The Mad Woman In The Attic And Jane Eyre

Her life turns upside down when she discovers right before her wedding that her lover has an ex wife a madwoman hidden in the attic and flees narrowly escaping from committing to a sinful relationship.

The mad woman in the attic and jane eyre.

One the one hand brontë s madwoman is a tragic figure a literary manifestation of jane s own feelings of oppression. Bertha mason is a fictional character in charlotte brontë s 1847 novel jane eyre. One of the most fascinating characters in literature is the mysterious mad woman confined to an attic in jane eyre. To my young mind she was nothing more than a plot device.

In some ways brontë s decision to merge the identities of the angel and the monster in the two primary female characters of her novel can be seen as a personal statement about the conflict between passion and passivity in her own life. Rhys s novel re imagines brontë s devilish. In jane eyre bertha eventually burns down thornfield and dies by suicide. She is described as the violently insane first wife of edward rochester who moved her to thornfield hall and locked her in a room on the third floor.

I have read and re read jane eyre many times and i m embarrassed to admit that i had never paid much attention to this spectre of a woman lurking in the shadows until much later in life. Jane eyre revolves around the life of a simple plain yet intelligent orphaned girl who struggles with internal and external battles before she comes to accept that she loves her employer mr rochester who is double her age and from an upper class background. It is the story of mason from the time of her youth in the caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to england. The first and most important point to make about her is that within the time span of the novel she is unable to give an account of herself.