Catholic Fiction

BBC Audiobooks, 2005, unabridged, read by James Wilby 

reviewed by Rachel Murphy

Having been a devoted fan of Jane and Rochester since my mid-teens, I decided to give Bronte’s The Professor a try, on audiobook—though perhaps I was motivated even more by its narrator, the film actor James Wilby (Behind the Lines, A Tale of Two Cities).

The story is of a young Englishman, William Crimsworth, who tries to free himself from a tyrannical employer (his brother) by finding a job abroad. Securing a place as teacher at a boys’ school in Belgium, William is later hired to tutor girls as well, at the neighboring ladies’ seminary. The story, told in first person, deals with his struggles as a teacher, both with his pupils and with the other faculty, whose seemingly duplicitous behavior is inexplicable to William, especially in contrast to the goodness and assiduity of one of his pupils, with whom William eventually falls in love. 

It is a far shorter work than Jane Eyre, and not nearly as engrossing. For one thing, the challenges of first person narration, which has always seemed to me to be more difficult to make a success of—at least, I personally have trouble warming up to it as a reader—is aggravated by Brontë’s attempt to tell the story from the hero’s point of view rather than the heroine’s. (Thankfully, Wilby’s reading made this much more palatable!) Brontë makes it believable for the most part; however, there is too strong an emphasis on analyzing the women/girls in the novel, both in the hero’s own thoughts and in his conversation, which came across as too much a woman’s fanciful hope rather than reality. Not that such fanciful hopes should not be there, even to a pronounced degree; but I couldn’t help but wish for a more balanced train of mind in my “hero”—more manly conversations, thoughts and ideals other than that of women, etc—if nothing else than to offset and enhance those moments of reflection. It was altogether too much of a woman’s world.

One point that surprised me in the novel is the narrator’s strong—though, thankfully, not oppressively dominant—anti-Catholicism.  A few passages from the narrator’s first impressions of teaching at a girls’ school are, I think, worth quoting at length as specimens of what was very likely a common Protestant view of things Catholic:

I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman Catholic religion, and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome. (Ch. 12)

Sylvie was gentle in manners, intelligent in mind; she was even sincere, as far as her religion would permit her to be so, but her physical organization was defective; weak health stunted her growth and chilled her spirits, and then, destined as she was for the cloister, her whole soul was warped to a conventual bias, and in the tame, trained subjection of her manner, one read that she had already prepared herself for her future course of life, by giving up her independence of thought and action into the hands of some despotic confessor. She permitted herself no original opinion, no preference of companion or employment; in everything she was guided by another. With a pale, passive, automaton air, she went about all day long doing what she was bid; never what she liked, or what, from innate conviction, she thought it right to do. The poor little future religieuse had been early taught to make the dictates of her own reason and conscience quite subordinate to the will of her spiritual director. She was the model pupil of Mdlle. Reuter’s establishment; pale, blighted image, where life lingered feebly, but whence the soul had been conjured by Romish wizard-craft! (Ch. 12)

"Priest-craft", "popery", "Jesuitry"…such is, apparently, the underlining reason for the vague atmosphere of duplicity and deceit which William finds at the girls’ seminary where he is to be a teacher. Strong words bespeaking a strong prejudice, written by one whose works reveal a woman anxious for an independent mind; words which, had she given them to another kind of character—one in whom the reader is allowed at least an opening for doubt in regard to the justice of the opinion—would have been appropriate as an example of the ridiculous superstitions held about Catholics during that time and place. But coming from the narrator himself, who seems to possess an—imperfect, perhaps, but probably reliable—combination of Brontë’s own opinions and aspirations, or at least her notion of an ideal partner in life, it is surprisingly bigoted and unimaginative. Such observations, though perhaps containing a grain of truth in some individual case—human beings that we are, we can so easily warp what is good and beautiful in the faith—are so pervasiven in Brontë’s novel that no allowance is made for nuance of character or circumstance. It displays the sort of unreasoned prejudice that is wholly at odds with the allegedly calm and reasonable judgments she would wish us to ascribe to her main characters; and, presumably, to herself. 

The one woman singled out as sincere and without deceit in the story, anxious to improve herself, is a “nursling of Protestantism” and therefore a breath of fresh air to William.  

I found the general story, and budding interest and relationship between the main characters, to be interesting and engaging, but the climax was a little stilted and unsatisfying. And in spite of the brevity of the novel, Brontë has a long anti-climactic sequence at the end, which induces the reader to feel that the whole story was little more than a vehicle for laying out Bronte’s vision of a true relationship of equality between men and women—a task more successfully accomplished in Jane Eyre by means of an enthralling story and surprising characters. I almost wished for more of a similarly Gothic imagination here, however fantastical; at least then something would have really been happening.

There were only a few characters in the story that the reader was expected to follow, one of them a Mr. Hunsden. An irritating, nihilistic man, Hunsden, having done the main character a somewhat questionable service early in the story, keeps reappearing for no apparent reason.  I found him a dislikable character, and one whom the author fails to endow with any of the seasoning or traits that would justify his continued acceptance as a friend of William. Perhaps he is meant only as a contrast to the main characters. At any rate his apparent unhappiness is certainly contrasted with the happiness that the main characters possess in their moral strength and union of mind and heart.

Whatever the case, I mention Hunsden as an example of the somewhat unsatisfying and inconclusive nature of many elements in The Professor—a randomness which however much it may resemble life according to Bronte (I would disagree), doesn’t make for a good story. Though fairly well written, it is severely flawed in terms of plot and structure, and I was surprised to find that it was a later work of Brontë’s, not an earlier.

The highlight of the book, for me, was unquestionably the excellent narration by James Wilby. I am now curious to listen to his other audios, for he reads this mediocre novel as if it were a sonnet by Keats. His soothing voice and quiet, poetic tone are beautiful to listen to; and it certainly enhances the quality of the writing. Wilby’s character voices are well distinguished, and his expression is perfect; he winds up the listener more by his voice than Brontë could, I believe, by her words alone; and for that reason, though I could wish it were Jane Eyre, I may have to go back and listen to this audiobook again.