Her early appearances occur when Jane is troubled, tense or desperate for freedom (it is no coincidence that the wedding-veil that Bertha tears is one that Jane feels she has been ‘cheated’ into accepting).
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Card 7
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This doubling – a common Gothic motif –
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Card 8
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The narrative strategies used by Charlotte Brontë clearly designate Bertha as ‘Other’.
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Card 9
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Yet critics have seen this ‘Othering’ of Bertha as highly problematic. One particularly troubling aspect of Bertha is her psychological instability.
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He tells Jane that Bertha ‘came of a mad family’, with a mother who was ‘a madwoman and a drunkard’, but also that,
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Card 11
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Brontë’s depiction of Bertha drew on contemporary descriptions of mental illness, such as those she found in the family’s medical encyclopaedia:
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It would be easy to see Rochester’s lack of sympathy as representative of general attitudes towards mental illness in 19th-century society.
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In a review of the 1844 report by the Metropolitan Commissioners on Lunacy, the Westminster Review reported that the ‘disposition of the public’ towards the mentally ill was becoming ‘more enlightened and benevolent’.
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and that those responsible for their care should ‘avoid everything which might give to the patient the impression he is in prison’.
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“I found her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic.
