BERTHA MASON RECONSIDERED

Modern readers (or increasingly, modern viewers) of Jane Eyre whether they know it or not, have had their impressions filtered (via editors, directors etc) by two immensely influential works.  Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, retold the novel from the perspective of Bertha Mason.  Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s the Madwoman in the Attic, in framing a theory of Victorian fiction, took a feminist perspective of Bertha as the victim of male oppression. 

     A quick survey of recent online essays on Jane Eyre shows three main lines of development from these two seminal books of the 60’s and 70’s.    Jean Rhys saw her protagonist as Caucasian, but some of the postcolonial theory her work has generated sees Bertha as part black, and Charlotte Brontë as guilty of racism.  From Attic have developed the views that either Bertha is not mad at all, or that she is mad and the cause of her madness is syphilis.   These are all interesting perspectives that have come on stream since I first encountered Jane Eyre as a child and formed my own impressions, and all worthy of consideration. 

What is the postcolonial case for seeing Bertha Mason as partly non-white?  She is described by Jane as having a discoloured, savage face, “fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments”, the lips swelled and dark.  (Ch 25).  In the statement of impediment to the marriage there is reference to her mother Antoinetta, a Creole (Ch 26).  Rochester refers to his “Indian Messalina” (Ch 27), and describes himself as having come from “a good race” (Ch 27). So, by implication, his wife didn’t?   A case can, it seems, be made for clear-cut racism.

     Actually, it isn’t that clear cut at all.  Bertha Mason is also described as having had good looks when Rochester married her – she is, in fact, specifically compared to Blanche Ingram: “tall, dark and majestic”.  (Ch 27) –   in which case the “purple face and bloated features” (Ch 26) of her later self would be the result of subsequent insanity rather than ethnicity.   

    It should be noted that some others of those who are a threat to Jane are described as dark: her cruel aunt Mrs Reed and bullying cousin John, for example, who “sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own”. (Ch 2).   The stress here seems thematic (dark personalities) rather than racial.  Mr Rochester – in his untamed state a threat to Jane – is also dark.  And the beautiful Blanche Ingram, whom Jane fears will marry Mr Rochester, is, despite her first name, “as dark as a Spaniard”.   (Ch 17).

     That simile, I think, is key; for it leads us into the meaning of ‘Creole’ in the novel: about which there is some postcolonial critical confusion.  Understandably.  The term ‘Creole’ is as confusing as the term Anglo-Indian: which can mean either those of mixed race, or those of British stock in India.   In the British-influenced Caribbean, ‘Creole’, certainly nowadays, tends to mean those of mixed black/white race.  But in Louisiana, ‘Creole’ was the word used to describe French settlers.  And Creole was also the term for a Spaniard born outside Spain in the Spanish Empire.  It is stressed (Ch 18, 19, 20) that Mason comes from Spanish Town in Jamaica.  Jamaica was Spanish before it was British, and some Spanish terms lingered.  So “her mother the Creole” might mean simply that Bertha Mason had an English-origin father and a Spanish-origin mother.  “Indian Messalina”, rather than having any ethnic connotation, might simply mean that she behaved like Messalina and came from the West Indies. 

     Mr Rochester’s good race.  Does it mean white (in which case, a slur on blacks) or English (in which case a slur on Spaniards)?  Or does it mean neither?  There might be a case if Mason Senior had been a Creole like his wife; but he is English, like Rochester.  We might consider here the reason for Mr Rochester’s marriage.  As Mrs Fairfax explains to Jane (Ch13), Rochester’s elder brother inherited all the estate because Rochester Senior wished to keep it intact.   However, he wished the younger brother to marry money and so preserve the prestige of the family name.  So then the reference to Mr Rochester’s good race might be no more significant than the reference to his good family in determining his marital eligibility. He might not have the money, but he’s still a good catch.  He comes of good stock.  If so, a sense of offence is being generated by some postcolonialist readers where none would have been intended. 

Those influenced by The Madwoman in the Attic tend also to be influenced by Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation.  Drawing on his own social experiences as a homosexual sado-masochist, Foucault’s general argument is about society’s dread of difference.  Historically, many of those merely different were seen as a threat and designated mad by society as a means of social control.  Homosexual sado-masochists, for example.   Or a girl confined to an asylum merely for having an illegitimate child.  

     Is Bertha Mason, then, not mad at all, but simply perceived as a threat by a patriarchal society?   Rochester describes her as “intemperate and unchaste”.  (Ch 27).  For that read sexually liberated and unsubmissive?   Too independent to be easily controlled; so lock her up?  The Soviets dealt with their dissidents by interning them as insane. Same sort of thing?

     This sort of reading seems to me to run against the grain of the novel.  It has got things the wrong way around.  Bertha is not declared insane because she is intemperate; her intemperance is a symptom of her insanity. 

     Some feminist criticism has seen Bertha as the victim of Rochester’s oppression.  There is something in it (Jane is also a victim of his attitudes).   But if Bertha’s madness is a general symbol of a male-dominated society’s oppression, then it seems to me to be a failure.   The novel’s attitude towards madness reflects bewilderment with how to deal with it; that, and pity. Mason implores, “Let her be treated tenderly”, to which Rochester replies that he does his best.  (Ch 20).   When grappling with Bertha, Rochester could have felled her with a blow, “but he would not strike” (Ch 26).  When Rochester elects to make a fresh start by quitting Jamaica for England, he could have settled Bertha in the dampness of his other property Ferndean Manor where the atmosphere would have finished her off (we should remember that that Mason  (Ch 18) finds even Thornfield too cold and asks for the fire to be replenished) but his conscience recoils.  (Ch 27) His solution is to “place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation”.  (Ch 27).  Rochester tries to rescue Bertha from the fire, and calls to her by name.  (Ch 36). 

     Far guiltier than Rochester in their treatment of Bertha are the respective male parents.  Mason Senior conducts the marital negotiations with Rochester Senior behind the son’s back, with a settlement of £30 000 as the price for getting shot of her, and with the mad mother carefully concealed in an asylum.  (Ch 27).   Rochester the younger son is quite as much a victim as any of the female characters.

       Yes, there is oppression in the novel, but rather than primarily male over female it seems to me to be primarily that of the old over the young.  The tyranny is not confined to elderly males.  Mrs Reid, for pure spite, tells Jane’s wealthy uncle Mr Eyre that Jane is dead, thus hindering her life chances, when he is trying to find Jane in order to adopt her (and subsequently leave her his fortune). Overwhelmingly, the law forbidding divorce is the most crushing tyranny of all.  Hardy arraigned against it too, and so did Dickens in Hard Times. Stephen Blackpool must remain wedded to a drunkard, and unable to marry the woman whom he loves. 

     Whatever take modern readers might want to put on the novel, there seems no doubt that Charlotte Brontë intended Bertha to be mad.  One of the great houses near Haworth had had a mad woman in it for several years: a story that the Brontë sisters discussed with one another.  Charlotte consulted the section on madness in the family medical dictionary to acquaint herself with the symptoms.  Jane Eyre is at least as much Gothic as it is realistic.  There are frequent references to elves and fairy tales, and Bessie’s songs and folk tales, and one senses the story of Bluebeard hovering somewhere in the background.  Of course there’s room in such a work for a literal mad woman.

     Why, then, is Bertha mad?   We are told that there has been insanity in the family for three generations, and the mother is in an asylum. (Ch 26). The younger brother is a congenital idiot.  (Ch 27). Observing Richard Mason before she knows who he is, Jane is struck by an impression of vacancy (Ch 18) and Rochester says that Richard, too, is likely to go the way of his sister.  (Ch 27).

     It is possible to inherit the consequences of syphilis – a point made forcibly in Ibsen’s Ghosts – but there many more obvious causes than syphilis for hereditary insanity. 

     Why then, the idea of syphilis: when there is nothing in the text to suggest it?  Power.   To inherit madness is passive; to acquire it as a result of your own actions is active.  And it involves a fight back against male dominance.  Rochester’s bitterness arises from his knowledge that his infected wife has infected him. 

     This theory, it seems to me, in either of its manifestations, is not supported by the text.  It isn’t Bertha’s fault if her madness is inherited.  But If she had acquired her madness as the result of her sexual actions, then it would be.  Charlotte Brontë could have indicated culpability had she wanted to.  Instead, Jane says, “she cannot help being mad”.  (Ch 27) And Rochester’s personality, like Heathcliff’s, has its origins in Byronism rather than sexual disease. 

   Even wider of the mark, it seems to me, are those who – insisting on the awfulness of male dominance, and unable to leave the syphilis theory alone – see Rochester as guilty of infecting Bertha, rather than the other way around.  But, allowing for a moment the validity of the concept, Bertha is five years his senior (Ch 27) and would have had a five-year head start in getting herself infected.  She would not have needed any help from Rochester.  And there is no suggestion in the text that Rochester is initially promiscuous; although he is later driven to three different women – French, Italian and German (Ch 27) – by the circumstances of his marriage.  We can say that Rochester is lying, or telling less than the whole truth, but we are then moving into the argument from silence and away from the realms of literary criticism which – for me, anyway –  is about what the text actually says. 

The words may remain constant, but the significance attributed to them will change as new readers bring new suppositions to the text.  Jane Eyre’s popularity seems destined to last for a long time; and for as long as it does, Bertha Mason will continue to invite controversy.