A Study on the Structure of Feeling in Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor

Abstract

Raymond Williams (1921-1988), one of the most influential Marxist cultural critics in the 20th century, proposed the concept of “structures of feeling” to reproduce the social psychology and emotional experience of people from an era. The structures of feeling are most conspicuous during social transformation and implicit in literary works of the same period. This paper intends to examine Charlotte Bronte’s novel The Professor with Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” theory to find out the conflict and contradiction between the real feelings of the characters in the novel and the dominant cultural characteristics, as well as the author’s solution strategy — the magic formula, and to uncover the participation of literary works in British empire construction.