Female Madness Reflected In The Victorian Literature

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WOMEN AND MADNESS 

De completat de către dumneavoastră

The Madwoman’s Characteristics 

Victorian Attitudes towards Madness

Madness Reflected in Literature of the 19th century

CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S “JANE EYRE”

Charlotte Bronte – the author

In the context of the female madness topic used in the Victorian literature, Charlotte Bronte’s romantic novels represent a focus point for all literary critics. Her most popular work, Jane Eyre. An autobiography, published in 1847, expresses moral and spiritual sensibility integrated the main character’s life, whose name is worn by the novel that is still a topic for debate. This novel is the true expression of female madness, described in a number of ways throughout the book.

Before proceeding to the analysis of the character of Jane Eyre, it is important to shortly analyse the life and activity of Charlotte Bronte, the author. According to Mitchell (1994), Bronte started to be appreciated for her writing style and work approximately five years before her death in 1855. Ever since, almost sixty biographies of the lives of the Bronte family were found. She was an expert in biographies and enjoyed observing other people’s lives. This is a fact that is observed also by literary critics. One of them is Katherine Frank, who also played the role of Bronte’s biographer. She states that the Bronte family has perhaps the most exhaustively documented and well-studied figures in literary history.

Having had this statement from a biographer, it is easy to draw the conclusion that Charlotte Bronte’s writing style that helped her describe scenarios and characters with so much accuracy, was shaped by her personality. Jane Eyre is another biographical work of Charlotte Bronte that was marked by real life events and characters. As Virginia Woolf affirmed in 1939, there can be contradictory versions of the same face (Mitchell, 1994), which is why her novels reached the top of readers’ preferences, not only in England, but worldwide.

Burt (2009) described Charlotte Bronte as a writer who has revolutionized the novel, along with her sister, Emily Bronte. His opinion is sustained clearly when stating that Charlotte and Emily Bronte are inseparably linked, not only by their remarkable achievements in revolutionizing the novel, but also by their incredible family saga. The sisters’ personal and artistic developments have fascinated readers as much as their literary work. Each woman reshaped great personal adversity into unique artistic visions of intense emotional engagement that few other authors can rival (Burt, 2009:222).

Charlotte Bronte worked as a teacher in her youth, having gathered experiences and observations that she would later on integrate in her novels. Jane, the main character of the currently discussed novel, was also a teacher, so it is easy to assume that there is a connection between the real and fictional characters. The author has seen and experienced tragic family events, from which she was also inspired when creating her characters. During her young years, she participated to the family’s drama when Branwell, a family member died from drinking opium. Later on, she became emotionally attached with the owner of the school she worked for. She experienced another dramatic scenario when the owner’s wife stepped in (Burt, 2009:223). All of Charlotte Bronte’s novels involved the time’s characteristic classism, sexuality, religion and proto-feminist elements, as well as social criticism.

The author’s obvious desire to connect to the above concepts, elements and philosophies was expressed in the preface to the second London edition. The Currer Bell publishing house wrote in 1847 that conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Similarly to her fiercest competitor, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte was a feminist biographer. Characteristic to the 19th century, feminist biographers pointed to ways in which the female subject challenges, not simply reflected ideological bonds which entrapped the individual. In this context, Charlotte Bronte was seen as an important model of women’s struggles for identity. This is likely to be the reason why her work is studded with such scenarios and suggestions.

Bronte’s success has negatively impacted the success of Anne and Emily’s novels, her sisters, as they were considered to be juvenile apprentice works of the author of Jane Eyre (Burt, 2009, 224). The author managed to offer a strong lesson in the power of imagination to dominate adversity (Burt, 2009:225).

The female madness or the madwoman that appears in Bronte’s novels is characteristic for the 19th century’s writers in England. Gilbert & Gubar (1984:311-312) describe Charlotte Bronte’s style from different perspectives. They state that she was essentially a trance writer and quote her comments in the Roe Head journal, in which she wrote all wondering why I write with my eyes shut and I have been in a dream half miserable and half ecstatic – miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly and ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world (the childhood fantasy world of Angria). The authors comment that her words are assuredly romantic and yet distinctively female, too. They add that most of Bronte’s vocabulary and many of her visions derive from the early nineteenth-century writers in whose work her mind was steeped, the entranced obsessiveness with which she worked out recurrent themes and metaphors seems to have been determined primarily by her gender, her sense of her difficult sexual destiny and her anxiety about her anomalous, “orphaned” position in the world (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984:312). Another important affirmation about Bronte’s writing was made by the same authors, who suggest that, like so many other women writers, Bronte was not always entirely conscious of the extent of her own duplicity (1984:315).

The madwoman portrait is deeply analysed by authors like Gilbert & Gubar, who express their opinion with regard to the use of madness in Bronte’s character creation. When emphasizing Bronte’s attempt to shape the image of the female in her novels, they allege that, though Bronte may not have consciously admitted this to herself, through the medium of Crimsworth she suggests that a female is a service and mentally depraved creature, more slave than angel, more animal than flower (1984:322). In this context, Bronte also writes that women have morally monstrous traits. The angel-monster antagonistic image of the female is frequently present in the novel Jane Eyre, which I will continue to focus on in the next sub-chapter, as it represents the main subject of this thesis.

Female madness in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is frequently referred to as the story of a heroine by some speciality authors and literary critics (E.g. Burt, 2009). It is also described by the author herself as being as plain and simple as myself. The storyline follows the main character, Jane, as she evolves from her troubled childhood to independence as a governess and to a sensitive love life when she falls in love with Edward Rochester, her employer. The first edition sod out in six weeks, although there were many critics that categorized it as unchristian and seditious. According to Burt (2009), the unusual family history and the isolated artistic development of the author defined this literary masterpiece. Also, these factors changed the form and possibilities of the novel.

Jane Eyre is narrated at first-person from the main character’s perspective and is settled in the north of England, following five stages: the character’s childhood, her education, her time as a governess, her time at the Rivers family and her reunion with Rochester. Jane is the second wife of Edward Rochester, is a passionate and principled woman who values freedom and independence. She proves to have a strong conscience which she displays through her acts and thoughts throughout the novel.

As the specialty literature shows, there has been more than one reason behind Bronte’s decision to characterize her character as her critics describe, as either an angel or a monster. Besides being inspired from her own life’s events, Charlotte also found inspiration in the works of individuals that were specialized in mental illness, such as James Cowles Prichard who wrote A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind in 1830. The respected physician based in Bristol wrote this work as a medical text that described mental illness and nervous disorders. He defines moral insanity as being madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations.

Bronte wrote a letter to William Smith William in which she admits that she read the work of Prichard and that she used the information that she found to define Bertha’s character: I agree that the character [of Bertha] is shocking, but I know that it is but too natural. There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness. She also implied that Bertha laboured under ‘moral madness’ in the early stages of her courtship with Rochester. Outwardly, she appeared normal; yet she led a ‘sinful life’ and sin, Brontë states, ‘itself is a kind of insanity’.

Showalter (1977:67), another reviewer of Bronte’s work, claims that Bronte’s account echoes the beliefs of Victorian psychiatry about the transmission of madness: since the reproductive system was the source of mental illness in women, women were the prime carries of madness, twice as likely to transmit it as were fathers. Foucalt (1991), on the other hand, claims that insanity is branded by power, which indicates that the authority categorizes Bertha as insane and Jane as sane. It is the same author who states that the division between sanity and insanity suggests a difference between authority and subordination. Since she grasps narrative and visual authority, the narrator Jane intends to control her creative world in order to make readers believe she is ‘sane’. For this reason, although resemblances between Jane and Bertha are readily found, they are far from a double; indeed, in terms of narrative, Bertha’s inferiority seems obvious.

It is a well-known fact that the Victorian period was not favourable for women’s rebellious behaviour. This was a period in which women were expected to be submissive and their main role in society was to love, honour and obey her Lord and master (Agius, 2012). Gilbert & Gubar (1984:249) insisted on highlighting the idea that imprisonment leads to madness, solipsism, paralysis. This can be observed both in the cases of Jane and Bertha, differently, in their relationships with Rochester, as his power and her subordination is represented. Bertha Mason, whom Charlotte Bronte¨ created as Edward Rochester’s lunatic wife in Jane Eyre (1847), is one of the most famous ‘monstrous madwomen’ in early nineteenth-century English literature, being portrayed as a significant figure in a widespread realm of critical studies. In Jane Eyre, the reason of imprisonment is frequently detected. Jane Eyre’s progress from place to place embodies a journey or pilgrimage.

Jane is constructed as the champion of female rebellion and the image of monstrosity and she has to reject in the course of her bildung, Bertha Mason. There is an obvious interaction between feminist criticism and the text of madness that arise problematic opinions on her work (Beattie, 1996:493). There were authors such as Nina Baym that criticized the novel and the work Bronte has put into defining Bertha out of humanity. As previously mentioned Gilbert & Gubar (1984) emphasize the extreme images of angel and monster in Jane Eyre’s character and brought once again to light the shocking traits of the title’s character. Jane and Bertha continue to represent the incompatibility of realist rebellion and gothic revolt (Beattie, 1996:494).

In Goodman’s opinion (1996:120), of all the Victorian novels, Bronte managed to express madness best. She claims that Bronte avoids confronting the implications of Bertha’s origins and manipulates her uncritically as a symbol of the heroine’s anger. She also mentions that it is important to recognize how powerful this depiction of Rochester’s wife challenged the conventional representation of madwomen. On the other hand, Bronte succeeded to write about female madness as a product of a naturally unstable femininity and not as a sign of protest or disruption.

Despite the first reactions, Bronte was not afraid to react to criticism and to stand against the critics’ negativity. She strongly affirmed: To you I am neither man nor woman – I come before you as an author only (…).It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me – the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

In Jane Eyre, there are many aspects that reflect female madness, besides the traits of the characters, their behaviours and their speeches. There is also an aesthetical factor that leads readers to thinking that the décor was intentionally described using certain patterns, with the intention to express feminine rage, madness and sexuality at the same time. For instance the red room can be seen as a figurative space where all of these characteristics can be observed.

A paragraph in which Rochester explains the way he sees the woman is highly suggestive:

It was half dream, half reality: a woman did, I doubt not, enter your room: and that woman was -must have been – Grace Poole. You call her a strange being yourself: from all you know you have reason so to call her – what did she do to me? What to Mason? In a state between sleeping and waking you noticed her entrance and her actions; but feverish, almost delirious as you were, you ascribed to her a goblin appearance different from her own: the long dishevelled hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were figments of imagination; results of nightmare: the spiteful tearing of the veil was real: and it is like her. […] Do you accept my solution of the mystery?

Foucalt (1991) highlights different aspects of female madness in Jane Eyre. He writes that In Jane Eyre, the authority identifies the different realms, sane and insane; Bertha is labelled a mad woman by her husband Rochester. Although the narrator Jane reconstructs Rochester’s account of his wife’s madness, he certifies his wife Bertha as a lunatic, that is, Bertha as a mad woman is constructed through language by others. At the same time, he observes that the authorities exercise power by branding dualistic divisions: sane/mad, dangerous/harmless; normal/ abnormal (Foucalt, 1991:199).

In Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is the character with the most pregnant symptoms of madness, which the novel’s author is not afraid to describe thoroughly. Later on, after other similar novels have been published in the same period of time, Bertha’s character could finally be compared to someone else, that being other insane characters shaped by other authors. She became a symbolical figure of female insanity and subordination. She appears to be unable to narrate for herself, so her laughter and growls are the only real sign of the insanity that she expresses on her own. For all the other characters in the novel, Bertha is the madwoman in the attic. Throughout the passages, Bronte refers to her as to a mad woman, a wild animal and a goblin appearance. She not only refers to her in this way by using actual words, but also by describing her appearance, which is that of a beat, of a lower animal and not that of a human being. In one of the passages, she is described as a wild creature with a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a name which ran backwards and forwards and snatched and growled.

The innkeeper is one of the characters that play an important role in offering readers an accurate description of Bertha’s portray, saying that she was kept in very close confinement, ma’am; people even for some years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her: they only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad; and some believed she had been his mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since a very queer thing.

After analysing Bronte’s writing and her way of integrating female madness into her characters, it becomes clear that she was interested in dragging the public’s attention towards mental disorders and understanding them. Although there are authors and critics that have easily detected elements that clearly express madness in Bronte’s writing, there are others that suggest the opposite. Beattie (1996) argues that there is a persistent lack concentrated focus on the text of madness in Jane Eyre. The author suggests that the deployment of madness in the novel can be called semiotic as it inacts an over determination of the signifier madness. Bronte applies words like madness, maniac, lunatic, insanity to several of the characters in the novel as a rejection of semantic certainty and could be viewed as an oscillation between semiotic and symbolic.

The concept of female madness, present in Bronte’s Jane Eyre, has become a major point of interest for critics. Although Jane is the title’s character and the entire action revolves around her, Bertha Mason, who is the definition of the madwoman, draws a lot more attention. She became one of the most important characters of English fiction, contouring the emotional economy and the construction of woman. Even more interesting than the controversies that the character of Bertha Mason stirs, is the link that some authors emphasize, such as Judith Williams who sees a close link between Jane’s fantasies and imagination and Bertha Mason (Lerner, 1998: 41).

In Lerner’s opinion (1998), Jane was secretly attracted by the dynamic and dangerous forces the proprieties were designed to protect her from. Another critic, Richard Chase, sees Bertha as the woman who has given herself blindly and uncompromisingly to the principle of sex and intellect. A more extreme approach is presented by Robert Keefe, who claims that Bertha is Jane’s Oedipal rival, preventing her from marrying Rochester and, therefore, representing the dead Mrs. Bronte. Bertha Mason is continuously linked to sexual desire, a live symbol of the dangers of madly uncontrolled sexual feeling, yet these views are not shared by Bronte or her characters.

Bertha’s character also represented a challenge for Sue Thomas (1999), who discussed about the tropical extravagance of Bertha Mason, stating that the boundaries of genteel femininity are blurred in Bertha. Rochester acknowledges that “no servant would bear the continued outbreaks” of Bertha’s “violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders” during their time in Jamaica. The house she manages is not “quiet or settled”. Thomas also claims that The vices of intemperance, cursing, and unchastity, which mark insubordination in Rochester’s model of genteel femininity and which prematurely ripen the “germs of insanity” in Bertha are normally, but not exclusively, masculine, lower-class, “coloured” female,8 or black ones in early nineteenth-century discourses about Creoleness. In her “moral madness” Bertha acquires “virile force” The gender instability of Bertha, linked with her degeneracy, is also underlined by Jane’s description of her as a “clothed hyena”. In religious iconography the “hyena, which eats decaying corpses has been used as a symbol of those who thrive on the filthy corpse of false doctrine. The ancients said that the hyena is able to change its sex, and used it as a symbol of the unstable man.

Looking at Rochester’s character, it is easily observable that Bertha’s madness is what led him to another mistress. He describes his life with a series of mistresses as a “grovelling fashion of existence”: “Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading” (Thomas, 1996:9). Madness is what drives him away from his current wife and closer to his future wife, who seems to be the exact opposite.

Jane Eyre is a romantic novel of great intensity, which critics have been debated about for a very long time. The antagonistic characters, the alternation between terror and love, the writing style, the portraying style and accuracy and the way in which the author has started a revolution to offer Victorian women a voice overwhelm any reader. The concept of female madness is constantly present in this novel and significantly pithy in Bertha’s character.

In the next chapter, I will observe and analyse the presence of female madness in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with the purpose to continue the research on the concept of the thesis and be able to compare its application and integration in Victorian literature.

JOHN FOWLES’S “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN”

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” 

CONCLUSIONS

Bibliography

Mitchell, Barbara. (1994) The Bibliographical Process. Writing the lives of Charlotte Bronte. University of Leeds.

Burt, Daniel. (2009). The Literary 100. Revised Edition. A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights and Poets of All Time. Facts on File, Inc. Infobase Publishing. New York.

Gilbert, M. Sandra. Gubar, Susan. (1984).The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Second Edition. Yale University Press. London.

Beattie, Valerie. (1996)The Mystery at Thornfield: Representations of Madness in "Jane Eyre" In Studies in the novel., Vol. 28, No. 4 (winter 1996), pp. 493-505. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Agius, Beverley. (2012). Charlotte Bronte and her women : the oppression of women in a patriarchal society and their quest to have a voice to express their emotions and sexual desires with reference to Charlotte Brontë's, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. University of Malta.

Foucault, Michel. (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.

Showalter, Elaine.(1977) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte¨ to Lessing. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

Goodman, Lizabeth.(1996) Literature and Gender. Routledge. London

Lerner, Laurence. Bertha and the Critics. In Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Dec. 1989), 273-300. ISTOR

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/medical-text-about-madness

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I. CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S “JANE EYRE”

I.1. Charlotte Brontë – The Author

In the Victorian era, female madness has been significantly present in literature. Mental health and normality have been described by authors through the behaviour of their characters. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White (1860) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) are three of the examples in a long list of Victorian works in which the feminization of madness is explicitly described. Charlotte Brontë’s romantic novels represented a focus point formost literary critics. Her most popular work, Jane Eyre. An Autobiography, published in 1847, expresses moral and spiritual sensibility integrated the main character’s life, whose name is worn by the novel that is still a topic for debate. This novel is the true expression of female madness, described in a number of ways throughout the book.

Before proceeding to the analysis of the character of Jane Eyre, it is important to shortly analyse the life and activity of Charlotte Brontë, the author. According to Mitchell (1994), Brontë started to be appreciated for her writing style and work approximately five years before her death in 1855. Ever since, almost sixty biographies of the lives of the Brontë family were found. She was an expert in biographies and enjoyed observing other people’s lives. This is a fact that is observed also by literary critics. One of them is Katherine Frank, who also played the role of Brontë’s biographer. She states that the Brontë family has perhaps the most exhaustively documented and well-studied figures in literary history.

Having had this statement from a biographer, it is easy to draw the conclusion that Charlotte Brontë’s writing style that helped her describe scenarios and characters with so much accuracy, was shaped by her personality. Jane Eyre is another biographical work of Charlotte Brontë that was marked by real life events and characters. As Virginia Woolf affirmed in 1939, there can be contradictory versions of the same face which is why her novels reached the top of readers’ preferences, not only in England, but worldwide.

Burt (2009) described Charlotte Brontë as a writer who has revolutionized the novel, along with her sister, Emily Brontë. His opinion is sustained clearly when stating that Charlotte and Emily Brontë are inseparably linked, not only by their remarkable achievements in revolutionizing the novel, but also by their incredible family saga. The sisters’ personal and artistic developments have fascinated readers as much as their literary work. Each woman reshaped great personal adversity into unique artistic visions of intense emotional engagement that few other authors can rival.

Charlotte Brontë worked as a teacher in her youth, having gathered experiences and observations that she would later on integrate in her novels. Jane, the main character of the currently discussed novel, was also a teacher, so it is easy to assume that there is a connection between the real and fictional characters. The author has seen and experienced tragic family events, from which she was also inspired when creating her characters. During her young years, she participated to the family’s drama when Branwell, a family member died from drinking opium. Later on, she became emotionally attached with the owner of the school she worked for. She experienced another dramatic scenario when the owner’s wife stepped in. All of Charlotte Brontë’s novels involved the time’s characteristic classism, sexuality, religion and proto-feminist elements, as well as social criticism.

The author’s obvious desire to connect to the above concepts, elements and philosophies was expressed in the preface to the second London edition. The Currer Bell publishing house wrote in 1847 that conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Similarly to her fiercest competitor, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë was a feminist biographer. Characteristic to the 19th century, feminist biographers pointed to ways in which the female subject challenges, not simply reflected ideological bonds which entrapped the individual. In this context, Charlotte Brontë was seen as an important model of women’s struggles for identity. This is likely to be the reason why her work is studded with such scenarios and suggestions.

Brontë’s success has negatively impacted the success of Anne and Emily’s novels, her sisters, as they were considered to be juvenile apprentice works of the author of Jane Eyre. The author managed to offer a strong lesson in the power of imagination to dominate adversity.

The female madness or the madwoman that appears in Brontë’s novels is characteristic for the 19th century’s writers in England. Gilbert & Gubar describe Charlotte Brontë’s style from different perspectives. They state that she was essentially a trance writer and quote her comments in the Roe Head journal, in which she wrote all wondering why I write with my eyes shut and I have been in a dream half miserable and half ecstatic – miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly and ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world (the childhood fantasy world of Angria). The authors comment that her words are assuredly romantic and yet distinctively female, too. They add that most of Brontë’s vocabulary and many of her visions derive from the early nineteenth-century writers in whose work her mind was steeped, the entranced obsessiveness with which she worked out recurrent themes and metaphors seems to have been determined primarily by her gender, her sense of her difficult sexual destiny and her anxiety about her anomalous, “orphaned” position in the world. Another important affirmation about Brontë’s writing was made by the same authors, who suggest that, like so many other women writers, Brontë was not always entirely conscious of the extent of her own duplicity.

The madwoman portrait is deeply analysed by authors like Gilbert & Gubar, who express their opinion with regard to the use of madness in Brontë’s character creation. When emphasizing Brontë’s attempt to shape the image of the female in her novels, they allege that, though Brontë may not have consciously admitted this to herself, through the medium of Crimsworth she suggests that a female is a service and mentally depraved creature, more slave than angel, more animal than flower. In this context, Brontë also writes that women have morally monstrous traits. The angel-monster antagonistic image of the female is frequently present in the novel Jane Eyre, which I will continue to focus on in the next sub-chapter, as it represents the main subject of this thesis.

Female madness in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is frequently referred to as the story of a heroine by some speciality authors and literary critics. It is also described by the author herself as being as plain and simple as myself. The storyline follows the main character, Jane, as she evolves from her troubled childhood to independence as a governess and to a sensitive love life when she falls in love with Edward Rochester, her employer. The first edition sold out in six weeks, although there were many critics that categorized it as unchristian and seditious. According to Burt , the unusual family history and the isolated artistic development of the author defined this literary masterpiece. Also, these factors changed the form and possibilities of the novel.

Jane Eyre is narrated at first-person from the main character’s perspective and is settled in the north of England, following five stages: the character’s childhood, her education, her time as a governess, her time at the Rivers family and her reunion with Rochester. Jane is the second wife of Edward Rochester, is a passionate and principled woman who values freedom and independence. She proves to have a strong conscience which she displays through her acts and thoughts throughout the novel.

According to Lodge, who suggests that the novel Jane Eyre could not have been written without the Romantic movement, the dominant energies and sympathies in the book are on the side of passion. This interpretation comes from other characters’ description of Jane, as well as from her own description. Jane states that feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untampered by feeling is too bitter and husky a draught for human deglutition. Mrs. Reed affirms: You are passionate, Jane, that you must allow.

As specialty literature shows, there has been more than one reason behind Brontë’s decision to characterize her character as her critics describe, as either an angel or a monster. Besides being inspired from her own life’s events, Charlotte also found inspiration in the works of individuals that were specialized in mental illness, such as James Cowles Prichard who wrote A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind in 1830. The respected physician based in Bristol wrote this work as a medical text that described mental illness and nervous disorders. He defines moral insanity as being madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations.

Brontë wrote a letter to William Smith William, her publisher, in which she admits that she read the work of Prichard and that she used the information that she found to define Bertha’s character: I agree that the character [of Bertha] is shocking, but I know that it is but too natural. There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness. She also implied that Bertha laboured under ‘moral madness’ in the early stages of her courtship with Rochester. Outwardly, she appeared normal; yet she led a ‘sinful life’ and sin, Brontë states, ‘itself is a kind of insanity’.

Showalter another reviewer of Brontë’s work, claims that Brontë’s account echoes the beliefs of Victorian psychiatry about the transmission of madness: since the reproductive system was the source of mental illness in women, women were the prime carries of madness, twice as likely to transmit it as were fathers. Foucault, on the other hand, claims that insanity is branded by power, which indicates that the authority categorizes Bertha as insane and Jane as sane. It is the same author who states that the division between sanity and insanity suggests a difference between authority and subordination. Since she grasps narrative and visual authority, the narrator Jane intends to control her creative world in order to make readers believe she is ‘sane’. For this reason, although resemblances between Jane and Bertha are readily found, they are far from a double; indeed, in terms of narrative, Bertha’s inferiority seems obvious.

It is a well-known fact that the Victorian period was not favourable for women’s rebellious behaviour. This was a period in which women were expected to be submissive and their main role in society was to love, honour and obey her Lord and master Gilbert & Gubar insisted on highlighting the idea that imprisonment leads to madness, solipsism, paralysis. This can be observed both in the cases of Jane and Bertha, differently, in their relationships with Rochester, as his power and her subordination are represented. In Jane Eyre, the reason of imprisonment is frequently detected. However, the character that best reflects female madness in the Victorian Er is Bertha Mason and not the main character, Jane. She was created by Charlotte Brontë as Edward Rochester’s lunatic wife. Throughout the novel, her behaviour was shaped in such a way that she became the most famous ‘monstrous madwomen’ in early nineteenth-century English literature. Bertha is a significant figure in a widespread realm of critical studies, having been analysed from various perspectives, such as the effects of clinical mental issues or the effects of women’s suppression. By comparison to Bertha, whose behaviour is determined by her mental illness, Jane is constructed as the champion of female rebellion and the image of monstrosity and she has to reject in the course of her bildung, the character of Bertha Mason. Jane Eyre’s progress from place to place embodies a journey or pilgrimage during her life, starting from her childhood.

The clear difference between the two important characters was long criticized. There is an obvious interaction between feminist criticism and the text of madness that arise problematic opinions on her work. There were authors such as Nina Baym that criticized the novel and the work Brontë has put into defining Bertha out of humanity. As previously mentioned, the authors Gilbert and Gubar (1984) emphasize the extreme images of angel and monster in Jane Eyre’s character and brought once again to light the shocking traits of the title’s character. In most critics’ opinion, Jane and Bertha represent the incompatibility of realist rebellion and gothic revolt ,as previously highlighted.

In Goodman’s opinion, of all the Victorian novels, Brontë managed to express madness best. She claims that Brontë avoids confronting the implications of Bertha’s origins and manipulates her uncritically as a symbol of the heroine’s anger. She also mentions that it is important to recognize how powerful this depiction of Rochester’s wife challenged the conventional representation of madwomen. On the other hand, Brontë succeeded to write about female madness as a product of a naturally unstable femininity and not as a sign of protest or disruption.

Despite the first reactions, Brontë was not afraid to react to criticism and to stand against the critics’ negativity. She strongly affirmed: To you I am neither man nor woman – I come before you as an author only (…).It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me – the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

In Jane Eyre, there are many aspects that reflect female madness, besides the traits of the characters, their behaviours and their speeches. There is also an aesthetical factor that leads readers to thinking that the décor was intentionally described using certain patterns, with the intention to express feminine rage, madness and sexuality at the same time. For instance the red room can be seen as a figurative space where all of these characteristics can be observed.

In the below paragraph in which Rochester explains the way he sees the woman (Grace Poole), a difference of style and language can be observed, from which readers can deduct the importance of the master’s language control and its meaning. When Jane describes her encounter with a mysterious woman, she says that she met a woman who is tall, large, with thick and dark hairhanging long down her back. Rochester response is the following:

It was half dream, half reality: a woman did, I doubt not, enter your room: and that woman was -must have been – Grace Poole. You call her a strange being yourself: from all you know you have reason so to call her – what did she do to me? What to Mason? In a state between sleeping and waking you noticed her entrance and her actions; but feverish, almost delirious as you were, you ascribed to her a goblin appearance different from her own: the long dishevelled hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were figments of imagination; results of nightmare: the spiteful tearing of the veil was real: and it is like her. […] Do you accept my solution of the mystery?

Rochester’s description reflects his understanding of strange behaviours and the resonance of individuals who transmit negative feelings to others. He uses a complex language and many details to help Jane understand the mystery.

The meaning of words and the definition of insanity is also discussed by Foucault (1991), who highlights different aspects of female madness in Jane Eyre. He affirms that branding dualistic divisions are used in Brontë’s texts, such as sane/mad, dangerous/harmless, and normal/abnormal. He writes that In Jane Eyre, the authority identifies the different realms, sane and insane; Bertha is labelled a mad woman by her husband Rochester. Although the narrator Jane reconstructs Rochester’s account of his wife’s madness, he certifies his wife Bertha as a lunatic, that is, Bertha as a mad woman is constructed through language by others. At the same time, he observes that the authorities exercise power by branding dualistic divisions: sane/mad, dangerous/harmless; normal/ abnormal.

In Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is the character with the most pregnant symptoms of madness, which the novel’s author is not afraid to describe thoroughly. Later on, after other similar novels have been published in the same period of time, Bertha’s character could finally be compared to someone else, that being other insane characters shaped by other authors. She became a symbolical figure of female insanity and subordination. She appears to be unable to narrate for herself, so her laughter and growls are the only real sign of the insanity that she expresses on her own. For all the other characters in the novel, Bertha is the madwoman in the attic. Throughout the passages, Brontë refers to her as to a mad woman, a wild animal and a goblin appearance. She not only refers to her in this way by using actual words, but also by describing her appearance, which is that of a beast, of a lower animal and not that of a human being. In one of the passages, she is described as a wild creature with a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a name which ran backwards and forwards and snatched and growled.

The innkeeper is one of the characters that play an important role in offering readers an accurate description of Bertha’s portray, saying that she was kept in very close confinement, ma’am; people even for some years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her: they only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad; and some believed she had been his mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since a very queer thing.

After analysing Brontë’s writing and her way of integrating female madness into her characters, it becomes clear that she was interested in dragging the public’s attention towards mental disorders and understanding them. Although there are authors and critics that have easily detected elements that clearly express madness in Brontë’s writing, there are others that suggest the opposite. Beaty (1996) argues that there is a persistent lack concentrated focus on the text of madness in Jane Eyre. The author suggests that the deployment of madness in the novel can be called semiotic as it enacts an over determination of the signifier madness. Brontë applies words like madness, maniac, lunatic, insanity to several of the characters in the novel as a rejection of semantic certainty and could be viewed as an oscillation between semiotic and symbolic.

The concept of female madness, present in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, has become a major point of interest for critics. Although Jane is the title’s character and the entire action revolves around her, Bertha Mason, who is the definition of the madwoman, draws a lot more attention. She became one of the most important characters of English fiction, contouring the emotional economy and the construction of woman. Even more interesting than the controversies that the character of Bertha Mason stirs, is the link that some authors emphasize, such as Judith Williams who sees a close link between Jane’s fantasies and imagination and Bertha Mason.

In Lerner’s opinion (1998), Jane was secretly attracted by the dynamic and dangerous forces the proprieties were designed to protect her from. Another critic, Richard Chase, sees Bertha as the woman who has given herself blindly and uncompromisingly to the principle of sex and intellect. A more extreme approach is presented by Robert Keefe, who claims that Bertha is Jane’s Oedipal rival, preventing her from marrying Rochester and, therefore, representing the dead Mrs. Brontë. Bertha Mason is continuously linked to sexual desire, a live symbol of the dangers of madly uncontrolled sexual feeling, yet these views are not shared by Brontë or her characters.

Bertha’s character also represented a challenge for Sue Thomas, who discussed about the tropical extravagance of Bertha Mason, stating that the boundaries of genteel femininity are blurred in Bertha. Rochester acknowledges that no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of Bertha’s violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders during their time in Jamaica. The house she manages is not quiet or settled. Thomas also claims that The vices of intemperance, cursing, and unchastity, which mark insubordination in Rochester’s model of genteel femininity and which prematurely ripen the germs of insanity in Bertha are normally, but not exclusively, masculine, lower-class, coloured female, or black ones in early nineteenth-century discourses about Creoleness. In her moral madness Bertha acquires virile force. The gender instability of Bertha, linked with her degeneracy, is also underlined by Jane’s description of her as a clothed hyena. In religious iconography, the hyena, which eats decaying corpses, has been used as a symbol of those who thrive on the filthy corpse of false doctrine. The ancients said that the hyena is able to change its sex, and used it as a symbol of the unstable man.

Looking at Rochester’s character, it is easily observable that Bertha’s madness is what led him to another mistress. He describes his life with a series of mistresses as a grovelling fashion of existence: Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. Madness is what drives him away from his current wife and closer to his future wife, who seems to be the exact opposite.

Jane Eyre is a romantic novel of great intensity, which critics have been debated about for a very long time. The antagonistic characters, the alternation between terror and love, the writing style, the portraying style and accuracy and the way in which the author has started a revolution to offer Victorian women a voice overwhelm any reader. The concept of female madness is constantly present in this novel and significantly pithy in Bertha’s character.

In the next chapter, I will observe and analyse the presence of female madness in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with the purpose to continue the research on the concept of the thesis and be able to compare its application and integration in Victorian literature.

JOHN FOWLES’S “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN”

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” 

CONCLUSIONS

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