Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, widely regarded as a feminist classic in the European tradition, provides a rich psychological profile of Jane Eyre in the Bildungsroman genre. This female Bildungsroman, adapted from a traditionally male literary template, provides the reader intimate access to Jane’s internal struggles as she progresses from childhood to a self-realized adult (Crutchfield). Bertha Mason, otherwise known as Antoinette Cosway (and the first wife of Edward Rochester) to readers of Jean Rhys’ critical novella to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, features prominently in the supernaturally-infused plot, especially in terms of Jane’s contention with the gender discrimination inherent in 18th century Victorian England. I make the argument that Bertha Mason is an outward expression of Jane’s (and to some extent Brontë’s) inner self that she must hide (or lose) in order to become effectively integrated into the society of the time. Moreover, I argue that Bertha’s death at the end of Jane Eyre is purposeful, so as to deprive Jane of her defiance to Victorian society while giving the appearance of gender equality. I make this argument through a close analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the character of Bertha is portrayed and explored with marked differences.
In order to better facilitate a close-reading of Jane Eyre, it is helpful to provide a brief description of the context in which Brontë writes the novel. Victorian England severely restricted the roles of women, as women were regarded as incapable of complex thought and physically fragile (Newman 3-13). Moreover, the ideal Victorian woman was docile, physically beautiful, graceful, and largely confined to the domestic sphere (that is, if she was of a sufficient socioeconomic class; lower class women often had to leave the house out of the need to meet the prerogatives for basic survival) (Newman 3-13). Meanwhile, Great Britain was active imperially, having established colonies in the Caribbean, such as in the West Indies, and we see its influence throughout both narratives in consistent references to slavery, rebellion, and yearnings for freedom (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13). The aftermath of slavery in the British Empire in the Caribbean in which Rhys focuses her novel on, demonstrates parallel tensions between the development of Jane and Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, and it can be argued that Antoinette is a critical refiguring of Jane (Crutchfield).
As a child, Jane is described by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, as fiery and otherwise rebellious for a child (especially of her gender), implicitly invoking the social training of obedience and docility in female children (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13). This fire is similarly expressed in Rhys’ narrative of Antoinette’s home of Jamaica and the vibrant landscape there, which symbolically embodies Antoinette’s true self (Rhys 103). Rhys’ allusions to Brontë’s red room in Jane Eyre, in which both protagonists face similar prison-like conditions as imposed on them by society, is telling. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in Mr. Brocklehurst’s first meeting with Jane and her aunt, when Mrs. Reed expresses hope for Jane, through careful and strict teaching at the Lowood School, to come to embody the key Victorian ideals of femininity: “‘I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects…to be made useful, to be kept humble’” (Brontë 45). However, from an early age Jane expresses her inner passions regarding social justice and women’s autonomy, often pushing back against societal prescriptions surrounding gender and class, but never fully able to escape their constraints (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13).
Moreover, Jane is very vocal about the unjust lack of love that Mrs. Reed regards her with, in a sense arguing that it is this compassion that every human being, regardless of class, is entitled to (Brontë 28-39). It is through her experiences at the Lowood School in which these ideals, her accompanying fiery disposition, and her human yearning for love and acceptance are nearly quenched by the instilling in her of the qualities of a proper Christian young lady (a lofty standard symbolized by Miss Temple), including humility, submission, and devotion to God and any other superior such as a future husband (Brontë 65-90). Similar to this narrative in Jane Eyre, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette (before being rechristened Bertha), also undergoes a similar indoctrination at her convent school, but nevertheless feels a similar inner disquiet, commenting at one point that “my needle is swearing” and paradoxically asserting that she “felt bolder, happier, more free” but “not so safe” within the walls of the convent (Rhys 30, 34). To me, this shows her identification and connection with the natural beauty of her home island, in which she instinctively understands that it represents her unbound self (Crutchfield; Rhys 30, 34).
Similar molding and indoctrination of women into happy acceptance of the domestic sphere happens to both Jane and Antoinette at the common nexus of the husband or male authority figure (Crutchfield). Much like Rochester seeks to mold Jane into his ideal version of a docile Victorian woman, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon [Bertha],” the Rochester of Rhys’s novel re-christens Antoinette as Bertha, giving her an anglicized name (Brontë 290; Rhys 81). This renaming is a prelude to his further attempts to wipe away core aspects of her identity, such as by taking away her previous wardrobe (including the symbolic red dress) and isolating her from the other residents at Thornfield (Brontë 290; Rhys 112). This loss of identity and innocence is summed up as Antoinette muses about her appearance and the lack of a mirror: “Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away” (Rhys 107). To me, the renaming and the withholding of a looking glass (uncertainty of identity) symbolizes to me the destruction wrought on colonized nations by the male colonizer figure (Brontë 290; Rhys 81).
Despite finding friendship and acceptance from fellow classmate Helen Burns, Jane still feels a sense of psychological isolation and continually describes the Lowood School as a prison that restricts her from exploring the outside world as she pleases, developing a similar agoraphobic fear of the outside world as Annette (Brontë 65-90; Rhys 30-34). Jane laments in Chapter 10 that:
I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits…and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences and antipathies: such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough…I desired liberty…change, stimulus… (93)
Thus, this overwhelming theme of imprisonment (having gone from the “red room” at Gateshead to Lowood School beforehand) continues at the Thornfield Estate in which Jane is now governess to Mr. Edward Rochester’s illegitimate child Adéle (Brontë 95-105). Brontë’s frequent allusions to slavery seem to become even more frequent as Jane acutely feels the socialized feelings of inferiority in comparison to the strong male figure of Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield estate (Brontë 95-105). For example, when Rochester attempts to give Jane new dresses and jewels, Jane remarks that Rochester smiles “such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched” (Brontë 269; Thomas 57-58). In between these emotionally confusing encounters with Rochester, she feels trapped by the dark, gloomy surroundings of the Gothic estate and expresses this paramount longing for freedom that both she and Rhys’ Bertha feel:
Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards…and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and certainly there were many and glowing…It is in vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they can find it…Women…feel just as men feel…they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation… (116-117)
This previous passage is notable in the respect that it shows the vitality of Jane’s self, particularly her inner self, her vivid imagination correlating very nicely to the parallel psychological landscape and physical hometown of Antoinette/Bertha, which is described in vivid, fiery tones that to Rochester are anathema to his own sense of self, almost to the point of seeming unnatural or “demonic” (Brontë 116-117, 290; Rhys 103). However, Jane’s and Bertha’s cold, prison-like surroundings in England serve as a foil to their fiery natures that both have tried to conceal for better or worse (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13; Rhys 107). England, described by Bertha, is “cold” and anathema to her inner fire (Rhys 107). This ominous feeling continues when she expresses that she and Rochester must have “lost our way” to England, the manifestation of her nightmares, “this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it” (Rhys 107).
The embittered and slightly mad Rochester recognizes this fire in Antoinette, seeking to take away from her that vitality in a bid to regain control over his identity as male colonizer whereby taking her back to England; here, Rhys seems to draw the reader’s attention to the similarities in the “man’s” treatment of Antoinette and Brontë’s Rochester’s treatment of Jane (Crutchfield; Rhys 103). In fact, Rochester’s subconscious aversion to a woman on a plane of equality with himself manifests itself outwardly in the scene in which Jane comes to the attic and discovers the existence of his first wife, Bertha. He states his preference for a submissive woman in his choice of Jane as “a change after that fierce ragout,” whereas Bertha was “a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (Brontë 290; Rhys 55). It is in Rhys’ novel that the reader understands that part of Rochester’s preference for Jane stems partly out of the fact that Bertha was hinted to have possessed unusual sexual cravings unbecoming of a Victorian woman (Brontë 290; Rhys 55).
Moreover, in the buildup to the climax of Jane Eyre in a seemingly unconscious revolt on Jane’s part, there come to be very alarming happenings at night in Thornfield, from the setting on fire of Rochester’s bed, the tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, and the stabbing of Mr. Mason (Gilbert 796). This revolt is unconsciously expressed by Jane, who cannot sleep one night prior to her wedding: “I could not sleep—a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising; seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred…” (Brontë 279). This “gale” and “mournful under-sound” parallels Bertha’s entrance into her room and tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, before Jane is fully cognizant of her presence (Brontë 279-281). A terrified Jane describes Bertha, whose identity was similarly fractured under patriarchal attempts to expunge her deviance, through such descriptors as “hyena” and notes “her bloated” and ultimately alien features (Brontë 290). In other words, Jane is terrified to recognize the innate similarities between both women, but later in the book, Jane comes to a peaceful acceptance of herself whereby sympathizing with Bertha, saying that “she cannot help being mad” (Brontë 297). Later, when meeting Bertha in the attic, Jane is forced to confront the fact that Bertha is her avenging self, who in physically resisting Rochester is showing “virile force in the contest” because of her “stature almost equaling her husband” (Brontë 290). Here, Bertha is Jane’s agent who is able to attack Rochester’s betrayal of his promises to Jane for equality in marriage (Brontë 290). As Gilbert eloquently puts it in her critical piece “Plain Jane’s Progress”:
Bertha…is Jane’s truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead. For as Claire Rosenfield has pointed out, ‘the novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological Doubles’ frequently juxtaposes ‘two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal self.’ (796)
Thus, when the reader reaches the point in Jane Eyre in which Thornfield Estate is discovered to have been burned down by Bertha (who also perishes in the fire, despite Rochester’s attempts to rescue her), Jane is understandably horrified (Brontë 414). This horrible realization is only furthered as she realizes the outcomes of her tempestuous dreams while at Thornfield, in which Jane questions a former Thornfield servant, in which Jane “feared now to hear my own story” in his description of the “lunatic” and her kindling of first Jane’s bed before the whole estate (Brontë 416-417). In other words, unconsciously she recognizes Bertha as the agent of her unconscious (Gilbert 796). It is this same foreboding that Rochester feels when he encounters “a paved road” in the forest in Rhys’ Granbois (his and Bertha’s imagined honeymoon house) leading to the “ruins of a stone house” where at the back of the house was Jane Eyre’s “tree of life,” described here as “a wild orange tree covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green” (Brontë 414; Rhys 62).
Rochester’s dread is his dread for when both women in his life will defy him in order to retain or regain their sense of socially-fragmented identity, as Bertha does in her rediscovery of Antoinette at the end of Rhys’s novel, whereby she sees the red sky with “all my life in it,” evoking memories of her childhood and giving her the strength (and clarity) to make the liberating decision to burn down the house (Brontë 414; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Antoinette expresses this feeling of freedom at regaining her identity whereby expressing that “the wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings” that might “bear me up” and away from the Thornfield attic that was the scene of her psychological trauma (Rhys 112). Similarly, Jane’s attempt at running away (both physically and metaphorically) from Thornfield after discovering the existence of Bertha reflects a sense of regained agency on Jane’s part in her conscious decision to remove herself from Rochester’s emotional manipulations and false promises of equality in marriage (Brontë 290-294; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Jane’s prior struggle between rationality and passion is emulated in descriptions of her wrestling with the decision to leave, lamenting how her “conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but slipped her dainty foot in the slough…of agony” (Brontë 294).
Tellingly, if one accepts the interpretation that the psychologically fragmented selves of Bertha and Jane are a united whole, then Bertha’s sacrificing herself to fire at Thornfield estate represents the fact that Jane essentially had to sacrifice the socially-ostracized self in order to maintain her place (and feel some sort of peace) in Victorian society (Gilbert 798). While Gilbert sees this as necessary in order for Jane to truly reach her self-actualization at the end of the Bildungsroman plot, in a sense, Jane still is sacrificing an essential part of herself in her quest for equality in marriage with Rochester (Gilbert 802-804). It is Jane’s inability to completely come to terms with Bertha’s sacrifice, upon which Jane Eyre closes (Brontë 438-441). Nevertheless, Jane masks the missing part of herself and consents to being Rochester’s wife, convincing herself of the equality of their union because of her being (seemingly) “independent…as well as rich” and her “own mistress” (Brontë 423). What Jane doesn’t recognize in her seemingly fairy-tale ending is that her perceived equality was a mask to disguise void where the part of her that she had to sacrifice to be accepted into society again as an “equal” used to be (Gilbert 802-804).
In the end, Jane never fully escapes from the red room that is reminiscent of the societal trappings upon which Jane and her double Bertha are imprisoned in and must find some way to escape (Gilbert 783). Perhaps Brontë never was fully to escape the confines of Victorian femininity herself, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” that the killing of Bertha, the designated Other, is the only way for Jane to achieve this self-realization in an age of English patriarchal imperialism (Spivak 251). Spivak scathingly explains that “she [Bertha] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (Spivak 251). In other words, this sacrifice of Jane’s Other self in favor of conforming to the dictates of Victorian society leaves us with the sense that achieving gender equality is an ongoing process and may not be achieved to perfection (Spivak 251).
Works Cited:
Crutchfield, Susan. “Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Women Authors Class Discussion, 27 and 29 September and 4 October 2016, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI. Lecture.
Gilbert, Sandra. "Plain Jane's Progress." Signs, vol. 2, no. 4, 1977, pp. 779-804. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173210.
Newman, Beth. Introduction. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, 1847, Boston/New York: Bedford St Martin’s Press, 1996, 3rd ed., pp. 3-13. Print.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, Introd. by Francis Wyndham, 1999, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 1-18. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985. pp. 243-61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.
Thomas, Sue. "Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no.1, 2007. pp. 57-79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40347124.
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