Hide the Crazy Woman - The Figure of Bertha in Jane Eyre

Introduction Over the time various famous and not so famous literary personalities have suffered from mental breakdowns. Very often writers themselves have written through their own “madness” and produced mad characters as a result. This is particularly true of many of the leading figures in Modernism, who all seem to have had some odd character traits. But even before Modernism the madman/woman was a very popular figure in literature. Just think of Shakespeare’s famous plays, where we encounter lunatics en masse. One of the most famous madwomen in English literature is Bertha, the locked up wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. In this paper I will look at Victorian madness in general and at the figure Bertha more closely. Furthermore I will also look, from a somewhat feminist perspective, at Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel in which Jean Rhys takes up the figure of Bertha again. I shall try to explain this rewriting of a canonical text in a postcolonial context.

Historical Madness Early in the Victorian period the madness seems to be lurking in the shadows – especially in gothic fiction, but then madness was very much on everybody’s mind in those days. The Lunatics Act of 1845 required that all counties should have mental asylums, and this led to an enormous increase of mental patients admitted to public care.[1] Before that it was not unusual for husbands to “shut up” their madwomen behind locked doors[2], and confining them to the attic or the madhouse might indeed have been a convenient way to dispose of unwanted wives and daughters. Most of the patients admitted to the new asylums were women, and they were mainly admitted because of “Hysteria”.[3] At that point hysteria had various definitions; physical aggression, grandeur, sexuality, alcoholism, addiction to drugs,