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Victorian society is patriarchal par excellence. In his poem 'The Angel of the House,' Coventry Patmore describes the ideal Victorian wife as a woman who is docile, subservient and always devoted. Women were supposed to adhere to society standards, please and obey men in every aspect. Any woman that refuses this classification cannot be tolerated by society. The case of Antoinette/Bertha both in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre is no exception. When Jane Eyre was first read, most readers mainly focus on Jane.
Few thoughts were directed towards Bertha Mason. Bertha in our minds at that time was just an obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s happiness and was finally removed by her own suicide during the fire at Thorn-field. Everyone was contented with the ending and forgot about Bertha. However, it is striking for readers to read the work of Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea.
When putting on gender lens and read Jane Eyre again, readers pay much more attention to everything about Bertha.
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“ Amazing as always, gave her a week to finish a big assignment and came through way ahead of time. ”
In this paper, I will establish a comparative study between the image of Antoinette/Bertha in both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in relation to the status of Jane in Jane Eyre. While Jane could make her way to become an independent woman with agency, Antoinette/Bertha was the victim of male society. I will discuss circumstances that contribute to Antoinette/Bertha’s failure in being independent; finally, I will read the notion of Antoinette’s madness through Feminist lenses.
We encounter Antoinette in the first part of the novel as a child telling her life story.
Her life was hard but she was strong enough to survive. However, strength is never enough in patriarchal society. Women of Coulibri Estate seem to suggest that mere survival is all Antoinette can hope for, but the models of survival each woman presents are difficult for Antoinette to identify with and none seem to offer the happiness and security she ultimately wants. She was pushed into a marriage that was not totally her choice. Since a woman can't possess a property by her own, Antoinette had to get married in order to get her stepfather's inheritance. She decided to make the best of it and start a new life with a husband who might provide her with the safety she lacked for her whole life. Unfortunately, her dream ended up to be a nightmare. All the strength she once had turned to weakness and all the hopes she holds on her new husband came to be eternal despair.
Antoinette/Bertha lives an isolated life where she essentially has no one to trust or to confide in. Antoinette lost both her independence and her fortune; she becomes someone else’s property. In both novels, Bertha is portrayed as mad. The only difference is that the reader is given information about Bertha’s past and details about her madness in Rhys’s novel, while there is none of this in Jane Eyre. Antoinette/Bertha has been occupying only a subhuman level of existence in the patriarchal narrative. Her identity was reduced to being “a monster”. On the other hand, Jane is able to discover a place for herself in society, to financially support herself, to find family and a place within that family.
Most of the literary critics considered Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, only the dark double of Jane. While Jane is the protagonist, Bertha is the antagonist. She was first introduced to us as a malicious obscure woman who lights fire in Mr. Rochester’s bedroom. Bertha is given the less human degree in the novel. Trying to describe her, Jane said: 'What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell' (Brontë 321). Before even seeing her, Jane classifies Bertha in the animal zone by describing sounds coming from her room as animalistic. Jane's conception of Bertha is summarized in this quote: “To listen for the movements of the wild beast or fiend in yonder side-den. But since Mr. Rochester’s visit it seemed spellbound: all the night I heard but three sounds at three long intervals- a sharp creak, a momentary renewal of the snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan” (Brontë 239). This description of Bertha is animalistic and represents the stereotypical “madwoman”. Bertha functions as a negative role model for Jane since she holds all the traits of femininity that would be deemed as inappropriate. She represents something Jane should never become and something she should avoid at all cost.
What should be considered here is that in Jane Eyre's progression towards independence she does not seem to experience the psychological wounds Antoinette/Bertha does. Jane individualizes herself by defining herself against the relationships in her life, against the structure that defines her world. Alternatively, Antoinette, who experiences psychological pain from her individualism throughout her life because of her inability to belong to something wants to belong to something rather than excluded from it. Jane is able to liberate herself from patriarchal confines and meet her husband as an equal.
In Bronte’s novel both Jane and Bertha are considered as inferior based on their gender, however, Jane is superior to Bertha thanks to her ability of narrative. While Bertha is represented by others and defined as a mad for lack of narrative ability, Jane told her life story the way she lived it. All this leads us to question the circumstances that make such difference between two female characters that were supposed to hold the same position. Jane is capable of keeping her image as sane because the identification of sanity and insanity depends on authority. In this concern, Michel Foucault expresses his view considering authorities as exercising power using binary oppositions: “sane/mad, dangerous/harmless; normal/ abnormal” (Foucault 199). Trying to read this view in Jane Eyre, one realizes that the authority identifies people, and bertha is an example of a woman who is labeled by her husband as a mad woman using language. The representation of Bertha provides much to dispute since she is represented as a mysterious and inferior other.
In the 19th century women’s psychological problems were explained as a normal effect of their femininity. In this concern, Shoshana Felman raises critical questions in her remarkable essay “women and madness” stating: “Is it by chance that hysteria (significantly derived, as is well known, from the Greek word for 'uterus') was originally conceived as an exclusively female complaint, as the lot and prerogative of women?” (Felman 2) Bertha’s madness is depicted both as a reflection of ideologies in a patriarchal society and of the beliefs of Victorian psychiatry. Rochester's statement talking about Bertha reinforces this: 'the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity' (Bronte 261). Felman redefines the women’s madness and considers it a request for help from desperate women. She states:
Depressed and terrified women are not about to seize the means of production and reproduction: quite the opposite of rebellion, madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation. Far from being a form of contestation, 'mental illness' is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence and of political castration. (Felman 2)
In our case, Bertha becomes a sign of female insanity. Her inability to narrate and lack of verbal authority, leads to a constant attempt to define and redefine her by others.
The reader gets to see how Antoinette, the protagonist in Wide Sargasso Sea, mind deteriorates along with her marriage to Mr. Rochester. This deterioration can be noticed for the first time in the narrative. The narrative is written in three parts: the first, which covers Antoinette’s childhood and youth up to her marriage to Rochester; this part is told by the protagonist herself; in the second part Rochester describes his arrival in the West Indies, his marriage and the disastrous relationship with Antoinette; in the third part, the narrative is given back to the protagonist, from the attic of Thornfield Hall. This division of parts and voices says it all about the situation of the protagonist. Antoinette was in full control of her life from her childhood to the point of her marriage. Once she got married she lost everything including her voice and power of narrating her own story. Finally, she decided to act again and say her last words before sitting fire on Thornfield Hall.
All women in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome oppression. Being not only a woman but also a West-Indian, that is a white Creole, Antoinette/Bertha experienced both women’s oppression and racial prejudice. Clearly, Rochester married her for her money. She became totally dependent on him. Rochester cannot bear her character, ways of living and other racial differences from him. As a result, he renames her Bertha, an English girl’s name, which is a typical symbol of patriarchy and colonialism. However, Antoinette does not want to accept this imposed image on her. When their relationship goes into an alienation situation, Rochester takes an even harsher attitude towards Antoinette. He describes her as a “Vain silly creature”. He brings her back secretly in England where she remains locked in the cold, dark attic for ten years. He does this just because he could not accept her otherness, and finally, Antoinette has been driven into madness.
The subjectivity of Antoinette changes throughout the novel. Her dreams, illusions, and desires are no more hers. She is just an object of sexual gratification and the other on whose screams the edifices of patriarchal discourse can be constructed. Rochester robes Antoinette of both her family name and her name. She is no more Antoinette but Bertha. In this context, the comment made by Spivak is pertinent that “In the figure of Antoinette whom in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism” (250).
Renaming Antoinette as Bertha is a patriarchal ploy to change the person into the patterns prescribed by patriarchy against which she rebels in the last part of the text. She becomes Rochester’s property like all the estates that was bequeathed to him. Their marriage makes the man the owner of everything she possesses: her body, her spirit, her lands, property, house, her smiles, tears, her thoughts, and emotions. With her marriage her efforts to represent self is taken over by Rochester as he tries to write herself as he pleases, renaming her as Bertha and trying to remove her from the familiar surroundings of her dream and reality. Patriarchy’s incursion into Antoinette’s world is synchronous with her reshaping her values according to the demands of patriarchy.
Antoinette is destroyed by a man who is supported by a patriarchal society. She is robbed of her life. What is worse is that the victim is represented as a monster and the monster as a victim. Everyone thinks that Bertha of Jane Eyre is defeated. However, Bertha can’t be defeated since she came to understand that sitting fire on the house where there is both her and Rochester will be a good end to her story. The revenge was not a success, but at least it sets her free forever. Bertha couldn’t take her revenge from Rochester, however, Jean Rhys did. Rochester is alive, with all the burden of his sins, and Bertha is not defeated since her story is told.
Ideal Victorian women live within the parameters set by the male world, obeying its rules consciously and internalizing it subconsciously. They remain as angels in the house conforming to the textual and contextual fringes assigned to them, never questioning, never challenging the roles cast upon them. Bertha Mason in the attic served as a warning to other rebelling women against the patriarchy social restrains. Normal women are not supposed to express their needs or desires. If expressed they violate the norm and become classified with the non-human beings of the mysterious and magical world invested with the power to seduce and lead men astray like Eve in Paradise Lost.
A Gender Approach to Madness in 19th and 20th Century. (2021, Dec 03). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/a-gender-approach-to-madness-in-19th-and-20th-century-essay
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