Exploited into Madness: The Dehumanization and Erasure of Bertha Antoinetta Mason

Abstract

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Bertha Antoinetta Mason is systematically dehumanized and discriminated against by Brontë in her representation of her in the novel as well as the narrative based on the intersectionality of her race, gender, and madness. Bertha, despite being a White Creole from a wealthy family, loses her social status and her wealth to her husband, Edward Rochester, and her madness on coming to England. Significantly, Bertha's loss of privilege and agency are the reverse of a former Caribbean slave's acquisition of freedom and agency on breathing English air. It is Bertha's madness that silences her and degrades her worth as an individual. Her madness degrades her into a raving animal that needs to be controlled. As a result of her madness, she loses her marriage and her husband. She becomes the mentally unstable, incapable, animalistic, bad wife. She is, therefore confined and taken care of by Grace Poole. It is worth pointing out that in confining her in the attic, Rochester treats her better than she would have been treated in a lunatic asylum. However, better is not good. In the case of Bertha - and countless others as I show - we see that confinement or imprisonment reproduces and worsens the symptoms of madness. We see that while Bertha may have been suffering from hereditary madness, her madness was exacerbated due to her confinement in a windowless room for ten years. In other words the condition that puts her in the attic worsens as a result of her placement in the attic. The cure aggravates the disease leaving the sufferer to be sidelined in favor of Bronte's eponymous heroine who wins the marriage plot.