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brings the frustration of women’s
ambitions into focus. The reality of
domestic responsibility dictating
women’s lives, which Brontë
introduced into the Victorian novel
through her own evocative use
of domestic spaces in Jane Eyre,
continued to haunt women writers
throughout the 19th century.
Many feminist readings of Jane
Eyre focus on key spaces such as
specific rooms, windows, and the
infamous attic at Thornfield Hall
in which Jane’s love interest,
Edward Rochester, locks up his
first “mad” wife. The domestic
sphere is intimately linked with
the female body and the female self,
and for this reason, much women’s
fiction of the time is riddled with
details of domesticity. Feminist
critics have argued that these are
the natural fictional manifestations
of women reacting to the strict
boundaries and gender ideologies
of the time.Madness and savagery
Jane is a woman who wants
more than the predefined life of
a Victorian woman, and reacts
against her domestic confines
as a prison from which she must
escape. At a turbulent moment in
their relationship, Rochester calls
Jane a “resolute wild free thing,”
noting that “Whatever I do with its
cage, I cannot get at it—the savage
beautiful creature!” His description
of Jane as a “savage” creature in
a cage could also be a description
of his first wife, Bertha, who is
literally caged in the attic of his
home. Bertha’s madness is a
manifestation of the limitations
that were placed on women’s lives
and it mirrors Jane’s sense of
imprisonment throughout her life.
Bertha is the most extreme and
literal depiction of what happens
to 19th-century women when theymarry and lose their identity; she
is not just a metaphor or mirror for
Jane’s constraint and rage but also
represents the “madness” of being
restricted in life.
Later authors produced more
explicitly feminist interpretations
of Bertha’s predicament. When the
American writer Charlotte Perkins
Gilman published her feminist
short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”
in 1892, she developed Brontë’s
representation of Bertha’s insanity
by calling into question theROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
medical and cultural oppression of
women within a patriarchal society.
In her widely acclaimed 1966 novel
Wide Sargasso Sea, Dominica-born
British author Jean Rhys would
go on to tell Bertha’s story from
another perspective: Bertha
(originally named Antoinette), a
Creole woman in colonial Jamaica,
marries an Englishman and is
taken by him to England, where
she is trapped in an oppressive
patriarchal society, losing her
identity and becoming mad.Not mad but trapped
From a feminist perspective, Jane’s
double is not “mad” but is forbidden
her freedom—like all other women.
In this context, Jane’s passionate
comment to Rochester that “I am
no bird; and no net ensnares me:
I am a free human being with
an independent will” becomes
a poignant reminder of the social
nets that trapped women in
the 19th century, inducing a
psychological madness within
them. When Brontë wrote Jane
Eyre she, perhaps unwittingly,
created not one but two feminist
icons: Jane herself, and the
“Madwoman in the Attic.” ■The Madwoman in the Attic
The most famous feminist
interpretation of Jane Eyre is
The Madwoman in the Attic by
American scholars Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Published in 1979, this
influential book borrows its title
from Jane Eyre and examines
Brontë’s novel alongside the
works of other female writers of
the era, including Jane Austen,
Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë,
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Christina Rossetti,
and Emily Dickinson.A major theme in their analysis
is that of the concept of
“madness” in relation to the
emotional, psychological, and
physical confinement of women
in the 19th century.
The authors argue that
19th-century women were
represented by male writers
as either angels or monsters;
women writers expressed
their anxieties about these
stereotypes by depicting their
own female characters as either
submissive or entirely mad.Women are supposed to be
very calm generally: but
women feel just as men feel;
they need exercise for their
faculties and a field for
their efforts as much as
their brothers do.
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