Between Labor and Capital: Charlotte Bront�'s Professional Professor

Abstract

At once outside the market and within it, the nineteenth-century professional juggles a kind of paradox. Most influential rise-of- the-professional narratives explain how the modern professional transcends the market by taking on an aura of disinterest. The professional, one version goes, reworks the aristocrat's noblesse oblige into the professional ideal of service. In another, he aligns himself with the unwaged work of the home so that he can draw on the middle-class angel's stock of self-sacrificing purity. Explaining how the professional enacts his distance from the market, both narratives assume that his proximity to the market requires no interpretation. 1 This essay reverses that assumption. It considers a moment in the emergence of the professional class when it is not the damning presence but the apparent absence of the market that poses the dilemma. In that case, neither the aristocrat nor the middle-class angel has any rhetorical tips to offer. In the 1840s, when Charlotte Brontë writes The Professor (completed in 1846, published in 1857), the relative invisibility of certain kinds of work as value-able labor threatened to shut its producers out of the marketplace. Studying this novel, in which the protagonist wishes to uncover rather than cover over the price of his intellectual labor, will help correct the balance of critical studies of professionalism. In so doing, it allows us to understand these opposing directions (away from, toward the market) not only as the contradiction or the paradox of professionalism but also as its dialectic, its ability simultaneously to enable and critique the economic system in which it ambivalently figures. [End Page 279]