8/17/2019 Bertha Mason

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Bertha Mason: is she an abused wife, or just "the madwoman in the attic"?

Bertha has become especially famous in literary criticism because her situation

supplied the title and central theory of a major 1979 book of feminist criticism,

Sandra ilbert and Susan ubar!s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination ha#e She is seen bycritics as a symbolic representation of the $trapped% &ictorian wife, who is

e'pected ne#er to tra#el or work outside the house and becomes e#er more

fren(ied as she )nds no outlet for her frustration and an'ietyBasically, the idea is

that the intensely powerful, passionate, and talented woman who is

seen as crazy and in need of connement by the world represents the

nineteenth-century woman writer, whose abilities threatened the

dominant good-old-boy literary network  *b#iously, this has a lot of

interestin+ implications for Bertha as a character, for harlotte Bront- as an

author, and for the ".utobio+raphy" of /ane 0yreIn fact, Bertha is such an

intensely powerful character that even as a prisoner in a remotecountry house across the ocean from her home, with no friends or

family or resources, everyone around her trembles in their boots when

she gets loose

2or harlotte Bront-, Bertha seems to become a strange kind of alter ego

Bertha is rejected by the man who was supposed to lo#e her3 harlotte fell in lo#e

with an unattainable man 4onstantin 5e+er6 Bertha is kept prisoner in a

lonely house on the English moors3 harlotte tra#eled a little, but spent most

of her life shut up in her father!s house in orkshire, away from any bi+8city

culture Bertha is only able to show her powers to the world in what

seem like insane, destructive ways women no#elists were common but their

works were often considered ridiculous and their abilities inferior to those of men

 he parallels are too stron+ to i+nore, and perhaps Bertha does double8duty, both

representin+ the restrictions that harlotte felt and becomin+ harlotte!s wish8

ful)llment of breakin+ throu+h those restrictions to inspire fear and awe

0#erythin+ we learn about Bertha in Jane Eyre we learn throu+h ochester as he!s

tellin+ the story about her to other people around him he only thin+s we really

"know for a fact" because we as readers ha#e seen them are that Bertha is

#iolent toward ochester and her brother, that she!s e'tremely disturbed in some

way if not actually insane, and that she!s kept locked in the attic