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The Age of Hysteria: The Repression of Male Sexuality and Englishness in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor

Victorian medical authors who envisioned hysteria as fundamentally a female malady tried to minimize and conceal the incidence of hysteria among men. They did so by stressing its comparative rarity and by linking it with femininity and effeminacy. The male hysterics were treated as a social, sexual, and psychological anomaly in a culture demanding normative masculinity, characterized by bodily vigour, mental toughness, and sexual restraint. Charlotte Brontë's posthumously published first novel, The Professor(1857), features William Crimsworth, a male hysteric, who represses his sexuality to an excessive degree in order to meet the ideal of 'a true Englishman' required by the British nation and empire. Thus, the issue of male hysteria is connected with that of Englishness.