Image of Madness in the Novel Jane Eyer - Term Paper Example

Insert your full Names here Insert the name of your professor/tutor here Insert the Title of the course Insert date of submission Image of Madness Introduction When one has finished reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhy then another must-read text is The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The two books, Jane Eyre and The Madwoman in the Attic are surprising by the coherence in their themes and imagery owing to the fact that writers of these books were historically and geographically distant from each other. The title of the third book (The Madwoman in the Attic) constitutes a central concept in Brontë’s Jane Eyre where Byronic hero’s wife has been detained in the attic. While this is the preliminary information, the central point in this case is how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar managed to make a breakthrough in feminist criticism and how post-colonial scholars have reacted to such writings. The authors have modeled the figure of Betha Mason to be the so called “Madwoman in the attic” so that an argument is made regarding perceptions towards female literacy characters of the periods. What the two authors communicate to their readers is that all female characters appearing in books authored by male can either be monsters or angel. This is the reason why Bertha Mason has been modeled to fit into the stereotype of Victoria society that for long, has been dominated by male figures and constantly oppressed by draconian rules that can be bent to favour male figures. To unmask such madness Bertha Mason, Rochester’s sometime wife tries to rip off the façade of what the authors present as dissimulation surrounding Victorian writers. It is for this reason that scholars such as Alexander and Smith state, “This is the text that illuminates society by trying to completely deconstruct Victorian masculinity by showing madness of Betha Mason” (34). It therefore goes that the central theme of texts is woman madness and Bertha Mason plays a key role. Based on this, the essay critically discusses image of madness in Jane Eyre with central focus being the post-colonial aspect of Bertha Mason. In so doing, elements of madness will be supported by citations from The Madwoman in the Attic. Image of madness in Jane Eyre The beginning of the text shows the reader a brief history of Bertha as told by Mr. Rochester. Her past is succinctly briefed without semblance of sympathy. It reads, “Bertha Mason is mad . . .she came of a mad family; --idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!-as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points . . . Oh! my experience has been heavenly, if you only knew it! (249) Looking at this statement, readers are reminded how Bertha went through barbarous system of restraint and coercion. It is therefore understatement to argue that the expressions above simply meant state of physical health or rather a state of unsound mind. Instead, Victorian era with its limited and antiquated knowledge about madness realized that Bertha was mad---madness that made her to move away from coercive barbaric rules. Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert confront the issue of the depiction of female characters in a society that has been shaped by and made for men. Their arguments bring an exquisite perspective on the roles women are given by a male-dominated society. Strangely, these roles are ultimately directed to the service of men. Since these roles or services were negative, especially those given to the madwoman, they imposed limitations on how a woman was to behave. This is why Bertha Mason wants to break away from them and as a result the cause of madness as depicted in the texts. Secondly, the text shows a situation where Rochester makes confession to have married a woman he describes to be “a trance of prurience” (Gaskell 56). After this marriage, Rochester discovers that Bertha is actually sexually promiscuous thus deciding to lock her away. In addition to this, the text as cited by Eagleton describes Bertha as having “fiery eyes and a lurid visage, which flames over” (67). The conclusion that authors have made regarding these statements is that she was a brave woman. To that regard, Brontë has this to be the stereotype of madness. To further conceptualise this statement, Maguire argues that, “…her braveness is the cause of her madness” (24). Contemporary scholars argue that portraits of Jane and Bertha reveal self-ruled, unlovable and often very aggressive humans who cannot conform to masculine society (Editorial Reviews of Daphne Du Maurier 243). In as much, The Madwoman in the Attic and Jane Eyre show that the two characters bring some ambiguity. For instance, Brontë gives readers two independent, feisty-one monster the other heroine. Illustrating Bertha as subverted by other forces but shows courage. This is seen when she lends emphasis towards ideas of Brontë of the assertive female. To conceptualise her image of madness, there is connection between morality and sexuality which clearly demonstrates post-colonial concerns regarding the social threats posed by emancipation of women. Basically, what Brontë has done here is to reinforce restrictive sexual values of the Victorian society through Bertha and yet Bertha is trying to display excess passion for it. The Madwoman in the Attic is presenting a genuine transcendence of female identity---Bertha Mason. To understand this point, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar take readers through passages one of such being Jane’s life in the red-room. Here, Jane becomes imprisoned in what it is termed as “figuratively and literally” (340). This is because red-room becomes her vision of the society in which she finds herself. It is at this point that Jane comes to hear mirthless laugh of Bertha. This laugh makes Jane compare Bertha with the “mad animal” she encountered in the red-room. The representation of a genuine transcendence of female identity is the manifestation of Bertha as a woman who is raged and one trying to break away from oppressive gender and social norms. Indeed the madness is made clear when Bertha tears up the bridal veil thus preventing the wedding from going on. To this regard, Bellamy argues that, “woman madness is witnessed in Bertha Mason, a character who tries to find her identity by burning to ashes what she does not like when Thornfield came to represent a state of servitude and submission for Jane” (46). This can be linked with Lerner ideologies. As identity threatened character, Bertha suffers from what Lerner terms as madness of “engulfment” (276). Lerner defines madness of engulfment as the extraordinary distress possessed by Bertha as she finds herself under compulsion to take on the features of personality---alien to her own. It is for this reason that Bullock (59) concludes that Bertha’s madness is a true representation of a new world for her. That madness brings a process of healing which makes her find avenues for self-realization. Her madness is seen as a source of freedom from culturally-defined image of women. A manifestation this essay considers to be a protest set to go against the crushing principles of the male-controlled society. A manifestation that can be made is that Bertha Mason can be seen as a complex presence in Jane Eyre. The reason for this is that Bertha manages to impede Jane’s happiness. Another point is that Bertha catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. It is for this regard that Bertha shows her madness---the image of madness Sandra and Susan describe to be the effort made by Bertha to save Jane from symptomatic difficulties every woman was supposed to encounter and overcome. They add, “Bertha represent madness when she act for Jane and make Jane manage the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” (73). To underscore such madness, Bertha can be interpreted as portrayed in The Madwoman in the Attic a symbol of madness. The symbolism in this case is that she can be interpreted as the way Britain feared and for that matter, “locked away” other people it met during the height of imperialism because these people were feared of their madness for change and transformation. David (132) sees this madness as a symbol of representation of the “locked away” Victorian wife who the society is not expecting to work or travel outside the house so that they become increasingly frenzied as she finds no way out of her anxiety and frustrations. To summarise and perhaps bring Jane into the picture, Bertha’s image of madness is seen as the warning she is giving to Jane of what complete submission to Rochester could bring out. What needs to be stated with regard to Jane Eyre and The Madwoman in the Attic is that there has been contemporary scholars reviewing these texts and strongly condemning them for their resounding unwomanliness and unfemininity (Mason 56). This appears shocking owing to the fact that women in these texts were oppressed and needed salvation. In as much, the two texts still belong to Victorian era dealing with domestic fiction (Bullock 135 – 141). This is the reason why Brontë has taken the step to rewrite the masculine prototype of romanticism, as manifested through a triumph of femininity (as it is occurring in Bertha). She represents feminine conscience that she is refusing to be redefined through what the society see as masculine interpretation and each are clearly as assertive as the other. However, the image of madness which actually creates Bertha’s antithesis is that she does not approach issues intellectually as seen with Jane. Instead, she is sheerly an animal cooped in an enclosure that is indeed a prey to her own sexual impulses. This justifies reasons why Brontë likens Bertha to a vulgar animal possessing wild mannerisms. The descriptions such as, "the maniac", "the clothed hyena", "the lunatic" and "that purple face" (250) shows a disheveled appearance. To recapitulate, the idea of madness as seen with Bertha under The Madwoman in the Attic, the text undermines one of the focal patriarchal schemes. Ellen Friedman, in his “Doris Lessing: Fusion and Transcendence of the Female and the ‘Great Tradition’,” says, “In the female tradition, women characters who choose ordinary life above the alternatives of death or madness must compromise their ambitions to allow themselves to be absorbed into a suffocating world” (466). Bertha subverts the supposed hegemonic paradigm. She rejects the “ordinary life” and fails to “compromise” their ambition of self-attainment. This makes her retreat to madness. Since the first publican of the book, “madwoman in the attic" is regarded as the ionic silence of women and Brontë has clearly demonstrated this through Bertha. The novel Jane Eyre has given Bertha a voice, not taken lightly in the society, making her to challenge authority, represent opinions and not just to sit there and accept the oppressive nature of men, she says, “I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die. I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me" (125). By this, Bertha practices her madness by straying from double standards thus rejecting weird womanhood standards, uncontrolled passion and need to be submissive to feminine standards. What we are seeing here is not only Bertha who represents the realities of the time in terms of mental illness but a woman portraying the enigma of fears and madness it evokes---strangeness, violence, and uncontrollability. As a character, Bertha is really mad here and is subtly woven through the text, with some elements of empathy for the suffering she is going through and this suffering is in itself an image of madness. Jane accuses Rochester by saying, “you speak of her with hate-with vindictive apathy. It is cruel- she cannot help being mad" (261). Moore (255) affirms this assertion by arguing that her constant direct addresses to the reader in the last pages of the text means that she is depicting her testimony to other colleagues or women so that they have the chance of learning from her personal experience. What should be understood in this argument is that Bertha is indeed an image of madness. Secondly, even if she does serve as one of those characters who can be argued to be villains, she is more of a critique of a society in which charismatic women are seen as monsters or madwomen. As Anderson (52) recognises, Charlotte Brontë has the character of writing a novel resembling Gothic and thus threatening to the men of her time. To some extent, Charlotte Brontë is seen to be tempting to merge the identities of madness and angel (Bertha and Jane respectively) in her novel thus being seen as a personal statement regarding the friction between passivity and passion in her own life---an elements that helps creating the madness of Bertha Mason. Society is not ready for the upside-down deconstruction of the patriarchal celebration of rationality when arguments by Avril and Zlosnik (84) are considered. Avril and Zlosnik believe that conformity to the rules of society is the real madness because it means clinging to the dictates of a society that is itself mad. And since Bertha is going against these dictates, Avril and Zlosnik see no madness (87). Basing from this argument, it can be argued that conscious state of madness can be projected as the only way out unconscious madness of the society. A point presented as the only way of gaining the true self within what is already mad society. This view however, has been disputed by Janet (15). In his psychological-political analysis of madness, Janet points out that madness is not a situation that an individual needs to be cured of; instead, a special strategy used by Bertha so as to live in her unlivable situation. Spivak (342) also argues that “The Madwoman in the Attic is a story giving example of women’s subversive strategies in fiction writing whereby the author is seen as imagining triumphs for the narrator in Berthas madness” (p.135). Even though the image of madness from the perspective Spivak may not be prevalent, the ultimate conclusions that can be made regarding the two texts are similar; that male and female as seen in The Madwoman in the Attic and Jane Eyre have certain degree of self-presentation and both undergo a different transformation with certain levels of consequences thus worth concluding that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and the Victorian Jane Eyre present similar discourses of masculinity and femininity and both texts quite ostensibly seem similar in their level of faithfulness to reactionary patriarchal assumptions. In this sense, Bertha is defiant in the process of constructing and presenting her image of madness. Looking at analyses done by Gaskell (354) regarding Jane Eyre and The Madwoman in the Attic, Bertha fits the definition of the Gaytatri Chakravorty Spivak’s subaltern. That is, The Madwoman in the Attic portrays Bertha as the cast and always referred to as ‘Other’ to a point of not being a human. Grudin also says, “First seen darkly as a ghost, then as a goblin, as vampiric and lycanthropic, (147). Though Gilbert and Gubar have created this to serve a purpose, the image created of this colonized woman is damaging. This further escalates to a point of not allowing Bertha a voice thus becoming an ‘Other’ and not her own identity. This makes the woman becomes what Chandra Talpade Mohanty terms as “average third-world woman” in the sense that she “leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender” within the attic without a voice (Mohanty 65). Bertha clearly does not have control over her body. This is complicated by the fact that as Jane’s narrative continues, the reader believes in Jane but sees Bertha as ‘heterogeneous Other.’ If one looks at the text as Jane being the site of social autonomy and rebellion, Bertha then becomes the cautionary or symbol tale to Jane if she happens to fail. Since Jane does not fail, she uses this madwoman’s body as a proof of her own madness within her self-consciousness thus obtaining the needed approval from readers. By Jane doing this (for the sake of justifying her autonomy) Bertha becomes a colonized being thus readers condemning her of being mad and allowing Jane her autonomy. Reading this point suggests that Jane is a representation of women’s subversive strategies in fiction writing where the author is making attempts of imagining triumphs for the narrators in her madness. It is actually the point of making Bertha the colonized that analysis such as Janet (34) have tagged her mad. In addition, critical readings, especially from post-modern theories set a balance to confirm the madness of Bertha as the colonized. For instance, Bullock asserts, “reading through The Madwoman in the Attic, Bertha Mason does not fail to represent heroine’s dark double. Believing that her madness escalates when she is represented as the colonized does not equally to distort the book since Gilbert’s and Gubar’s main thesis lies in Rochester’s introduction to both Bertha and Jane through this manner” (167). To further conceptualise Bertha’s madness as represented through her colonized state, when Jean Rhys came up with Wide Sargasso Sea she explains how she is moved by Bertha Mason’s madness as the colonized (102). Bertha’s madness becomes apparent when one traces Jane’s marriage to Rochester and integrating that with the nightmare that reinforces her association with Bertha. It is at this point that Gilbert and Gubar come in. In the process of trying to explain feminist criticism they find some faults with Madwoman in the Attic. They believe that for Bertha to accommodate the marriage between Jane and Rochester, she has to turn her anger inward and doubling this feeling through different authors in the text. Gilbert and Gubar assertions are apparent on page 700 of the Madwoman in the Attic where they attempt to convey the madness of turning anger inward and doubling it. They further use figure of Bertha Manson to depict the so called “Madwoman in the Attic.” The last book published by Gilbert and Gubar explains the concept of ‘tuning anger inward and doubling it’ (23). Connecting such definitions with the case of Bertha in the novel, they assert that Madwoman in the Attic represents a pattern for countless others. Though ‘Other’ has been highlighted above, Gilbert and Gubar explain ‘others’ to be the numerous instances where women are seen going overboard with their emotions. They support this by quoting “… a story of enclosure and escape, a distinctively female Bildungsroman” (45). This implies the struggle Bertha is undergoing as a representation of madness. The aspects of ‘tuning anger inward and doubling it’ as a sign of madness in Bertha is clear through the analysis made by Editorial Reviews of Daphne Du Maurier. It reads, “Most important, her confrontation, not with Rochester but with Rochester’s mad wife Bertha, is the book’s central confrontation, an encounter … not with her own sexuality but with her own imprisoned ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage,’ a secret dialogue of self and soul on whose outcome, as we shall see, the novel’s plot, Rochester’s fate, and Jane’s coming of age all depend” (411-414). Another construction of madness as seen in Brontë’s Jane Eyre as far as tuning anger inward and doubling it is concerned is manifested when the experience of Bertha in the red-room brings an indelible mark on her personal consciousness thus the beginning of her attempt to reign in her rage and become subdued and disciplined character. Instead of struggling to ensure she saves herself from the suffering, she manages to turn her anger inward and accelerates the doubling that actually began when Brontë manages to link unsettled state of mind from Jane with Bertha’s manifestations. The novel Jane Eyre can be categorized as the tradition of Victorian domestic. On other hand, Gubar and Gilbert have attempted to incorporate Brontë’s in what can be seen as feminist tradition of Victorian fiction. Grudin has come with critical review of Gubar and Gilbert’s The Madwoman in the Attic and Brontë’s Jane Eyre materials suggesting that first, the readings favour the connection between immorality and madness. Secondly, that madness of Bertha can be seen through her sexual desires (71). He believes in his assessment that Victorian texts regarded sexually unsatisfied women as mad. Grudin’s interpretation is that the real madness of Bertha is expressed in the night before the wedding when she expresses her sexual dissatisfaction buy setting on fire items. It is in this sense that Bertha’s madness has been regarded as, “a woman showing her madness to others by acting with a lot of bestiality just because of social and sexual alienation” (Grudin 78). On the other hand, Bertha can be looked at as the monstrous embodiment of psycho-sexual conflicts both Rochester and Jane make her to experience. In this case, Jane is believed to have denied her sex by taking Rochester away something that escalates her madness thus tearing of the veil on the night prior to the wedding. This conforms that “For Jane, Bertha is mad because she is isolated from surrendering her sexual authorities and desires to men. For Rochester, Bertha brings the image of madness since she embodies the ambivalence of the Byronic hero towards his own sexuality” (Grudin 81). Conclusion The image of madness in the novel Jane Eyre is given a multifaceted approach and so is its interpretation. For instance, The Madwoman in the Attic and Jane Eyre consider Bertha to be mad because she did not comply and thus deviating from what they consider to be a norm---suffragists fighting openly for their rights. Bertha is also mad because she is strong, willful, creative, determined and inquisitive. That is why there are two women cast in one of the texts, the perfect and the madwoman in the attic. Madness is seen here to be a subversive strategy for those who tend to be creative with minds and ideas of their own. Having established this, the image of madness as seen in these texts were supposed to be important for feminist criticism since it represented a form of non-cooperation or resistance of the regime. Currently, Bertha’s lunacy (image of madness) has changed with time. However, this does not mean that her deconstruction and construction in both texts and subsequent critical analyses does not betray the forging of her madness. Works Cited Alexander, C. and Smith, M. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Anderson, Benedict. Imagines Communities: Reflections of Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as vampire.” In Avril Horner and Angela Keane (eds) Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. 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Janet Harbord, “Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca.” Feminist Review 53 (1996): 95-107. Lerner, Laurence. “Bertha and the Critics.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 44.3 (Dec 1989): 272-300. Maguire, Gregory. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Mason, M. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Moore, Judith. “Sanity and Strength in Jean Rhys’s West Indian Heroines.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 41.1/2 (1987): 21-31. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Norton Critical Edition. (New York: Norton, 1999). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Bassingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988. 271-313. 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