Female Madness is a unique subject. The madwoman is a frequently encountered character in folk tales and literature all around the world. Usually some reason is given for her madness – loss of a child, her shame at having lost her virginity, barrenness and so on – all, more often than not, symbols of having veered away from male-defined versions of “femininity” varying by culture and region. I think Vasugi’s article is unique in that she actually argues that Jane Eyre, one of literature’s most celebrated women may indeed not be the liberated character she seems to be, and that the woman in the attic – Mr. Rochester’s Creole wife – may really have more to her than meets the eye.
For many of us who thrived on British classics, Fitzwilliam Darcy was a character that we modeled our ‘ideal’ real life boyfriends or husbands on. He has all the characteristics that you would love in a man – he is handsome, caring, possesses an admirable amount of pride, stubbornness and is intelligent. After Darcy, perhaps Heathcliff from ‘Wuthering Heights’ comes a close second.
Not long after comes Edward Fairfax Rochester from Jane Eyre. One of my friends said that she always felt that Jane should have married the clergyman who proposed to her. Why did she refuse his offer and marry Rochester, who at the end is blind, does not have his family estate any longer (if you can recollect, the mansion is burnt down by his mad wife) and is almost her father’s age? Does Jane’s desire to marry someone that she loves rather than marry someone who loves her point out to the fact that she is a feminist, who chooses her own path of action in a patriarchal world?
In fact, in of the chapters in the novel, Jane even argues in an outright manner for the equality of women. She says: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties… it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.’’
All this is plausible but how often have we given serious thought to the madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason who is locked away by Rochester under the claims of insanity?
Before we investigate the figure of Bertha, let us briefly pause and consider this word ‘insanity’. Insanity comes from the Latin adjective ‘insanus’ – ‘sanus’ is the operative word here, which denotes healthy. The word ‘insane’ (in + sane) therefore denotes unhealthiness, sickness and disease. When we talk of someone being crazy, we then refer to their insane mind, which is not capable of ‘healthy’ reasoning capabilities. In fact, the other term for madness ‘hysteria’ derives from the Greek word ‘hystera’ which means the womb. Early practitioners of medicine believed that the womb moved around the woman’s body giving rise to physical and mental disturbance or weakness.
Here, the definitions of ‘healthy’ of course denote and conform to societal definitions of healthy reasoning. In fact, the passage that I quoted from Jane Eyre can be seen as activities that are emblematic of ‘healthy’ and ‘sane’ nineteenth century women – namely ‘cooking puddings’, ‘knitting stockings’, ‘playing the piano’ and ‘embroidering bags’. Thus, Jane’s reasoning in an ironic manner draws on this healthy model to rebel (rather mildly) against it. There is no direct denial of these activities but only the assertion that along with these activities other forms of accepted social behavior that are not labeled insane must be included.
Having said that, let us return to the figure of Bertha Mason. Bertha deviates from all these nineteenth century definitions of sanity. Critics have noted the effect of doubling, of sanity and insanity that is manifested in Jane and Bertha respectively. Bertha is “a big woman, in stature almost equaling her husband, and corpulent besides” with a “virile force” and “purple…bloated features” (279; ch. 26). Unlike Jane, who is an impoverished orphan, and an English clergyman’s daughter who is reared in a charity school; Bertha is an exotic Creole, and the pampered daughter of a wealthy Jamaican planter. Jane is modest, decorous, and virginal; Bertha is “‘at once intemperate and unchaste’” and is therefore framed as being mad.
The reason for her madness is elided in the novel but its cause is fully investigated with a haunting open-endedness in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which is a rewriting of Jane Eyre. Here, Rhys posits Rochester as one of the reasons for her ‘madness’. Definitions of madness are complicated and reassessed in the book hinting at the fact that these definitions are framed by the institution of patriarchy.
Euro American female writers who were often labeled ‘mad’ include writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and Mary Perkins Gilman. For feminist writers such as Helene Cixous and others, the hysteric woman writer is the writer who is emblematic of free speech and writing, someone who has freed herself from the societal shackles that bind female sexuality. Thus, the madwoman as a figure of hysteric rage has the power and most importantly, the potential to rebel against patriarchal modes of oppression – something that feminism as a movement hopes to achieve.
So, the next time you evaluate your potential boyfriend in terms of fictional men, pause for a moment to think about the women that they hide away in their attics.
Maybe Bertha was finally free when she jumped off Thornhall and set fire to the mansion.
Picture Source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/64388378_bb2b03809d.jpg?v=0
The Author Vasugi Kailasam is a Master’s student in Comparative Literature (Asia/Africa) at SOAS. She is passionate about the field of postcolonial literary studies and was an exchange student under the IDP Peace Scholarship Program to Australia during her undergraduate studies in Stella Maris College. She is particularly interested in the field of subaltern studies, neocolonialism and the relation between decolonization and women. She enjoys trying out different things and worked with Google’s online advertising venture - AdWords. An avid reader, she blogs at www.mysimulacrum.blogspot.com
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