Why is bertha mason mad

This catalogued evidence of abusive treatment in Victorian mental institutions raises two questions for a reader of Jane Eyre.

Why is Bertha Mason living sequestered in a house, rather than institutionalized in an asylum, as there were asylums throughout Britain? Since she is living in a room at Thornfield, why is she being exposed to such cruel conditions?

The reader is told only briefly of Bertha's history by Mr. He summarizes her past quite succinctly and without any semblance of sympathy:. Bertha Mason is mad.

Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard! Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. This statement has long been the source of criticism of Jane Eyre as a racist novel, since it is explicitly mentioned that Bertha's mother is "the Creole" and is both an alcoholic and a lunatic — traits which were common stereotypes regarding Creoles.

There is no evidence in the novel that Bertha has ever been placed in a formal mental asylum in an attempt to discover a cure for her condition.

This is very unusual to note, as the actual Commissioners' report relates that "the number of insane persons ascertained to exist in England and Wales exceeds 20,, and there is every reason to believe that this is considerably below the actual amount" Thus, mental illness was a recognized and widespread condition throughout England and Wales.

It seems that the number of institutionalized patients was also on the rise; while the Lancaster Asylum had reported patients in , in it boasted strong Metropolitan Commissioners While the poor would face difficulties in finding adequate care at asylums due to financial restrictions, certainly Mr. Rochester would have no such financial obstacle to surmount in finding appropriate care for his ill wife. It is very clear that she is from a non-white ethnicity. Her portrayal as an insane bestial woman is further problematic as a case of racial prejudice.

The book thus avoids the fact that people from all cultures would essentially have anger resulting in irrational read unconventional behaviour if suppressed by society and treated as a passive, second class citizen.

Bronte has not allowed madness to linger in pure European blood or to attribute madness to it. Bertha Mason is described as a woman of Creole descent. Madness is conveniently reserved for women that do not conform to the Victorian code of conduct. Here, the narrative is wrested away from Jane and given to Bertha, finally giving her a voice. Written as a prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea shows how Bertha and Rochester both married each other under false pretexts and how marital frustration culminates, following a dark and disturbing future life for Bertha in England.

Her gender makes it easier for Rochester to discard her as a madwoman and lock her up later. An important observation would be to see that initially, Jane, in the violence that she displayed with her cousin brother and Aunt Reed as a child, showed some supposed signs of madness — violence and unchecked energy.

Whereas for Jane, her admission into her boarding school at Lowood curtailed her her rebellious nature and she was tamed to suit the ideal of a Victorian woman. Nothing of that sort was provided to Bertha. Jane is, hence, towards the end made to depict the ideal Victorian woman, and Bertha comes in as the supposed anti-heroine who must not fit into this idea in order to justify her death.

We are shown how white women, Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte though plain, control the narrative of a non-white character, and how her subdued narrative is finally reclaimed by a woman of her own origin, Jean Rhys. If the author wanted a character to look insane to all other characters, the most likely explanation is that she WAS insane. Negative depictions of non-Caucasians are common in Western literature and have been for almost all of history, but it is unfair to judge non-modern works with modern values especially if those works were progressive for their time.

My student stopped responding to that guy, per my probably bad advice. She started pretending like she couldn't hear him. This is literally behavior that appears to be unhinged from reality. I have found myself in these situations too many times in my life and yet as a white, cisgender woman, fewer than others.

I get to go to the bathroom in peace and am seen as acting "mad" much less quickly than women of color, who by and large have to endure more frequent and egregious forms of this form of toxicity. I'm speaking for myself when I say that these are situations when I feel as though my only two options are to let myself be steamrolled or to call someone out. My grandfather left me a little money when he died and my uncle could not stand it.

I agreed to give him half of the money but we had to go back and forth ad nauseum about the details. During this seemingly endless sending back and forth of documents, he would send me the changes that he wanted made and I would do the editing in the document. I was working two jobs at the time and this added part time job of doing his legal work on top of my own got to be too much for me.

When he sent me yet another round of edits that he wanted me to insert into the document I finally told him no, he could make his own requested changes to the document. Also, I didn't say this, but I was finding it humiliating to help him essentially sue me.

The wrath that ensued when I said I wouldn't continue as his legal secretary was one of the most striking about-faces I have ever seen. I was an "entitled bitch" and got emails and phone calls telling me so for days.

I transferred the money into his account as he continued to call me names. There have been dozens of smaller incidents like this one: when my college boyfriend would have me hold his beer in front of other men, even though surfaces that appeared structurally sound abounded.

I could either hold the beer or not, but all eyes were on me. Or the years and years that one of my brother's friends called me a clever nickname for Vanessa — Vannoying — because I "always had an opinion about everything. Then there have been the bigger indignities. The ones that still bleed when I pick at the scabs. My C-suite level boss shook my assistant-level self and screamed at me as my feet dangled in the air.

When he put me down, tears were in my eyes, so he patted me on the head and said, "Oh look at you, acting offended by this.

Bertha is left without a voice and in place of it is a growl. Her character depicts the masculine nocturnal beast that wanders Thornfield Hall at night and hides during the day. Bertha has a brother, Richard Mason, who is never depicted in any way as beast like.

He is treated like an English gentleman, which is interesting because he comes from the same family line as Bertha. It is, of course, taken from Jane Eyre , where the madwoman, Bertha Mason, is quite literally confined in an attic, but it becomes emblematic of the female subversive desire to challenge all-pervasive patriarchal standards — a desire which can be expressed only through images of irrationality, passion, and imprisonment Foster