Bertha's Treatment Of Women In Jane Eyre

This passage greatly shows the stark contrast between the two women, the demonization of the Oriental female subject and the innocence of the English one. Rochester’s narration of his life with Bertha paints a very negative portrait of hers. He tells Jane that he was bonded with a mad Creole woman that came from a Jamaican mad and degraded family, having “idiots and maniacs through three generations” and a mother, “the Creole…both a madwoman and a drunkard!” (JE 337). Apart from her insanity, his disappointment and wretchedness was due to being “bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste” (JE 353). According to Brennan, “Rochester’s language captures Bertha’s vigour and voluptuousness but casts these qualities negatively, as producing
base appetites unfitting for a woman” (Brennan 73). Unlike the good, chaste and self-disciplined Occidental woman, the Oriental female is marked by lack of restraint, immorality and sexual promiscuity.
Thus, Jane’s self-control against Rochester’s touch and compliments before their wedding and Bertha’s lack of restraint in regard to sexuality demonstrate Jane’s Englishness and Bertha’s Otherness. Bertha is also given animalistic and grotesque features being presented as a violent monster with “wolfish cries” (JE 355) that filled his habitation with “the sounds of the bottomless pit” (JE 355) and thus needed to be “safely lodged in that third-story room of whose cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast’s den- a goblin’s cell” (JE 356). All these show that Bertha, the racial Other is stained with intemperance, infidelity, madness and bestiality. Spivak rightly advocates that “Bertha’s function in Jane Eyre is to render indeterminate the boundary between human/ animal frontier, thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law” (Spivak,
249). “That woman, who has so abused your long-suffering, so sullied your name, so outraged your honor, so blighted your youth, is not your wife, nor are you her husband” (JE 356).
According to Rochester’s words, Bertha is the main person to blame for his misery during his youthful years, leaving nothing else but ostracism and pity for her. Having given a complete description of Bertha’s repulsive behavior, Rochester emphatically proves Jane’s benevolent personality by saying: “You are my sympathy-my better self-my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely” (JE 363). Therefore, Jane’s pure, moral and intellectual nature reflects the “…positive ideas of home, of a nation and its language, of proper order, good behavior, moral values” (Said 81). On the other hand, “the colonial other becomes the moral antithesis of the British self” (Armstrong 60). Conclusively it can be argued that Rochester’s degrading depiction of Bertha is necessary not only to prove himself as a victimized Englishman but also to highlight Jane’s sanctity and above all her English superiority towards the colonized other-
Bertha.
Apart from Rochester’s dichotomy between Jane’s Englishness and Bertha’s Otherness, Jane herself as the narrative voice of the novel effectively silences the Oriental female, Bertha Mason. Silencing the colonial other was considered another British strategy to show its dominance, control and cultural superiority. Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism rightfully points out that “[t]he power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism” (Said xii). The narrative strategy of ‘telling’ or ‘exposition’ appears in Bertha’s description by Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre’s viewpoint concerning Bertha has a considerable share in Bertha being silenced. Except from her laughter and yells that resemble the noises of an animal, Bertha is deprived of a voice in the narrative. Her identity, appearance and past, are given from the voice of the others, mainly Rochester’s and Jane’s. But the process of silencing the colonized subject does not stop only to the mutation of Bertha. Bertha is metaphorically silenced by being presented as a wild animal not only by Rochester but also by Jane in the following passage: “In the deep shade… a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, 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 mane, hid its head and face” (JE 338). Jane’s description clearly shows a process of dehumanization as she uses derogatory words such as ‘it’, ‘beast’ and ‘wild animal’ to refer to Bertha. The portrait of Bertha’s savagery is also noticeable when Jane describes Bertha’s attack on Rochester, saying that “the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek” (JE 338). Through these descriptions, Jane tries to create an antipathy for the sub-human and imprisoned Bertha. Additionally, Brennan suggests that “Bronte portrays her as inhuman in order to excuse Rochester’s treatment and by extension that of the British imperial project as one of its supposed aims was to ‘civilize’ those ‘foreigners’ with whom it came into contact” (Brennan 70). Jane’s descriptions of Bertha even involve gothic elements as Bertha is given characteristics