A Rhetoric of Surveillance in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor

Abstract

This essay aims to investigate the ways in which Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor debunks the Victorian myth of self-help embedded in the first-person male narrator’s life. The character’s autobiographical memories seem to record three phases of his life in accordance with the process of establishing his own self-identity: his successful resistance to tyrannical surveillance in capitalistic setting, his victorious attempt to overcome the sexual temptations from women in the romanticized and foreign environment, and his strong efforts to secure domestic peace and stability. The narrator’s panegyric on his own adherence to the Victorian self-help credo is not only a naive appraisal of his economic experience without recognizing that he is a victim of the dominant ideology of self-reliance, but it is also a deceptive and self-justifying rhetoric in order to assert the primacy of his own self over the other. The narrator’s restless anxiety over the failure of his self mastery entails his sensitive and fastidious habits of constant surveillance. Divulging a hero’s pathological symptoms of a series of denial and repression, the novel interrogates his discourse on masculine success of self-management.