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Leah shook her head, and the conversation was of course dropped. All I had gathered from it amounted to this-that there was a mystery at Thornfield; and that from participation in that mystery I was purposely excluded. (Jane Eyre, [p. 161])'
Whether she is construed as the champion of female rebellion, or as the image of monstrosity that Jane Eyre must reject in the course of her Bildung, Bertha Mason, Charlotte Bronte's paradigmatic madwoman, continues to compel feminist criticism to address the highly problematic yet omnipresent conjunction of madness and femininity. This interaction between feminist literary criticism and the text of madness in Jane Eyre continues to yield uneasy conclusions, and madness remains one of feminism's central contradictions. In "The Madwoman and Her Languages," Nina Baym deplores "the work Bronte has put into defining Bertha out of humanity" (p. 48), and proceeds to take feminist literary theory (ranging from French-affiliated feminisms to deconstruction) to task for its valorization of madness which, for her, "seems a guarantee of continued oppression" (p. 49).2 Hence the conceptual impasse implied in the statement that follows the colon in her title: "Why
I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory." On the opposite side the most obvious approach is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential The Madwoman in the Attic, called after Bertha herself.3 Although providing these critics with an inspiring title, an equally inspirational analysis of Bertha is, however, effectively blocked by their ideological alignment with the views of Rochester and Jane on madness (incidentally, Baym similarly errs in assuming the coincidence of the viewpoints of author and fictional heroine). While in their chapter on female creativity they argue that, "Specifically, a woman writer must examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of 'angel' and `monster' which male authors have generated for her" (p. 17), in the chapter on Jane Eyre they reproduce the same repressive logic by examining Jane and Bertha in these very terms, referring to Jane as a "sane version of Bertha" (p. 366) and viewing "the loathsome Bertha" (p. 369) solely as a negative example from which Jane must be freed. In this, Gilbert and Gubar's analysis is representative of a considerable body of feminist criticism which, setting out to explicate the role of madness in Jane...