Is Bertha only a double?

New scholar work around the Brontë novels:

The Influence of John Milton's Areopagitica on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: Jane as a Model of National Virtue
by Sarah Jean Schmitt
Michigan State University

Charlotte Brontë utilizes Milton’s ideology of virtue in Areopagitica, which emphasizes the importance of being exposed to vice and choosing to dismiss it, to frame the protagonist of Jane Eyre as a virtuous heroine outside of the “angel in the house” discourse. Jane is ultimately presented as a model of the Milton-inspired, new Victorian heroine. Her success comes not despite foreign presences, but is rather defined in contrast to them. In the cultural moment that Brontë comes out from behind the shroud of Currer Bell, this conception of virtue – in contrast to “excremental whiteness” – provides a framework in which she may continue to strive to engage in the public sphere without moral censure. The question of whether or not Jane Eyre is a “naughty book” concerns not only critics of nineteenth-century literature, but also anyone engaged with today’s debates regarding issues of women, citizenship, or morality. 

Questioning the hierarchy of female characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - Is Bertha only a double?
by Diósi Zsófia
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

This BA thesis aims to analyze the hierarchically organized interpersonal dynamics between two female characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian Bildungsroman Jane Eyre (1847). I wish to enter in a critical dialogue with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal feminist interpretation outlined in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) with the aim to challenge their reading of Rochester’s former wife, mad Bertha Mason as “the truest and darkest double” of the angelic new bride Jane Eyre. I wish to argue for the possibility of regarding Bertha as an autonomous figure unjustly marginalized in opposition to the more privileged white, uppermiddle class, British Jane who shows no empathy for the madwoman’s exoticized, eroticized otherness and hence seems complicit in the patriarchal strategy of marginalizing and subordinating women. To question Bertha’s status as a mere shadow of Jane’s character I shall rely on psychoanalytical concepts like Otto Rank’s notion of the double and Freud’s theory of the “uncanny”. My character analysis is grounded in a comparative analysis of Victorian stereotypes of femininity that explores the misogynstic functioning of the dualistic model contrasting the Angel in the House with the Fallen Woman. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) provides a significant starting point for my intersectional feminist analysis of the two female figures that is meant to reveal the interconnections of patriarchal, colonial imperialist, ableist exclusionary strategies.