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Keywords: Brontë, Charlotte / disability studies / feminist literary criticism / Jane Eyre / madness / mental illness / physiognomy
Over twenty years ago, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, a now classic text of early feminist literary criticism (1978). Basing their title on the character of Bertha Mason, a madwoman secretly imprisoned in her husband's attic in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre ([1847] 1981), Gilbert and Gubar argued that the "maddened doubles" in texts by women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century "function as social surrogates," projecting women writers' anxiety of authorship in a male-dominated literary tradition (1978, xi). Much like the determined women who fueled feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, these madwomen rebel against the strictures of patriarchal authority. Since then, the figure of the madwoman as feminist rebel has had a sustained cultural currency. As Elaine Showalter notes, "To contemporary feminist critics, Bertha Mason has become a paradigmatic figure" (1985, 68). Furthermore, as Showalter also points out, feminist critics have a sympathy for Bertha Mason that, ironically, Charlotte Brontë does not seem to share (68-9).
Many factors, not the least of which is the proliferation of feminist criticism and reading practices, have contributed to Bertha Mason's paradigmatic status and to contemporary readers' newfound sympathy. Perhaps most notably, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1985), a prequel to Jane Eyre, has influenced a generation of readers' responses to Brontë's character. Rhys's novel tells the story of Bertha "Antoinette" Mason's life in Jamaica before she marries Rochester and moves to England.(1) Rhys's novel gives voice to the previously silent madwoman and depicts what some might consider the causes of her madness -- a difficult childhood, a dangerous social climate, and her husband's ultimate betrayal. In her depiction of the events that precede Antoinette's imprisonment in the attic, Rhys departs in important ways from Jane Eyre's configuration of madness, which I will discuss in greater detail below. By stressing the causal factors that contribute to Antoinette's emotional state, Rhys also makes it easier for readers to understand and to identify with the originally enigmatic and inarticulate character.
Another factor significantly affecting contemporary readers' sympathy for Bertha Mason is the changing cultural thinking about psychiatry, mental illness, and the asylum from...