The Effeminized Hero or Authorial Projection: Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte in most of her novels, as suggested by Gilbert and Guber, in The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), has worked out a vision of an indeterminate, usually female figure (who has often come "from the kitchen or some such place") trapped - even buried - in the architecture of a patriarchal society and imagining, dreaming or actually devising escape routes, roads past walls, lawns, antlers, to the glittering world outside. Like Charlotte Bronte, many nineteenth century women almost wrote in "a state of 'trance', about their feelings of enclosure in `feminine' roles and patriarchal households. And wrote, too, about their passionate desire to flee such roles or houses" (313).