both of us say there are laws to obey
Jun. 27th, 2012 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI'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.
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.
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Date: 2012-06-28 03:10 am (UTC)I am very, very bad about reading the biographical into Charlotte's work...I think I love her writing so much that I end up feeling like I love her, which I'm sure is very bad form but hey, I'm not an academic, so who's going to stop me? :) And then there's, frex, Shirley, which I feel like makes SO much more sense and means so much more if you think of it as being about Charlotte's life. (Do you love Shirley? I sort of do, and I legitimately love Shirley herself. Who am I kidding though...I love them all!)
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Date: 2012-06-28 03:21 am (UTC)And now I REALLY need to go to bed.
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Date: 2012-06-28 03:59 pm (UTC)I also read Villette as a profoundly bisexual novel - Lucy loves Ginevra and Graham Bretton and even little Paulina just as much as she does M. Paul, I think. Paul isn't the best lover, he's merely the last - and not even that, because arguably Lucy ends up in the longest-term intimate relationship with Ginevra!
(On the Snape/Hermione thing - a lot of classic Snape/Hermione fic replicates a very Brontëan dynamic, but in a more self-consciously feminist way: bright passionate (somewhat innocent) young student falls for broody (dubiously virtuous) older professor, neither are exactly beautiful, ect, ect. But because this is fic, I find it tends to be more id-pleasing and less agonizing-social-commentary.)