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
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,
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-