Feminism In Charlotte Bronte's The Professor

Charlotte Bronte illustrates the hardships that women faced in the mid-19th century in England and worldwide in her first novel, The Professor. The novel is about an Englishman that seeks a new career as a teacher in Belgium. The effeminized Englishman, William Crimsworth, finds his wife in Belgium, but surprisingly, his wife Frances requests equal standards and rights. Although Bronte addresses topics such as nationality and religion, The Professor is known to be one of the first works of literature that directly addressed the female problem and to help start the feminist movement that still continues today. Charlotte Bronte shows in her first novel, The Professor, that women must achieve gender equality and they have to accomplish this by …show more content…
Bronte confronts this problem directly when she writes in her novel, “Now, would you occasionally, when you see an opportunity, slip in a word of advice to her on the subject? Men have so much more influence than women have” (94). This selection describes a situation of a woman asking a man to use his manly influence to convince someone to make a decision. In this instance, Bronte is showing a lack of confidence in a woman. If women are looked upon as higher in society, than they will have not only the confidence, but also the influence. In the Cambridge Companion to the Brontes, Heather Glen states, “Charlotte’s first novel (The Professor) shows a feminist appropriation of the work ethic that reaches beyond the pragmatic” (73). Glen’s analysis of the novel indicates that Bronte goes very far in conveying her point that women must work the same as men. Bronte shows the feminist appropriation of the work ethic by having Frances Henri, the female protagonist, demand that her husband let her work as much as he does. Finally, Mohammed Mahameed in English Language and Literature Studies continues this idea saying, “The insistence that women as well as men need fulfillment in work is one of the new elements of reality in Charlotte Bronte 's novels” (12). Mahameed’s study of Charlotte Bronte’s works found that Bronte continually incorporated the idea that women …show more content…
For example, in The Professor, Frances Henri is asked what she would have become if she had not married Charles and her reply states, “I should have probably failed, and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women…I should have been, though, but for my master” (Bronte 190). Bronte shows Frances explaining that if she had not met and married William, then she would have died an old, poor maid. She automatically assumes that she would have ended up a maid and poor because that is what typically happens in the time that this novel is written. By William’s wife stating that she would just end up as a maid just because she does not have a man in her life shows that the opportunities in this time period were rare and hard to come by. Sally Mitchell, in Critical Survey of Long Fiction, discusses Bronte’s works saying, “In Bronte’s work, a woman author makes significant statements about issues central to women’s lives. Most of her heroines are working women; each feels the pull of individual self-development” (3). Mitchell’s study of Bronte finds that Bronte conveys the idea that women should and want to develop their lives to the point that they can be self-reliant. This idea is clearly shown in The Professor, when Frances, the female protagonist marries Charles, the male protagonist, on the condition that she can work