Jane Eyre & Bertha Mason: The Anti-Feminist Monster
For the literary fanatic, or anyone interested in my analysis on the popular novel Jane Eyre, the below essay is a review of my thoughts, specifically focused around the character Bertha Mason.
Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, has long been acclaimed as a work of feminist literature, in which a woman paves her own path and decides for herself who she wishes to love. This plot was subversive upon its release into a world emerging with first wave feminism; in the modern era, however, the novel should be recognized for its regressive qualities. Although Jane herself challenges norms, the story demonizes Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s secret wife. Bertha is depicted as an animalistic monster. In reality, there is proof that madness did not drive her into confinement but that confinement drove her into madness, and that her violent actions are thoughtful, not random. Jane Eyre, in her fictional autobiography, provides zero space for Bertha to share her side of the story. Instead, she mimics the xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr. Rochester. The depiction of Bertha Mason as a monster represents a racist, sexist attitude that silences a Creole woman’s voice and diminishes the validity of modern feminist praise for this novel. The historic value of Jane Eyre should be celebrated, and empowering plot lines deserve admiration, but its anti-feminist depiction of Bertha Mason should not go unnoticed.
In reciting his past to Jane, Mr. Rochester says that before Bertha became “unreasonable,” “intemperate,” and “unchaste” (274), she was “tall, dark, and majestic. Her family wished to secure me, because I was of a good race; and so did she” (273). Mr. Rochester admits that their marriage was a financial and social transaction. His father and brother encouraged him to pursue Bertha as a means of obtaining “thirty thousand pounds” (274), and Bertha’s West Indian family pushed her to marry Mr. Rochester due to his European race. The narrative provided in the text, through Mr. Rochester’s account, is that in realizing his marriage was purely transactional—not the result of the love he thought he had been experiencing—he felt tricked: “a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was” (273). He grew to resent the marriage altogether, figuring that all along she had been a crazy woman—the descendent of her mother, shut away in an insane asylum—and he was now obliged to live with her. There is no insight into Bertha’s perspective.
It seems probable that both Mr. Rochester and Bertha Mason thought they had found a perfect partner and realized, actually, that their families set them up for the purpose of a strictly transactional arrangement. Just as this realization troubled Mr. Rochester, Bertha also would have been unsettled, feeling tricked into companionship with someone she thought she loved but truthfully hardly even knew. Mr. Rochester’s concern that she was “by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings” (275) is even more true a statement for Bertha; if Mr. Rochester had little power to separate, she had even less. Perhaps, like her mother, she had the audacity to challenge this position she was forced into, and met with continual denial and abandonment, she was driven very realistically into a state of pure despair. Mr. Rochester says that quickly after marriage, “conversation could not be sustained between us,” and that she had “absurd, contradictory, exacting orders” (274). He states this as if it is proof that she was beginning to reveal her madness, but it seems evidence of something else: after their marriage, she was being driven to madness. Conversation not being sustained any longer implies that real, human discourse once existed, meaning she was not always a creature, “clothed hyena,” and “maniac” (263). Further, claiming that she was “exacting orders,” without qualifying what they were, means they could have been reasonable demands such as a request that he consider her side of the situation or that he provide a solution to their contractual dilemma in which she isn’t locked in a room by herself while he travels around finding other women to flirt with.
Bertha Mason is described as unpredictable, yet the violence she displays is not random; it is articulated. She seeks to harm those that try to control her. She attacks her brother with a knife, and it was her family who most forcefully pushed her into marriage. Her main target is Mr. Rochester himself, the one who has dragged her to England and hid her away in the “secret inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast’s den” (277). Bertha visits Jane one night, holding a candle, the same tool she used to set fire to Mr. Rochester’s bed. However, she does not light Jane’s bed aflame, nor does she inflict any harm upon her. Jane tells Mr. Rochester about the night Bertha came, describing how she took Jane’s veil, “threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror” (254). She tells him that Bertha then ripped the veil in half, and stood still before her: “the fiery eyes glared upon me—she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes” (255). This series of events, ending with direct eye contact, is more of an ominous warning than a demonstration of violence. Each step is precise, not the act of an unstable madwoman. Bertha wears Jane’s veil, looking at herself in the mirror: a reflection of her own marriage to Mr. Rochester. Without speaking a word, she communicates her message to Jane, ripping the veil to say that her marriage should not continue. She proceeds to stare Jane in the eyes to make clear that this is a warning: from her experience, be cautious of what can happen after marrying this man.
When Bertha eventually lights Thornfield aflame, inciting a complete decimation of the mansion, over ten years have passed since Mr. Rochester moved her to England and trapped her in her chamber. Over sixteen years of being legally trapped in a marriage, ten of which she has spent physically trapped in a room, does not justify violence, but it does well explain the intention behind it. Bertha, after stealing the keys from her caretaker, Grace Poole, could have destroyed the property and then ran away, but Jane is told that people “witnessed Mr. Rochester ascend through the skylight on to the roof: we heard him yell ‘Bertha!’ We saw him approach her; and then, ma’am, she yelled, and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement” (381). It does seem Mr. Rochester had a drop of sympathy in attempting to save her; he is not a violent man, and while he prefers Bertha hidden, he does not want her dead. However, after years of confinement, Bertha does not want sympathy—she wants freedom. Unfortunately, the only way she sees herself obtaining freedom is in committing suicide. It is important to recognize that jumping, and ending her life, was a powerful choice that she made, not out of insanity, but in an intentional effort to escape the terrifyingly oppressive world around her.
Jane Eyre knows what it is like being wrongfully banished and called a lunatic. In the opening chapter of the novel, John Reed bullies Jane, telling her she is a dependent in the house who has no right taking books to read. He physically assaults her with a book, “striking my head against the door and cutting it,” and after fighting back, Jane is sent by Mrs. Reed “away to the red-room” (13). In the red-room, she feels troubled by the injustice of being locked away, contemplating “some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die” (16). No dialogue is given to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, but Jane’s own inner-dialogue seems to reflect what Bertha may have felt throughout her marriage: “All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death?” (17). Just like the screams Jane hears coming from the third-floor room of Thornfeild, Jane herself “uttered a wild, involuntary cry” (18), for left alone, she finds herself susceptible to fear and superstition, believing she has seen a ghost. Jane does not recognize her likeness to Bertha, despite the acute similarity of their experiences. Later in the novel, when Jane moves from Lowood to Thornfield, she carries with her the memory of her fear in the red-room but seems to forget the unjust act of being blamed and then forced into solitude. When Bertha visits Jane to rip apart her veil, Jane recalls that “for the second time in my life—only the second time—I became insensible from terror” (255). This moment is a direct call-back to her experience in the red-room. However, she does not see in Bertha the humanity of someone trapped and alone, like Jane was that night of the red-room; on the contrary, she sees Bertha as a parallel to the frightful apparition she thought she had witnessed. In this scene, Jane does not yet have knowledge of Bertha’s true identity and her experiences of being locked away; however, the voice of Jane as a reflective narrator does have this knowledge and could therefore approach the relaying of these events with retrospection and much greater sympathy.
Unlike Bertha, Jane—a young, unmarried, white woman—is able to free herself, without deteriorating into frustration or having to seriously contemplate suicide. She convinces Mrs. Reed to allow her to live elsewhere, and shortly after, she gets sent to Lowood. Jane is ignorant to any self-awareness of the fact that it is only through privilege that she has been able to escape from her own experience of maddening confinement. With the same rhetoric that Mr. Rochester uses, Jane gives Bertha no sympathy and calls her “a savage” (254), an exotic other, like those from “some savage country” (21) in Gulliver’s Travels, one of Jane’s favorite books as a child. Her description of Bertha’s madness is rooted in physical details, many of which emphasize Bertha’s black, Creole features: her “thick and dark hair,” “blackened inflation,” “purple” face, and “swelled and dark” lips (254). She is not described as bloody or seething or frantic—the horror descriptions are limited to her darkness, creating a gross parallel between monstrosity and race. When Jane sees Bertha in her hidden room, she describes her again: “whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face” (263). In reciting this story, Jane chooses the words she uses to portray Bertha, and the physical depiction—combined with the lack of gendered pronouns—should be considered. Again, Jane calls attention to her dark features. She calls Bertha “it,” as if she is an animal or object, devoid of all humanity. This is much like Victor Frankenstein’s dehumanization of the Creature, a theme seemingly common in Gothic literature; a monster is created not through any innate qualities but through the language used to describe them as a character.
Bertha Mason’s role as the exotic monster of Jane Eyre perpetuates problematic attitudes, equating Bertha’s monstrosity with her physical appearance. Treated as an animal, in both the context of the story and its narration, she is not given a single line of dialogue; despite her defining role in the plot, Bertha receives as much of a voice as Mr. Rochester’s dog, Pilot. Jane Eyre, who herself has been unjustly punished before, does not recognize their similarities and instead provides little sympathy towards her. Close reading shows that Bertha Mason is not sporadic and unpredictable, as the narrator implies; she is calculated in her actions, even the violent ones. There is also proof that Bertha Mason was not born with a predisposition to insanity—as Mr. Rochester suggests—but being forced into a contractually binding marriage, silenced, and then shut away in a room of solitary confinement, is what spiraled her into a state of all-encompassing frustration. The narrative of Bertha Mason as a monster is racially-charged and anti-feminist. However, the narration does not necessarily equate to the views of the author. Charlotte Bronte’s work in introducing this book to the world has created a space for critical analysis generations beyond its initial release. The fact that this book can still be scrutinized in such relevant detail is a sign that it provides rich material for modern feminist and postcolonial analysis. It deserves honor, but it also deserves proper criticism in a time where one can recognize its perpetuation of stereotypical, regressive ideas. The real monsters of the story are those who continue to paint Bertha Mason in a strictly negative view.
Works Cited
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Norton. 4th ed.
