only the expedient of my exam list got me through. Because oh, I found it so inexpressibly painful, uncomfortable, and generally pitiful that reading it physically hurt.

This is the first book she tried to publish, before Jane Eyre. She plundered it later to write Villette, and the novel itself was published posthumously in 1857 by her husband. The weird - and painful - thing about it, though, is that it's Villette from the other side. The pov character, the "I," is the brusque older male teacher, and through his first-person narration you watch him falling in love with the shy, clever, poor, plain, young female instructor.

And it's - it's impossible not to read the biographical in here, but - it's watching this young writer trying to write herself as lovable, especially knowing that in life, the beloved object didn't return her passion, that's so absolutely excruciating. The point of view is strangely attenuated - it keeps stretching out to encompass the girl-lover's feelings and impressions, which of course Charlotte knows, but I also feel that in the scenes of classroom instruction there's something in Charlotte that delights in inhabiting such an absolute position of disdainful masculine superiority, in tearing down the stupid vain girls and patronizing the prim schoolmistresses. Of course her analog-character never does this, but is meek and quiet, but in the same way that Agnes Grey clearly draws on a personal experience with childcare, so The Professor draws on Charlotte's own experience as a teacher.

The whole thing is really making me crave Snape/Hermione fic.

I'm yours alone, you do not care

Since Brontës seem to be going around (selenak on Wuthering Heights, katta on Jane Eyre), it seemed to me like it might be time to try expounding on my Grand Unified Theory of Rochester. Which I have never tried to do before, not really, so be gentle!

Like Katta, I love Rochester. I always have, ever since Jane Eyre whirled me away as a sixteen-year-old and made me decide to study Victorian literature for a living. But I've had a really hard time talking about him, to most fans of the book, and certainly I've found that academic analyses of him don't patch with my reading. The current tendency seems to be to read Rochester as similar to Heathcliff, but without the benefit of Emily's sarcastic commentary and relentless anti-Romanticism: a Byronic brooding Bad Boy Woobie who gets himself Redeemed By Lurve. Witness the take Fassbender gave on him in the recent film: his Rochester is all about the lure of the bad boy. Rochester's appeal gets read as symptomatic of women's simultaneous political desire for freedom and sexual desire for submission, as suppressed s&m. All very Twilight, when you come down to it.

( This is not my Rochester. )