· Bertha’s laugh immediately follows Jane’s assertion that women are entitled to more that “making puddings and knitting stockings”, ‘to exercise their faculties’ (93)

· Bertha’s laugh may be reflection of society or Jane’s own fear of female autonomy

· Bertha is locked up in an isolated room, restrained, unable to speak just as Jane was at Gateshead;

· Bertha’s fate can be seen as punishment inflicted by society on unruly women

· Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic: “What horrified the Victorians was Jane’s anger” (338)

Bertha, in other words, is Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead.” (Gilbert and Gubar 360)

· I would add the Victorians were equally horrified by Bertha’s sexuality

· Bertha is described as quite different from Jane: Bertha is “tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back”… with a “savage face”…”roll of the red eyes”. Her “lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed, the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes” and even as a “Vampyre” (242) echoing earlier gothic images in the novel

· We’re also told that she is mad, can’t converse, has a “violent and unreasonable temper” and that she is intemperate and unchaste”…”gross, impure, depraved” (261).

· When Jane finally sees Bertha she is described as inhuman: ”it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal” and then like a “clothed hyena” stood upright (250 emphasis mine).

· Jane is described by Rochester as “stainless” (115) a “neophyte, that have not passed the porch of life” (117).

· he lacks interest in Jane’s previous experience

Initially:

Jane Bertha

small tall

pale dark

“not pretty” (113) well known for her beauty (260)

poor £30,000

austere charming and accomplished

childish mature

Later:

thin corpulent

pure unchaste

nurturing Vampyre

restrained mad

· Dichotomy continues in Rochester’s description of the West Indies, where he met and married Bertha

· Indies are like hell as opposed to Europe, which he describes as civilized and sane (263)

· Rochester seems incapable of accepting sexual and physical passion in a woman of his own dimensions

· could be argued that, initially at least, he prefers a child-like woman half his age that he can manipulate, control and make into his idea of femininity

· During Rochester and Jane’s conversation at Thornfield, Jane demands that they be on equal intellectual footing:

‘I don’t think, sire, you have a right to command me merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.’ (114)

· In turn, he values their exchanges because she is “frank and sincere,’” remarking that “Not three in three thousand raw school-girl governesses would have answered me as you have just done” (115).

· He desires that Jane “will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you” (118) – see breakdown of the social and economic class hierarchies

· in part, breakdown occurs because they are isolated from society where such hierarchies would be reinforced through interactions with others;

· becomes apparent during the party with the Ingrams and others of Rochester’s social class

· however, while he begins by calling her “Miss Eyre” (118), he refers to her as “Jane” after she saves him from the fire (129), while she still calls him “sir” and Mr. Rochester, suggesting that the power differential is still partially intact; additionally, he remains her employer, who pays her for her work, reinforcing the power discrepancy between them

· He also values her for her lack of experience in contrast to his disillusioned state. Where he is “a trite commonplace sinner” (116), who has led a life of “petty dissipations, he refers to her as “my pet lamb” (184), “my good angel” (269) and “my better self” as if she could redeem him;

· reminiscent of the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast –Rochester, like the ugly Beast of the fairy tale, feeds and tries to clothe her, has lengthy conversations with her, resists her departure to visit the Reeds

· perhaps foreshadows Rochester’s later despair at her departure after finding out about his marriage

· Initially, Jane enables this arrangement when she idolizes him;

· she comes to resists such objectification

· after the wedding fiasco, she removes him from the pedestal:

Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe vice to him; I would not say he had betrayed me: but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea…. (253)

· He suggests that Jane live as his mistress, despite having earlier told her that “Having a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave and both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior; and to live with inferiors is degrading” (266), but he thinks nothing of the degradation of the slave and the mistress in being bought.

· Rochester proposed situational ethics for unusual circumstances: it doesn’t matter if they commit adultery and bigamy because:

· a) they are in love

· b) he cannot divorce a mad woman

· c) Jane has no living relatives, so no one will know and she won’t suffer social ostracism (270); that is, the situation warrants the behaviour, the consequences will be minimal, and the outcome desirable

· Jane’s position is that:

Law and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? (270).

· novel utilizes Romantic notions of nature as “pure” as opposed to human constructions as inherently corrupt or impure

· Jane anthropomorphizes the moon as “she” (95)

· moon oversees currents of life

· part of natural world, which is pure and truthful as opposed to Thornfield, which is stagnant, gloomy, with rooms like ‘rayless cells’ (99)

· she checks Rochester’s face in the moonlight for truthfulness (217)

· Moon comes to her after the marriage is called off: “My daughter, flee temptation” (272)

· days later she finds herself alone on the heath: “not a tie holds me to human society at this moment….I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose” (275).

· Goes into the heath as a return to the womb of Nature, where she is nurtured:

I touched the heath: it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer-day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. Tonight, at least, I would be her guest – as I was her child: my mother would lodge me without money and without price. (276)

· Nature offers what humanity cannot: unconditional love as a parent for a child

· light leads her to her family

· by moonlight, hears Rochester call her name (357) and Rochester was sitting in moonlight when he called her

· rejection of martyrdom of St. John Rivers

· St. John Rivers wants to save Jane, “to pull her up” (340) where Rochester wanted Jane to save him

· But like Rochester, Rivers also sees Jane in terms of her utility to him, not as a fully autonomous person: “you are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous” (344), “formed for labour, not for love” (343)

· she recognizes that she would lose herself if she joins him and that she cannot endure a loveless marriage

· returns to Rochester with her own money, a successful stint as a teacher, without feeling the object of pity or in need of rescue

· marriage to Rochester now involves reciprocity; she has developed into an autonomous being, he has learned to receive

· she can love Rochester, not as his “pet” or child, like Adele, to be doted on, but as a woman