English 268: Women and Literature

Spring 2018
Research Paper
21/8/2018

Mecaj Klisio

Eleni Godi
Compare Bronte’s Bertha to Rhys’s Antoinette. What is Rhys hoping to achieve by

(re)writing this character’s life? Is she successful?

 It should be impossible to read a nineteenth-century British literature like Jane Eyre

without considering the notions of Imperialism and Colonialism. In that age, both of

them were crucial and a part of England’s image not only to the British people, but

also to the rest of the world.(Spivak, 1985) As a result of that, the works of people

were affected as well, such as literature in this case where Bronte  portrays Bertha, a

woman from the “third world” Caribbean islands as “mad” and uses her as a tool in

order to assist Jane Eyre who is an English woman.  However, Bronte is not ignorant
of Colonialism, since she uses it in all her major novels. In Shirley and Villette, the

two heroines of her two novels are in love with men who are trying to immigrate in

the colonies and marry with foreign women from there.  In Jane Eyre, Bertha’s is

presented as a native and gives individuality to the white Jane through the difference

of her color, whereas in Wide Sargasso Sea Bertha is a white Creole rather than a

native. There are several differences between the two women despite the fact that they

are the same character.[ CITATION Sus90 \l 1033 ] Rhys chose to re-write the novel from

the perspective of Antoinette/Bertha, since she felt that Bronte undermined the whole

character, a character who had the same origins as herself and that was “offending”

for her race as well. As a result, she created a relationship that is intense with desire

while at the same time has been through many tragedies, which have left their mark.

For readers of Jane Eyre the name bertha comes highly changed, it is the name of

female madness. Madness signified anger and therefore protest. Bertha is described as

“voracious sexualized monster” .Henry Maudsley described the woman as a “raging

fury of lust”. Mr Rochester confined due to her illness in a sort of morale quarantine:

Mr Rochister does not wish to be contaminated and he locks her up in the attic since

the medical men had also pronounced her as mad. That means that she had been shut

up. She is shut up and never tells her own story while Rochester’s narrative is

presented as stable reinforcing his own position as rational Western Subject. Madness

in wide Sargasso seas thus marks the woman’s capitalion to the narratives of others

the beginning of her dawning belief that words are no use , I know that I know”

(135). Giving up words means giving up battlefield to the Rochester figure’s

representations, which will come to stand as universal. When Antoinette comes,

madly to participate fully in her renaming as Bertha Mason by carrying out the

expected ending in which she burns her husband’s ancenstra home we cannot help but
think of the parrot on fire at the beginning of the novel who falls from the rooftop of

another burning house, Antoinette’s childhood home, crying in mimicry the words

“Qui est la”? (Caminero-Santangelo, 1998)

Charlotte Bronte created a character named Bertha Mason who has in the last two

decades become one of the most important characters of English fiction. Bertha is the

menacing form of Jane’s resistance to male authority and through her, Charlotte

Bronte represents her fear of that sexual surrender which will seal her complete

dependence in passion. She is of West Indian origin, and a Creole. As a member of

the colonial nouveaux riches she is considered to be inferior to England’s old

families; as a daughter of a former slave-owning plantation-owner she is living a

reminder of the sordid origins of his affluence. Bertha tearing the wedding veil and

leaning over Jane’s bed is seen as a fantasy of sexual violation. The need to protect

Jane is felt by both Rochester and Jane. Bertha is both Rochester’s dark shadow and

opposite and she is also Jane’s double. Apart from that, Bertha is also Jane’s oedipal

rival and she tries hard in order to make it impossible for Jane to marry Rochester

(Lerner, 1989). That means that she is the obstacle in both Rochester’s and Jane’s

happiness.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette suffers a childhood without protection and an

adulthood of full of cultural and gender oppression. Rochester is the colonizer and she

is the colonized. The Wide Sargasso Sea plays a major part in the restoration of the

voices of those victimized by historical silences. In doing so, they fix the cultural

oppositions and sexual imbalances Rhys discerns. They treat characters’

identifications as essentially dissimilar and stable, and establish antithetical (even

hostile) divisions among them. [ CITATION Sus90 \l 1033 ] Antoinette is a woman

incarcerated in a house which her own money has been used to buy, by the man who

has married her on a basis of crass, mercenary motives. Rochester’s erosion of

Antoinette’s identity started early in his insistent renaming of her as “Bertha”.

Initially, Edward goes often to Antoinette's bathing pool, finding there "an alien,

disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I

see is nothing — I want what it hides — that is not nothing. His early hopes and

promises, to Antoinette, of "happiness" in this inauspicious marriage are as fragile as

his sense of his own reality — and little less so than hers. The passion they share at

first, sharing the sun, is sure to recoil upon her. It would have taken less than Danie l

Cosway's malicious gossip about her mother's madness and her own past relationship

with her half-caste cousin, Sandi (of which her step-father so violently disapproved)

to harden Edward' s habit of repressed feeling into cold alienation. The warmer

Antoinette, who "has the sun in her” confronts him too late with her truth. Their

shared tragedy and the cause of it is that Edward has never learnt to give, nor

Antoinette to receive securely. The "secret" is denied by their deep, shared incapacity

for relationship and love. At the moment of departure Edward is "suddenly,

bewilderingly .... certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false”. He

takes her away to England and he vents his irrational frustration as he believes he

need to get his revenge for her suspected betrayal, not only upon her but upon

himself. Antoinette herself, who has long sad dark alien eyes. A creole which is may

not be of pure English descent but she probably is not of European either. Rochester

felt that Antoinette’s home was on her side and had now become his enemy, while

she corrected him that “this place is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do

with us. (THORPE, 1977) Mr Rochester was afraid of his overwhelming love of

Antoinette and of the results it could have on his judgement.

Jean Rhys was asked why did she decide to elaborate on the life of Bertha and she

answered that: “She seemed such a poor ghost, I’d like to write her life a life”

Bertha representing Jane’s suppressed anger and now Bertha-Antoinette as

representing the colonial subject. In the Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys demonstrates that

giving voice to those facing oppression is a more complicated action than merely

conferring authority upon speakers. Her characters cannot just tell their stories and

join an established community of language. Because of the complex social system in

which they live, no single dialect is sufficient enough to represent their complicated

lives; they often speak in manners inconsistent with the expected markers of race,

class and gender. When Rhys re-writes the character of Bertha Mason as Antoinette

Cosway, she returns the character’s voice and dignity to a previously overshadowed

individual and in her striking resuscitation, she becomes emblematic of women’s

emergence from personal and literary silence. Antoinette draws voices from various

cultures when she says “ They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white

people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved

of my mother, “because she pretty like pretty self”. Antoinette defines herself in

relation to the language of the western and white people. In addition, she establishes

her distinct and unique heritage by placing herself outside the white colonials, for “we

were not in their ranks”. Antoinette borrows ideas from the three predominant

inflections of Caribbean islands in order to define herself. She emerges within the

language and the blends of French and patois among the island Blacks. Rhys suggests

that the languages around her help and afterwards complete the creation of her inner

self. Bronte presents Bertha as being mad dark skinned and scary, something that

happens in order to boost Jane’s role in the book whereas Rhys describes her skin as

being almost white and her voice is only vaguely off kilter. Rhys also makes it plain
that Antoinette’s voice announces the shifts of balance in the world around her. She

speaks of the process through which she must find herself construct an identity.

Credible human substance even to this minor character.

To sum up, Bertha is a character that was created by Charlotte Bronte and used as a

tool in order to create a drama around the main character of her novel Jane Eyre. She

was presented just as a mad woman without listening to her point of view and without

having a background. Jean Rhys decided to write a book as a prequel of the original

novel in order to illustrate the life of the mad woman in the previous book, Bertha or

with her real name Antoinette, and shows us her detailed point of view. She was quite

successful in what she did, since she was turned from a madwoman to a victim who

was locked in the attic from her husband that committed an inhuman act of cruelty. So

we end up questioning if Bertha actually started the fire because of her lack of mental

stability or was it due to the fact that she actually felt the need to free herself from the

torture and the prison of the attic, and she saw death as a way of liberating herself

from the difficulties she was dealing with.

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (1998). The madwoman can't speak, or, Why insanity is not

subversive. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lerner, L. (1989). Bertha and the Critics. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 44(3),

pp.273-300.

Meyer, S. (1990). Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of "Jane Eyre". [online]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828358. Available at:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828358?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents [Accessed 20
Sep. 2018].
THORPE, M. (1977). "The Other Side" Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. [ebook]
Canada: University of Calgary, pp.8-11. Available at:
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/viewFile/32207/26267
[Accessed 20 Sep. 2018].

Winterhalter, T. (1994). Narrative Technique and the Rage for Order in "Wide

Sargasso Sea". [online] Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20079640?
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%3A113be3bb5cbf1ec557f3c3ade7db9391&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
[Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].