Jane Eyre

The character of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Rochester (née Mason), a violent and mentally ill woman whom he imprisons in the attic for 15 years, has interested feminist and postcolonial theorists. One of the best known works of feminist literary theory is named after Bertha—Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. In it, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the anxieties felt by early women novelists who had few female literary role models and so felt like “madwomen” and “monsters” themselves. Gubar and Gilbert theorize that this anxiety appears in the novels of women authors through hidden feminist subtext. In the case of Jane Eyre, Bertha might be the embodiment of Jane’s darkest fears of moral degeneration (i.e. what she fears she will “become” if she gives into temptation and runs away with Mr. Rochester).

Postcolonial theorists, meanwhile, find evidence of Victorian British colonial racism in the way Bertha, a white Creole woman from Jamaica, is described:

What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face (729-730)

This description uses dehumanizing language to invoke horror in the reader.