Between Labor and Capital: Charlotte Bronte's Professional Professor

Art works are ideological because they a priori posit a spiritual entity as though it were independent of any conditions of material production, hence as though it were intrinsically superior to these conditions. In so doing art works cover up the age-old culpability that lies in the divorce of physical from mental labour.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (323)

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.

"How can a man put a price upon his mind!" Silas Wegg exclaims disingenuously in Our Mutual Friend (1865), a novel that laments the market's ever-expanding reach (Dickens 790). Written in 1846, almost two decades before Dickens's novel, Brontë's The Professor asks a similar question, but this question demands an answer, one that takes the form of the story that unfolds. "Carry your intellect and refinement to the market and tell me in a private note what price is bid for them," a character taunts the protagonist, thereby setting the novel in motion (70). The eponymous professor does indeed place his intellect on the market and, finding himself well rewarded, has the last laugh. The Professor, in other words, does the opposite of what later novels like Our Mutual Friend train us to expect: rather than bemoan the commodification of minds, it worries about the mind's resistance to exchange value.

The difference between the two novels is an index of how far the professional class had come by 1865. By the time Our Mutual Friend appears, the professional class has so clearly differentiated itself from the capitalist class that Matthew Arnold could write of "a professional class [...] with fine and governing qualities" and "an immense business class [...] without governing qualities" (qtd. in Reader 113). "By 1860," writes W. J. Reader, "the elements of professional standing were tolerably clear" (71), and the structural contradiction of the professional— simultaneously inside and outside the market—had been papered over. The Professor, however, is part of an earlier moment not of class consolidation but emergence. "In the formative period, most of the markets for professional services had to be created," Magali Larson explains, and "common standards of what this unique commodity—intangible services—meant [...] were lacking" (14). The problem that faced this nascent class marketing intangible services was that it had to write itself into being at least in part by representing itself in the idiom of production. It had to...