Rochester complains, "...I perceived that I should never have a quiet nor settled household..." The ideal Victorian real woman suffers any mistreatment without complaint. She is non-assertive.
It's obvious that Bertha does not fit this role at all and is therefore liable to be labeled "crazy" because she doesn't conform. Waller (2004) discusses sexuality as insanity in 19th century literature and argues that "the rejection of a proper woman's role... is a dangerous undertaking." Thus, Bertha is seen as fallen, degenerate, immoral, and animalistic rather than victimized:
Jane herself feels little empathy for Bertha, and this is striking because from the first pages she demonstrates a hatred of cruelty, repeatedly evokes metaphors of emancipation, and chooses principle over personal gain. Yet although Jane notices Bertha's plight and laments her suffering, she neither dwells on it nor identifies a perpetrator -- madness provides her a category with which to identify suffering without implicating Rochester. Bertha becomes not a victim but an impediment" (Su, 2003, p. 160).
Thus, Bertha Mason's madness is not seen as the product of her situation as a woman and her oppression. The more she struggles for liberty, the more she is contained. And the more she is contained, the angrier she gets. The angrier she gets, the more her "craziness" is substantiated. But she isn't crazy. On the contrary her behavior, though indeed angry, is logical and understandable.
When Bertha comes to Jane's bedroom two nights before the wedding is to take place, for example, she does not behave like a person who is mentally ill. She quietly enters the room. She inspects the bridal veil carefully and then puts it on. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees herself as a bride. Then she removes the veil and tears it in two, throws it on the floor and tramples it. She does not attack Jane, the bride-to-be; thus, one can safely assume it is not a jealous rage or envy that troubles her. The only other explanation is that she sees the veil as a symbol of her marriage to Rochester. Rochester, himself, interprets her behavior that way. What he does not see is that the marital relationship with its demands, restrictions, and controls has ruined her life and stripped her of her identity. Bertha has rebelled against the strictures of patriarchal authority. She can find no real escape. Now she sees that Rochester is about to imprison and drive another woman crazy. Her diagnosis of "mental illness" is, as described by Foucault (1988), really a form of social control. Jane, of course, is "sane," but Donaldson (2002) argues that "even if Jane Eyre should happen to go mad, she will not escape the requirements of restraint..." As Rochester tells Jane:
if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat -- your grasp, even in fury would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive (p. 286).
Whether a woman is restrained by a straitjacket, or the strong arms of her "fond" husband, or by the conventions of patriarchal society she has internalized, it is still restraint (Donaldson, 2002). In any event Bertha's "madness"...
Jane and Bertha also share other characteristics that emphasize Bertha's significance in the novel. As an adult, Jane comes to certain realizations about her life and the world in which she lives. First she realizes that men and women are basically the same in that "women feel just as men feel" (117) and it is "thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or
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