THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN: THE OTHERNESS OF BERTHA / ANTOINETTE MASON IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S JANE EYRE AND JEAN RHYS'S WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Abstract

Many readers who are familiar with the Victorian literature are aware of Charlotte Brontē's masterpiece Jane Eyre. In the book, the lunatic lady held locked on the third floor of the house, may have stuck in your mind along with some thought-provoking questions. Who is Bertha Mason in reality? Why is she locked up? Is she really mad or does the narration show her to be a mad woman? And if so, what are the causes of her madness? In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys manages to find answers to these questions and illuminates the readers by indicating that there is another side to the coin, constructing her own version of it. In the light of above information, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the otherness of Bertha / Antoinette Mason, in Charlotte Brontē's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Headnote

Abstract: Many readers who are familiar with the Victorian literature are aware of Charlotte Brontē's masterpiece Jane Eyre. In the book, the lunatic lady held locked on the third floor of the house, may have stuck in your mind along with some thought-provoking questions. Who is Bertha Mason in reality? Why is she locked up? Is she really mad or does the narration show her to be a mad woman? And if so, what are the causes of her madness? In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys manages to find answers to these questions and illuminates the readers by indicating that there is another side to the coin, constructing her own version of it. In the light of above information, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the otherness of Bertha / Antoinette Mason, in Charlotte Brontē's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Keywords: Jane Eyre, madness, otherness, Victorian literature, Wide Sargasso Sea

1. Introduction

During Queen Victoria's reign, the distribution of the roles between men and women was considerably apparent, like in the other spheres of social life. In this rigidly male-dominated Victorian society, women from all classes were kept within their homes and their roles were to create a peaceful place for their husbands and children, while men were dealing with financial issues in the Industrial Britain. In addition to being fully responsible for the household chores, working class women had to support their family incomes with low paid jobs. According to the social norms of Victorian society, being a good wife and mother was the primary duty of middle class women, and marriage was their best career. Social expectations from these Victorian women consisted in performing domestic duties within the private space of their households. Men actively participated in the public, but women were isolated from the outside world. Women were almost imprisoned in their houses. If a woman was silent, obedient, and invisible when needed, she was accepted as an "angel in the house", as Coventry Patmore called her in his narrative poem "The Angel in the House"; otherwise, if she was different from what was "normal" and expected, she would be labelled as a fallen woman.

Another issue that degraded the position of women in that society was having no right to possess or inherit property. The Married Women's Rights and Properties Act was a turning point in the equality between men and women. Before this Act, when a woman got married, she no longer had her own rights or wealth, her possessions were now all her husband's. The Married Women's Rights and Properties Act, however, allowed women to be the legal owners of the money they had earned as well as the right to inherit property. As is described by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England under the title of "Legal Consequences of Marriage": "[b]y marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of the husband, under whose protection and cover, she performs everything [...]" (Blackstone 1978: 145). This is the situation which paves the way for Mr. Rochester's marriage to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and in its prequel published one hundred nineteen years later, Wide Sargasso Sea. Taking into account the above information, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the otherness of Bertha / Antoinette Mason, in Charlotte Brontē's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

2. The othering process of Antoinette

The social standing of Jane is highly problematic. Since she works as a governess, she neither belongs to the same class with the servants, nor with the owner of the house. In spite of these social class issues, Rochester gains Jane's love. However, there is an insuperable obstacle to their relationship: Rochester's mad wife Bertha Mason. She is described as a frightening figure when she first comes out in the novel: "[i]n the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (Brontē 2009: 416).

Rochester had married Bertha for financial reasons. His father leaves all his fortune to Rochester's elder brother, as he does not want to divide his property. Thus, Rochester is obliged to marry Bertha, who is about to inherit significant wealth. Their marriage is the reflection of the British Empire's cultural and commercial exploitation of colony countries. Just as the British Empire colonizes some countries for its own benefit, Rochester exploits Bertha, a Creole woman, for his own interest. Initially, Bertha can be simply regarded as a figure preventing Rochester and Jane's possible chance at happiness. However, it is perfectly clear that the real sufferer is Bertha. Before she marries Rochester, she is a rational and beautiful woman, as stated by Rochester himself:

Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie [...]. She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her. (Brontē 2009: 433)

3. From otherness to madness: Antoinette's transformation into Bertha

Bertha's dramatic change from an attractive lady to a bestial figure raises serious questions in the reader's mind. Who is Bertha Mason in reality? Why is she locked up? Is she really mad or does the narration show her as a mad woman? And if so, what are the causes of her madness? In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys manages to find answers to these questions and illuminates the readers by indicating that there is another side to the coin, and constructing her own version of it. While Rhys is rewriting the story of Brontē's Jane Eyre borrowing its characters, she also tells the story from the perspective of someone more familiar with the history, culture and geography that shapes it. According to Wolfgang G. Müller,

Generally speaking, it is aesthetically and ontologically impossible to have identical characters in literary works by different authors. If an author takes over a character from a work by another author into his text, putting it to his own uses, this procedure may have a parodistic, satirical, corrective or censorious function and imply literary or social and political criticism. So, in presenting the Jamaican prehistory of Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester, Jean Rhys, though indebted to Charlotte Brontē's characters, does not just borrow them, but rather constructs her own versions of them. (Müller 2007: 65)

Wide Sargasso Sea acts as a prequel to Brontē's Jane Eyre, but it has as its main character Antoinette Cosway Mason, who is Rochester's mentally unstable wife, imprisoned in the attic in Brontē's Victorian novel,. In Jane Eyre, Bertha - or Antoinette - functions as a mad woman, while in Wide Sargasso Sea, she tells her own story from an early age to death. In her novel, Rhys writes a story which both challenges the British Empire, and the oppressed condition of a Creole woman in the patriarchal society of a colonized country. Under the repressive forces existing in this society, Antoinette is doubly oppressed: on the one hand, she is individually exposed to gender related discrimination, and on the other, she is oppressed both as a woman and as an individual of a colonized country, since Creole people are regarded as second class British citizens. As a Caribbean native writer, Rhys evaluates Brontē's novel as the English side of the story.

As Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, one hundred and nineteen years later than Brontē's Victorian novel, the shift in its literary form from the nineteenth century to twentieth century is absolutely clear. In her essay "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea", Barbara Ann Schapiro states that:

Rochester's lunatic first wife, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Bronte's tale, assumes center stage in Rhys's version. Rather than the haunting "other" of Jane Eyre, the madwoman's searing subjectivity indeed defines Rhys's novel. The collapse of rational order, of stable and conventional structures on all levels, distinguishes Rhys's vision and places it squarely within the modernist tradition. Like many modernist works, Rhys's novel explores a psycho-logical condition of profound isolation and self-division, a state in which the boundaries between the internal subjective world and the external object world have dissolved. (Schapiro 1995: 84)

The title of Rhys's novel is probably not chosen accidentally by the author. The Sargasso Sea is located in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean, which separates the West Indies and England. The Sargasso Sea represents the separation between two worlds that are both culturally and geographically different. In a similar manner, Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of a woman who does not succeed in making the West Indies her home and, like the Sargasso Sea, "[...] a mass of seaweed surrounded by swirling currents in the Atlantic Ocean, the novel's troubled heroine is suspended between England and the West Indies and belongs fully to neither" (McKenzie 2009: 56).

Antoinette opens her narration by informing the reader about the ambiguity of her situation in the society she lives in: "[t]hey say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks" (Rhys 2007: 15). Mr. Mason's wealth places Antoinette and her mother outside the ranks of the black population. Even though Antoinette and her family are safer after the marriage of her mother to Mr. Mason, she thinks that "in some ways it was better before he came, though he'd rescued us from poverty and misery" because "the black people did not hate us quite so much when we were poor" (Rhys 2007: 3031). The black Jamaican people call her a "white cockroach" and the British women and men call them "white niggers". In addition to living in a male dominated society, she faces the reality of being a citizen in a colonized country, as she is both rejected by her own people and by the British society. Antoinette "[...] is alienated both from the Caribbean and English landscapes, and from virtually all the people in her life" and expresses her frustration and confusion in the following passage (McKenzie 2009:64):

"Did you hear what that girl was singing?' Antoinette said.

"I don't always understand what they say or sing." Or anything else.

"It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. Will you go now please. I must dress like Christophine said." (Rhys 2007: 93)

As is understood from her life experience, Antoinette's unfortunate heritage as a Creole woman might be a contributing factor to her lunacy. Even though, she is sensitive before her marriage, it is inferred from the narration that her husband's refusal to understand her social position and origin pushes her beyond control. Rochester's attitude towards Bertha in Brontē's novel is absolutely indifferent, however it is understandable in the romance plot of Jane Eyre, as Bertha is described as mad and unsympathetic. Rhys provides readers with possible and potential answers to the questions such as "Who was Bertha?" and "Why was she mad?" According to Josephs,

[...] the figuration of madness in Wide Sargasso Sea is fraught with questions of colonial identity, place, and order. Via representations of Antoinette's, her mother's, and her husband's madness, the novel determinedly resists the categories and hierarchies that colonialism depends on for power and perpetuation. In insisting on "other sides" and third spaces, Wide Sargasso Sea complicates the fixity and dualism - black/white, European/native, mad/sane - that those in power are invested in maintaining, especially during periods of social upheaval, such as during abolition (the setting of the novel) and decolonization (the period of its creation and publication). (Josephs 2013: 51)

In accordance with Victorian law, Rochester takes all of her money after marriage. However, he does not only possess her property, but also wants to own her and change her identity. Although he is not in love with Antoinette, nevertheless, as a representative of a patriarchal world, he wants to both possess and dominate her: "I'll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She's mad but mine, mine" (Rhys 2007:150). He even wants to deprive Antoinette of her name and insists on her accepting the name "Bertha". When she objects to this, "My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?" he responds, "[b]ecause it is a name I'm particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha" (Rhys 2007:122). Through renaming, he wants to exercise his masculine power over his wife. According to McKenzie, "[f]ew things are more closely linked to a person's sense of self than his or her name. Rochester's patriarchal onomastics - Antoinette calls it English obeah - is a strategy aimed at controlling her innermost being" (McKenzie 2009: 60). It is clearly seen that he wants to give her a new identity, and Antoinette is aware of it: "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that obeah too" (Rhys 2007: 133). As Müller pointed out,

What is intertextually such an astonishing feat is that in Rochester's attempt to force a new name on Antoinette and assign to her a new identity, she is put on the way of becoming the "Bertha Mason" of Jane Eyre. We paradoxically witness the genesis of "Bertha Mason", the madwoman in Jane Eyre, as a result of the pressure and manipulation to which her husband subjects her in Rhys's novel. (Müller 2007: 71)

4.Different women, same fate

Antoinette's fate, madness and death mirror her mother's, Annette. Even their names are similar, and they also share the same isolated condition. As a result of oppression and emotional torture she goes through, Annette suffers a nervous breakdown. Isolated from the society she lives in and saddened because of her son's mental and physical handicap and then his death, she feels disappointed. In the novel, Annette's dependence on men is also reflected. After the death of her husband, she has to marry Mason to avoid economic problems. However, her marriage does not save her. Following the mental state that her second husband, Mr. Mason, leaves her in, she is shut away in a house in the company of a black couple. Moreover, the historical and social incidents that take place during those days, such as the freed blacks' revolt, will drive her to madness, abuse and death. If the relationship between Antoinette and Annette is taken into consideration, one can notice that Antoinette repeats her mother's fate. Sylvie Maurel emphasizes the close resemblance between Antoinette and Annette in her book titled Jean Rhys:

Antoinette cannot unknot family ties and, as the story unfolds, she looks more and more like her mother. Their physical likeness is underlined on many occasions: Antoinette comes to have the same frown as her mother, which, in both cases, looks as if it had 'been cut with a knife'. The destiny of the daughter repeats that of the mother: both marry an Englishman and both end up sinking into alcoholism and madness. Daniel Cosway brings out the similarities in his letter and calls 'Rochester's' attention to the fact that Antoinette is 'going the same way as her mother'. (Maurel 1998: 133)

Antoinette is trapped in the same suppressed role that destroys her mother; but Christophine, Antoinette's nanny in Jamaica, despite being a servant, is more independent and courageous. Christophine, who is given to Annette as a wedding gift, is portrayed as a strong character, in contrast to Antoinette and her mother. In addition, she is a defiant woman of knowledge, who opposes Rochester. However, "[...] like the alleged witches in Europe, she is both feared and persecuted, and was once reportedly jailed for practicing obeah. Rochester goes to great lengths to try to subjugate and destroy her" (McKenzie 2009: 60). She is a strong-willed character trying to convince Rochester that he was mistreating his wife.

Both Bronte and Rhys put a female character in the centre of their novels and discuss the women issue in the patriarchal society, but they deal with the issue in different ways. The novels, written in different centuries by different authors, have common characters and similar events, but they narrate different stories. The different perspective from which the two stories are written causes the difference between the two novels and is also proof that the time when a work is created affects its characteristics. Unlike Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, is a twentieth-century psychological novel, focusing on:

[...] how the inability to trust one's perceptions results in a psychological disorder in which boundaries between self and other - both human others and the physical environment - collapse, disabling the cognitive constructive processes required for normal human functioning. Notably, this mental instability, which afflicts both Antoinette and her unnamed husband (the Rochester character of Brontē's novel), finds its first cause in the untrustworthiness of human others. (Easterlin 2012: 138)

Brontē's heroine, Jane, maintains a strong stance against anything that confronts her in her struggle to gain a respected position in society. She is very headstrong and rejects any kind of oppression. In the end, she marries, gains her economic independence and so she attains her goal. Rhys's heroine, Antoinette, experiences the isolation of a modern character. She loses her family like Jane, but she cannot put up with the situation as Jane does. She is otherized in her own society, thus she cannot protect herself and suffers significant harm. Both heroines begin their stories as neglected children and experience lonely childhood. Jane is sent to Lowood boarding school, and Antoinette goes to Mount Calvary Convent School. They both manage to survive in a patriarchal society. While the story of Brontē's heroine brings forward the idea that women can achieve their goals in life, Antoinette's story tells the exact opposite.

Many critics consider Bertha to be Jane's double. According to Gilbert and Gubar, Bertha is symbolically a part of Jane - the embodiment or displacement of her rage. The two critics compare the character of Jane Eyre and mad Bertha, asserting that Bertha is Jane's "other", her alter ego, who realizes Jane's secret impulses. Thus, Jane is "the angel" and Bertha "the monster", which "echoes Jane's own fear of being a monster" (Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 362). Bertha acts as Jane's dark double and reflects Jane's repressed fear and anger. Although Jane always tells her true feelings, she never expresses her anger explicitly. Bertha manifests her anger instead of and for Jane. Jane keeps her anger under control, while Bertha expresses her womanly rage overtly.

5.Conclusion

Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are among the most renowned works of the literary world, and their two heroines, Jane Eyre and Antoinette Bertha Mason, take their place in the literary canon. The novels emphasize the victimization and emotional confusion of the protagonists and, by narrating their experiences, they reveal the oppression of women in the patriarchal society. Although Rhys builds her novel on Brontē's masterpiece Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea is a work of art that is completely original. Rhys does not just borrow the characters from Brontē's Jane Eyre, but constructs her own versions of them. After reading in Wide Sargasso Sea about Antoinette's solitary childhood, unrequited love and the difficulties she has to face, we can never think of Bertha Mason in the same way as before. From a modern and post-colonial perspective, Rhys creates another story, starting from the text of a Victorian novelist, who expresses the women's struggle for their identity, but ignores the role played by colonialism and imperialism in their lives.

Sidebar

Selin Yurdakul is an English Instructor at Ordu University, Turkey. She completed her B.A. in the English Language and Literature Department at Dumlupınar University, Kütahya, Turkey and her M.A. in the English Culture and Literature Department at Atılım University, Ankara, Turkey. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the English Language and Literature Department at Istanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University, Turkey. Her research interests focus on gender studies, utopian and dystopian fiction.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

Blackstone, William. 1978. Commentaries on the Laws of England. New York: Garland Publications. [Online]. Available: http://lib.freescienceengineering.org/view.php?id=572401. [Accessed 2017, October 10].

Bronte, Charlotte. 2009. Jane Eyre. Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library.

Easterlin, Nancy. 2012. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic. [Online]. Available: https://archive.org/details/TheMadwomanInTheAttic. [Accessed 2017, October 10].

Josephs, Kelly Baker. 2013. "'Fighting Mad': between Sides and Stories in Wide Sargasso Sea" in Disturbers of the Peace. Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, pp. 50-63.

Maurel, Sylvie.1998. Jean Rhys. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

McKenzie, Earl. 2009. "Tragic Vision in Wide Sargasso Seď' in Philosophy in the West Indian Novel. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 56-72.

Müller, Wolfgang G.2007 "The Intertextual Status of Jean Rhys's: Dependence on a Victorian Classic and Independence as a Post-Colonial Novel" in Rubik, Margarete and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds.). A Breath of Fresh Eyre Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 63-79.

Patmore, Coventry. 2014. The Angel in the House. Edited by Henry Morley. The Project Gutenberg eBook. [eBook #4099]. Transcribed from the 1891 Cassell & Company edition by David Price. [Online]. Available: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 4099/4099-h/4099-h.htm. [Accessed 2017, October 8].

Rhys, Jean. 2007. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton.

Schapiro, Barbara Ann. 1995. "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sed" in Berman, Jeffrey (ed.). Literature and the Relational Self. New York: New York University Press, pp. 84-104.