How is Bertha Mason presented in Jane Eyre?
Bertha Mason is a complex presence in Jane Eyre. She impedes Jane’s happiness, but she also catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. Further, Bertha serves as a remnant and reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism. Yet Bertha can also be interpreted as a symbol.
How does Jane describe Bertha?
Bertha Mason is Edward Rochester’s first wife from Spanish Town, Jamaica. Jane describes her as “purple…the lips swelled and dark”, “savage” with “thick and dark hair” and altogether reminiscent of a vampire (270).
What does Bertha Mason symbolism in Jane Eyre?
Bertha is a symbol for many cultures exploited and repressed by the British Empire. Brontë writing Bertha as the “mad woman” represents the fear that the English had if miscegenation was to occur between the British and “other” cultures.
What do you understand by Bertha Mason as The Mad woman in the Attic?
Bertha, for all her belligerence, is a subjugated woman forced to give up her wealth and her country. It is cruel—she cannot help being mad.” Bertha represents the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. She is Jane’s alter ego who acts out her darkest repressed desires.
How is Bertha Mason a foil mirror to Jane Eyre?
Bertha is both a foil and mirror to Jane Eyre. She represents the angry self that Jane has rejected and repressed as an adult. Yet Jane had been like Bertha as a child, acting out in rage against patriarchy and imprisoned in the red-room, just as the rage-filled Bertha is imprisoned in the Thornfield attic.
What does Bertha Mason do?
She is the source of the mysterious, mocking laugh that Jane hears as she stands on the battlements of Thornfield Hall, desperate for freedom from domestic routine: she is responsible for setting fire to Mr Rochester’s bed, attacking Mr Mason, and tearing Jane’s veil on the eve of her wedding.
What is wrong with Bertha Mason?
Mason suffered from a progressive and familial psychiatric illness with violent movements. We hypothesize that Mason’s character had features of Huntington disease, as she fulfills the tenets put forth by Huntington in his seminal essay.
Is Bertha Mason a victim?
Bertha Mason, Antoinette, was a victim of patriarchy and colonialism. She was a woman being oppressed and a victim who could not speak for herself. Both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea represent the voice of women in any historical period of protesting patriarchy and oppression.
Why was Bertha locked in the attic?
Her name is Bertha Mason and she is a character in Jane Eyre, a novel written by Charlotte Bronte. In the novel, Mason was the former wife of Edward Rochester and she was kept locked up in the attic because she was ‘mad’.
What Rochester calls Bertha?
Rochester refers to Antoinette as “Bertha” as a way of ensuring that she surrenders into his idea of a woman, as opposed to who she truly is.
Is Bertha the inner fire of Jane Eyre?
Berthas death precedes a successful union between Rochester and Jane. When Rochester and Jane get together, their relationship succeeds due to the fact that he has learned how it feels to be helpless and how to accept the help of a woman. Finally, we can state that Bertha is the inner fire of Jane. Bibliography: Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Who is the main antagonist in Jane Eyre?
Analysis of the character ‘Bertha Mason’ and her importance in the novel ‘Jane Eyre’ Bertha Mason is quite possibly the biggest antagonist in ‘Jane Eyre’. Although Master Reed and Mrs Reed are emotionally and physically cruel to Jane, Bertha potentially does the most amount of damage to her, intentionally or indirectly.
Who is Miss Scatcherd in Jane Eyre?
In Jane Eyre, a teacher of history and grammar, Miss Scatcherd, whips Jane’s best friend, Helen Burns. She also sentences Helen “to a dinner of bread and water .
What is Ferndean in Jane Eyre?
Symbols. If the ending in Jane Eyre is taken as a happy ending, then, as a whole, the Ferndean part of the novel symbolizes happiness and family because Jane is reunited with Rochester and allowed to live as his equal.