Jane returns to the inn near the coach station, the Rochester Arms, to find an answer. She discovers that Bertha Mason set the house on fire last autumn. Before this happened, Rochester had shut himself up like a hermit in the house, as if he had gone mad. When the fire broke out, Rochester saved the servants, then tried to save Bertha, but she jumped from Thornfield's roof. Rochester has lost his sight and one of his hands in the fire. He now lives in Ferndean with two old servants, John and Mary.
Suspense builds in this chapter, as Jane delays the revelation of Thornfield's tragic end and of Rochester's history. Upon entering the coach at Whitcross, Jane reflects on the major changes in her situation since her arrival there a year earlier. Then she was "desolate, and hopeless, and objectless"; now she has friends, hope, and money. Then she paid all the money she had to ride the coach, now she has a secure fortune.
Arriving in Thornfield, Jane notices the difference between the scenery here and in Morton the place she has just left ; Thornfield is mild, green, and pastoral, while Morton is stern.
Thornfield's landscape is as comfortable as a "once familiar face," whose character she knows intimately. Notice the stark contrast between Jane's comforting, flowering, breathtaking dream of Thornfield and the reality of its trodden and wasted grounds; the world's vision of the upper classes doesn't always capture the hidden passions that boil under the veneer of genteel tranquility.
The passions kindling at Thornfield have finally sparked and burned the house down; Rochester's burning bed was merely a prelude. Jane's psychic powers have been reaffirmed as another of her dreams has become reality. Finally, she is roped to a chair, much as Jane almost was in the incident in the red-room. Post-colonialist critics, such as Gayatri Spivak, have argued that Bertha, the foreign woman, is sacrificed so that British Jane can achieve self-identity, and the novelist Jean Rhys has written a novel called The Wide Sargasso Sea that presents Bertha's life in Jamaica before her madness.
Both of these women writers suggest Rochester's relationship with Bertha wasn't as innocent as he claims; as a colonialist, he was in Jamaica to make money and to overpower colonized women. In the nineteenth-century, men had almost complete legal power over women, and perhaps this lack of power contributed to Bertha's madness, just as it caused Jane's temporary insanity in the red-room.
These critics remind the reader that Jane Eyre isn't merely a story critiquing the social injustices against women, but also exposing the brutality of colonialism. In the previous chapter, Jane had joked about leading a rebellion of the women in Rochester's imaginary seraglio; now she has almost become a member of that harem, but Bertha leads the resistance. In Chapter 25, for example, the wild wind and blood-red moon symbolized Jane's passion, but here all of that energy has drained away.
Bertha's red eyes and virile force emphasize her excessive, crazy passions, but Jane has become a husk. Gone is the "ardent, expectant woman," and in her place is the "cold, solitary girl again. For Jane, the world has become a white waste, a chill, stark corpse that will never revive.
Previous Chapters Next Chapter Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title. 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.
Fairfax, Mr. Brocklehurst, Ms. Ingram, and Grace Poole, respectively. All antithetical to Victorian values, by the way. Already this goes against the grain of the book:.
Rochester lock his wife up in the attic if she was not insane in the first place? We know she was upper class land-holding inheritance , and would have been the product of an upper-class Victorian lifestyle and education The West Indies being colonised by Britain at the time.
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