SOURCE: “The Professor: Charlotte Brontë's Hysterical Text, or Realistic Narrative and the Ideology of the Subject from a Feminist Perspective.” In Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Vol. 18, edited by Michael Timko, Fred Kaplan, and Edward Guiliano, AMS Press, 1989, pp. 353-80.

In the following essay, Johnston uses Lacanian theory to examine The Professor and discusses the possibility of constructing feminine subjectivity within a realistic framework.

The essay which follows explores the construction of sexual identity in representation. I argue that the realistic notion of identity as a particular temporal/spatial structuration is assumed (if modified) in the psychoanalytic account of the constitution of the subject, which means that both the theory and aesthetic practice consequently furnish a model of subjectivity that is exclusively masculine. In this context I examine Charlotte Brontë's The Professor as a hysterical text, by which I mean a text that interrogates...