The Gender polities of portraiture in Theprofessor by ©everly Taylor Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Anticipating Judith Butler’s work on the fluidity and social construction of gender,1 Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor (written 1846, posthumously published 1857) delineates the trajectory through which William Crimsworth becomes “male” in his society. At the outset, he is passive, lacking authority and autonomy, feminized in terms ofhis social positioning. By novel’s end, he occupies an overtly “masculine” role—financially independent, socially established, and authoritative in a household where his wife calls him “Master.”1 2 The narrative traces the development ofattitudes and behaviors by which he claims the position of mastery culturally coded as “masculine.” While critics have advanced similar readings of Crimsworth’s development,3 little attention has been paid to the implications of this trajectory for Frances Henri, whose experience of poverty, loss of family, and professional advancement so closely parallels his. We may well ask what this account ofthe “selfmade man” implies about the self-making of woman.4 We must consider how “mastery”—foregrounded by the manuscript title “The Master,” involving not only economic and social advancement but also stoic fortitude in adversity—is gendered both masculine and feminine in the narrative. 1 Peel discusses Bronte’s anticipation of Butler’s views in VilleUe. arguing that Lucy Snowe “uses performance to assert an identity that challenges ... the roles ofgender and sexual orientation” (232). 2 Glen and others associate Crimsworth’s story with the Victorian vogue for the “biography of the selfmade man” (10). 3 See Nestor (41-45); Boumelha (44-52); and Gezari (37-42). 4 Rodolffnotes the novel’s interest in representing “self-help” from a woman’s perspective (Lamonica 160). Victorians Journal 171 The trope ofportraiture links the stories ofCrimsworth and Frances thematically and formally, countering Tillotson’s criticism that the Crimsworths’ sibling rivalry is a “false lead” (282) and Bronte’s sense that the novel’s early chapters were “very feeble” {Letters 1:574). The imagery of portraiture suggests how Bronte subtly disentangles issues of class and gender to highlight the role of gender politics in Crimsworth’s “making” his manhood. As the references to portraits demonstrate, he initially displaces his economic and class anxieties to the sphere ofgender relations in order to reconstitute himself as masterful. Through this displacement, he achieves a gender confidence that allows him to recognize Frances’s subjectivity, a development that discredits his earlier strategies for self-making, at least within their personal relationship. Notably, the strategies that establish his gendered cultural position cannot successfully establish a love relationship with a comparably “masterful” woman. Achieving such a partnership requires that he forego the role of artist or art critic shaping and interpreting the image ofwoman, and also that she establish herselfin her professional sphere while at the same time maintaining the feminine ideal at home. In other words, Bronte indicates that, much like Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire, Frances has to make all the right moves while wearing high heels and dancing backwards. Bronte depicts the process of masculine gendering partly through the responses of Crimsworth and his friend Yorke Hunsden to portraits of women erased from the narrative except as images.5 Crimsworth’s mother and Hunsden’s Lucia feature only as palimpsests of the feminine which stimulate the men’s interpretations. Bronte’s notes entitled “Lucia” in her German notebook from 1843 link the two female figures, suggesting that portraits, recorded in her notations as “old dining room—pictures— Old Squire and lady,” were central to her early conception of the novel {Professor 287n261 ).6 In the episodes focused on paintings, Bronte sorts class and gender strands 5 Morse persuasively argues that Crimsworth and Hunsden share a homoerotic attraction, a reading that reinforces my view ofCrimsworth’s early gender uncertainty and instability. 6 Rosengarten’s notes in the Clarendon edition of The Professor cite Bronte’s 1843 German Notebook, positing that “possibly ‘Lucia’ was originally to have been...