Female Mental Illness, Monstrosity, and Male Medical Discourses: Revisiting Jane Eyre

ANNE RÜGGEMEIER Female Mental Illness, Monstrosity, and Male Medical Discourses: Revisiting Jane Eyre

Beginning with Romanticism's interest in the 'grotesque,' the 19th century saw a "cultural revaluation of monstrosity in all its forms" (Gill 2009, 211). One of these forms is the fascination with the mad woman. While Romantic poetry uses the mad woman first and foremost as a referent of the mysterious and the sublime (compare e.g. Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" (1800) and Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (1819)), the 19th-century novel connects the theme of female madness with threatening monstrosity. A striking example is Lucy Ashton, the heroine of Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), who, after being forced into an unwanted marriage, stabs her husband on their wedding night. When she is discovered, she huddles in a corner, "her eyes glazed, and her features convulsed into a wild paroxysm of insanity" (Scott 1964, 323). Violent female madness becomes an act of female rebellion and empowerment in the face of male oppression. However, "even the murderous madwomen do not escape male domination" (Showalter 1986, 17). On the one hand, madness is a rather desperate form of rebellion. Shoshana Felman characterizes it as "the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest and self-affirmation" (1975, 2). On the other hand, madness is eventually just another "poetic form of pure femininity as the male culture had constructed it" (Showalter 1986, 17). With this argument the feminist scholar refers back to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who suggested in their influential monograph The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that Victorian women were "fated to inhabit male-defined masks" (2000, 19), of which the most prominent are the images of the 'angel' and 'monster.' According to Gilbert and Gubar, the main challenge of the woman writer is to "examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of 'angel' and 'monster' which male authors have generated for her" (2000, 17). They argue that the monster is the "necessary opposite and double" (2000, 17) of the angel. This thesis draws our attention to the prominence of literary doubles in 19th-century literature. Connected to the fact that Victorian society was characterized by high moral standards, the literary motif of doubles and Doppelgängers can be regarded as a fictive attempt to outsource the monstrous from the supposedly clean and sound ideal Victorian citizen. The monstrous was outsourced in many different ways: In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), the invisible inner moral monstrosity of Frankenstein becomes visible in the physical outer monstrosity of his creature. A different relationship of visible and invisible monstrosity can be observed in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886): the well-respected gentleman Dr. Jekyll is one and the same person as his ugly, satanic, and deformed alter ego Mr. Hyde. Jekyll can stay respectable by experimentally separating his dark other from his well-respected self. In contrast to the pair 'Monster and Frankenstein' that negotiated the relationship between visible and invisible monstrosity, the pair

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.3 (Winter 2019): 73-88.

'Jekyll and Hyde' focusses readerly attention on the issue of inner monstrosity, or, put differently, 'the beast within' which is either outsourced or attributed to a double. The same process can be observed in Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891) with the only difference that the double is not a living creature, but just a picture. It is the fantastic relationship between the portrait and the one portrayed that allows Dorian to hedonistically explore life without being inhibited by moral considerations as all the ugliness of his behaviour is projected upon the picture. What all these examples serve to show is that monstrosity, especially moral monstrosity, was an issue in Victorian society, where high moral standards clashed with human desires, weaknesses and needs. The Doppelgänger motif and the fascination with a second, hideous existence thus comment on a culture marked by many taboos. Interestingly, the motif of the double is mainly connected to male characters in 19th-century literature. Female characters, such as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," either mystically combine the wild-eyed femme fatale and the fair-haired innocent beauty in one character or appear in antagonistic pairs that clearly separate the eccentric and erotic femme fatale from the rational, virtuous, and delicate innocent woman. Examples can be found in the European novel throughout the 19th century as contrasting couples like Anne Catherick and gentle Laura Fairlie in Wilkie Collins' Woman in White (1859-1860) or Anna and Judith in Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich (1854-1855) illustrate. Though less obvious, this contrasting Winter Journals couple or mirroring effect can also be seen in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) whose gentle and rational female protagonist is set into opposition and into dialogue with the monstrous, excessive, and mad woman in the attic, Bertha Mason. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) Maria Beville states that 'monster' originally signifies "unknown otherness" (2014, 15). This conceptualization of the monstrous helps us to make sense of Brontë's exploitation of Bertha's monstrousness. Brontë as a woman writer explores the for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution monstrous as a means to attempt a potential self-definition that combines and transgresses the man-made binary of angel and monster. She uses Bertha in all her variations – the mad woman, the haunting vampire, the creole – to explore the unknown otherness in the female self, which her society so strongly and severely subjects and controls. Relying on a psychoanalytic approach, Gilbert and Gubar famously argued that Bertha is not only Jane's double, but that she must also be interpreted as the author's double: [B]y projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or the poem) female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them. What this means, however, is that the mad woman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is in some sense the author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage. (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 78) Following Gilbert and Gubar's argument, we have to reconsider our assumption that Brontë's subtitle, An Autobiography, refers to the character Jane Eyre. Rather, Brontë creates two autobiographical avatars. Both Jane and Bertha function as Brontë's avatars

to explore possible developments of the story, which is ultimately a fictional fashioning of her own story as a woman and as a female writer in the mid-19th century. Helge Nowak poignantly states that "Victorian views on femininity, motherhood and the family pressed women to produce many children and care for them lovingly – that is to prove their reproductive qualities – while the production of literature was evidently not thought fit for the female sex" (2010, 370). As a consequence, women writers, especially if they were unmarried and intellectually ambitious, were at least in danger of being regarded as transgressing "the limits of the acceptable" and were consequently positioned within "the framework of the 'abnormal'" (Beville 2014, 14). In addition, contemporary medical discourses suggested that monstrosity in the form of monstrous madness lies asleep in every woman and is always in danger of breaking out if one does not carefully guard one's behaviour, conduct or, as Victorian physicians would add, the necessary balance of energy. Charlotte Brontë – a woman without children, a woman who wrote books, a woman who was constantly accused of 'unwomanliness' – uses Bertha and also Jane as examples in order to dissect and illuminate the patriarchal oppression that shaped Victorian female lives: an experience which allows her to pointedly articulate an awareness of how every woman that deviates from the angelic ideal becomes overdetermined as potentially monstrous. In this article I want to bring out the meanings of monstrosity and madness as they interact with gender in Jane Eyre. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson points out, there are many parallels between the monster (or the freak) and the woman: "both are owned, managed, silenced and mediated by men; both are socially defined as deviations from the ideal masculine body, both are marginalized in the realm of economic production, both are appropriated for displays as spectacles; both are seen as subjugated by the body" (1997, 71). Keeping these parallels in mind, I will demonstrate how Brontë in Jane Eyre dissects the mechanisms of freaking (that is, monstering) and labelling (that is, maddening) Bertha to simultaneously (though hideously) discover and unmask how her own female self is pathologized, managed, and suppressed by social and medical discourses that Donaldson pointedly characterized as "the gendered double bind of madness" (2018, 5). A reading that concentrates on female madness and monstrosity, I argue, allows us to explore and highlight the shared situation of all three women. While Bertha is a racial (creole) monster and a "maniac" (Brontë 1996, 259), Jane is a social monster with an ambiguous class status and "the witch" (248). Charlotte Brontë is the biological (childless) monster and a 'scribbling woman.' The monstrous is the realm where all of these categories of othering meet. While it has been argued that Brontë stages "pale Jane's success at the darker woman's expense" (Fraiman 2009, 31; cf. Spivak 1985), I will argue that the application of the concept of monstrosity allows us to see the shared mechanisms of labelling, controlling, and subjecting that underlie both the 'othering' of Bertha and of Jane. It is via the category of their shared monstrosity (which in Jane's case is always a potential threat, while in Bertha's it is irretrievably enforced) that both women's stories mirror each other. Instead of reading Bertha's madness as a facet of Jane's subconscious as Gilbert and Gubar do, I focus on monstrosity to draw attention to their shared

vulnerability by and through oppressive medical discourses that in a very similar way draw on the category of the monstrous to justify violence against women.

Mastering the Female Monster – Gendering Madness Male medical discourses on female mental illness and their explicit and implicit shaping of "the monstrous" become visible as a tool to abject, to reject, and to exclude women whose behaviour falls out of the conventionally expected course of life. The ideal life style for a Victorian woman included the cycles of reproduction, care, and moderate (aimless) exercise. In The Economy of Health (1837), James Johnson treats the idea of balance as central to mental and physical health and warns young women that "all pungent stimuli produce inordinate excitement, followed, in the end, by a train of evils" (49) inducing debility and irritability. This hints at the fact that the economy of energy in women was considered as essentially unstable. It was assumed that women's general proneness to instability could be worsened and amplified by activities that over-stimulated their nervous system. Reading, just as music (cf. Kennaway 2011), was considered as potentially dangerous because it could lead to the over-excitement of the nervous system and, eventually, become a threat to women's gynaecological health. According to the Victorian physician Sir Alexander Morison, studying and education were also rather dangerous activities. In Outlines of Mental Diseases (1829), he states: Education conducted with too great severity may lead to insanity […] Excess of ignorance, and excess of study, both tend to weaken the mind, particularly the latter […]. The consequences of this excess of study […] are – an irritable state of body and mind – restless nights – febrile symptoms – diminished power of attention – confusion of ideas – and, if persisted in, insanity. (Morison 1829, 70) Positioned in this context, the Victorian woman writer must have been perceived as always on the verge of insanity and thus potentially monstrous: not only was excessive writing and studying considered to foster an imbalance of the energies; moreover, writing was considered a male profession and women who wrote novels were suspicious. The gender problematics underlying and shaping the situation of female novelists in the middle of the 19th century does, of course, already become obvious by the fact that Brontë found it necessary to publish her novel as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell. Thus, she not only masked the generic affiliation of her writing, but also chose a pseudonym that made it difficult to determine the sex of the author, showing that women novelists found it necessary to unsex themselves and to appear as possibly male writers. Victorian approaches to madness show that it is an umbrella term for hidden anxieties in an era when mental illness was supposed to have an elusive and a sublime quality. These anxieties become very clear in Barker Benfield's seminal study The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (1976), in which the author explores male attitudes towards female bodies and female sexuality in the 19th century. As the title already indicates, women and especially the female body presented an unknown (or at least half-known) other to 19th-century science and to the newly emerging profession of

gynaecology. Following Stephen Asma, who maintains that "'a breakdown of intelligibility' defines the adjective 'monstrous'" (2009, 10, qtd. in Beville 2014, 4), we can conclude that women's bodies and female sexuality were perceived as monstrous because of their (bodies') unintelligibility. The horror of the unknown rendered women's sexual organs monstrous in male medical discourses. Simultaneously, this fear of the unknown gave rise to a medicine that focused on women's generative organs as cause and origin of everything that was perceived as abnormal in women's behaviour. As a consequence, "the possession of female sexual organs alone was […] seen as a predisposition for madness" (Klambauer 2018, 10). Mary Poovey explains that the instability or the danger of a disbalance of energies "was considered a function of what medical men denominated female 'periodicity,' a state inaugurated by puberty, signalled by menstruation, and epitomized in child bearing" (1988, 36). This periodicity was considered as decisive in the female organism and psyche, while it had no counterpoint in the male who was thus considered as much more stable. In Body and Mind (1870), Henry Maudsley, the English physician and founder of Maudsley Hospital, writes: The monthly activity of the ovaries which marks the advent of puberty in women has a notable effect on the mind and body; where it may become an important cause of mental and physical derangement. […] There is certainly a recurrent mania, which seems sometimes to have, in regard to its origin and the times of its attacks, a relation to the menstrual functions, suppression or irregularity of which often accompanies it; and it is an obvious presumption that the mania may be a sympathetic morbid effect of the ovarian and uterine excitement, and may represent an exaggeration of the mental irritability which is natural to women at that period. (Maudsley 1870, 87-88) Women's biological instability was seen as natural, and, consequently, their liability to mental illness was also regarded as a medically and socially accepted fact. In Jane Eyre, Rochester's report of Bertha's behaviour and conduct in their early marriage strongly reminds us of Maudsley's description of the bodily and mental symptoms of what he calls "the insane temperament:" "Without being insane, a person who has the insane neurosis strongly marked is thought to be strange, queer, and not like other persons. […] Punning on words is […] sometimes an indication of the temperament, and so also that higher kind of wit which startles us with the use of an idea in the double sense" (Maudsley 1870, 63). The medical description has many common features with Rochester's description of his and Bertha's first days as a couple: "I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow […] kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile" (Brontë 1996, 270). Bertha's excessive drinking and her lasciviousness, which Rochester describes as socially compromising, fit in very well with Maudsley's description of nymphomania: "the irritation of ovaries or uterus […] is sometimes the direct occasion of nymphomania – a disease by which the most chaste and modest woman is transformed into a raging fury of lust" (Maudsley 1870, 82; original emphasis). While Bertha is portrayed (at least by Rochester) as a woman that was never

chaste nor modest, Maudsley's mentioning of the possibility of the transformation from chaste and modest to furious and lustful (or, put differently, from angel to monster) depicted the female body and the nature of women itself as always potentially monstrous and prone to unexpected madness. Medical men's characterization of the female body as naturally unstable and prone to imbalances reflects and simultaneously produces a rather ambivalent position for women and their mental health. On the one hand, they were characterized as weak and in need of protection; on the other hand, these very theories about women's instability show that female bodies and psyches presented an enigma to the male medical profession. As a consequence, not only were the mentally ill considered as monstrous, but, rather, every woman was categorized to naturally contain the seed of mental illness, that is, imbalance ("Females are exposed to exciting causes from which males are exempted," Morison 1829, 67) and, inextricably connected to it, the potential to become a monster. 19th-century cultural ideas about women – "their supposed irrationality at a time when Reason was male, their weakness and lability occasioned by a biology which includes the coming of menses at puberty, then pregnancy and lactation, then menopause, together with notions about proper feminine behavior" (Appignanesi 2008, 43) – shaped the period's definitions and treatments of women's insanity. Madness – and, ultimately, the monstrous stigma connected to it – was, according to the medical authorities of the 19th century, a natural predisposition of the female sex. This is why Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture (1830-1980) speaks of an "essentialist equation between femininity and insanity" in 19th-century England (1986, 5). In her influential monograph she states that "the English have long regarded their country, with a mixture of complacency and sorrow, as the global headquarters of insanity" (1986, 7). She further argues that in England the differences in the perception of madness as it appeared in men and women stand out with particular clarity […] Even when both men and women had similar symptoms of mental disorder, psychiatry differentiated between an English malady, associated with the intellectual and economic pressures of highly civilized men, and a female malady, associated with the sexuality and essential nature of women. Women were believed to be more vulnerable to insanity than men, to experience it in specifically feminine ways, and to be differently affected by it in the conduct of their lives. (1986, 7) These intricate dynamics between the fear of the unknown female body and the constant observation and control of women's moods, behaviour, and conduct eventually clarify how male medical discourses on mentally ill women tied in with cultural discourses on monstrosity. The scientific attempts to describe and to define the female body and its supposed relation to women's mental health (or illness) refer back to the Victorian obsession with categorization and ordering that ultimately expresses a desire to control the unknown and to manage and process threatening otherness.

Monstrous Mixture Contained? The Pathologization of Bertha Mason In a culture that gains its sense of security from binary constructions, there is nothing as threatening as mixture and hybridity. In their article "From Hideous to Hedonist: The

Changing Face of the Nineteenth Century Monster," Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson remind us that there has always been a strong connection between monstrosity and mixture (2013, 238). It can be traced back to Greco-Roman antiquity, where monsters often displayed a mixture of human and animal elements (e.g. the Minotaur or Scylla, a hybrid with a female torso and the tail of a sea creature with dog heads sprouting from the middle). Apart from that, scientific concepts that suggested the common ancestry connecting humans to the animal kingdom had an important impact on the conceptualisation of the monstrous. Even before the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859, the general border between the animal kingdom and the human as the crown of creation seemed very permeable. As a consequence, conceptualisations of monstrosity as something that potentially lurked in every human being had strong effects on the contemporary fascination with the monstrous but also on the vigorous effort to distance oneself as far as possible from anything animalistic to highlight and prove one's humanity and civilization. A closer look at the way in which Bertha Mason is depicted in Jane Eyre indicates that both her madness and her monstrosity are inextricably bound up with discourses of mixture that depict her as half-animal and half-human. After Rochester's plans for marriage, or rather bigamy, have been thwarted by the appearance of Bertha's brother and his lawyer, Rochester – full of bitter frustration – leads the small congregation to meet his "bad, mad and embruted partner" so that all "shall see what sort of a being [he] was cheated into espousing" (Brontë 1996, 258). His choice of vocabulary underlines his perception of his mentally disordered wife as a mixed being; Rochester's implied interpretation that she is not fully human, but rather an animal ("imbruted"), is strikingly connected to a moral ("bad") and a pathological ("mad") assessment of her conduct and appearance. Moreover, Rochester's laconic remark towards Bertha's brother Richard Mason that he must remember the attic because Bertha once "bit and stabbed" (Brontë 1996, 258) him there, implicitly forces Bertha's brother to bear witness to her animalistic nature. Spivak interprets this scene in the sense that Bertha Mason, the heathen, bestial "not- yet-human Other" (1985, 247), must first be annihilated to enable Jane's development into European female subjectivity and concludes that Bertha "the woman from the colonies is […] sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister's consolidation" (251). Spivak's reading of the novel can be backed up by the observation that Bertha is pictured as an animal from the zoo, gazing "wildly at her visitors" (Brontë 1996, 259). Brontë's use of vocabulary reverberates with the popularity of human zoos (cf. Blanchard et al. 2008) in the 19th century. These exhibitions, which swept through major European cities, showcased people from different colonies "positing them as freakish objects to be stared at and studied" (Six and Thompson 2013, 250). According to Blanchard et al. the freak shows and human zoos not only bear witness to a "popular craze for monstrosity" (2008, 10; original emphasis) in the 19th-century general public, but they also point towards society's endeavour to establish a Western norm that was backed up and upheld by showcasing those that differed from the norm and who were therefore defined as culturally abnormal, freaky or monstrous (cf. Gill 2009, 131, qtd. in Six and Thompson 2013, 250). Bertha's body is mediated and appropriated by Rochester for display. The power relation between

owner and owned conspicuously ties in with the Victorian gender hierarchy between male and female, but also implicitly mirrors the relationship between the British citizen and the colonial (Caribbean) other. Thus, the 'staging' of Bertha works alongside imperialism's "narrativization of history" (Spivak 1985, 245). Bertha's monstrosity, which has haunted the text before Rochester's final revelation and her shocking effect on his visitors, is constructed as two-fold. On the one hand, she exerts the threatening power of the monstrous as something unknown and unexplainable that defies the limits of knowledge and conceptualization. She is depicted as a beast-like creature that is said "to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones" (Brontë 1996, 265). On the other hand, we witness in this scene how her threatening mixture, hybridity, and resistance to classification is explained by labelling her as "the maniac" (259): "Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations[!] Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard! – as I found out after I had wed the daughter" (257). As Beville argues in her monograph The Unnamable Monster: "Its [the monster's] excess […] is sidestepped when it is classified. […] Named, it is no longer unpredictable. Its Otherness is contained and managed in its new form, as a label" (2014, 5-6). Once Bertha is labelled as "the maniac," her original capacity to terrify and her aura of anxiety which originated "in the powerlessness to contain [her]" (Beville 2014, 8) seems to evaporate. Hand in hand with her stigmatization as mad, the erotic fascination of the excessive female conduct of the typical femme fatale is lost. Although the "tall, dark and majestic" beauty of Spanish Town, Jamaica, once "dazzled, stimulated," "allured" and "excited" Rochester (Brontë 1996, 269), her present status as mad is no longer enmeshed with sexuality and does not stimulate any erotic fantasies. Any aspect of Bertha's difference is disambiguated, classified, and explained: "the doctors […] discovered that my wife was mad – her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity" (271). When Jane warns Rochester to be merciful with the "unfortunate lady" who cannot help but being mad (Brontë 1996, 265), Rochester destroys her view of Bertha as a "poor mad creature" by portraying his mad wife as not only mentally but also morally corrupt: "The lunatic is both cunning and malignant" (273); "a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw" (270). Obviously, the explanation he puts forward to make sense of his wife is one that combines pathological and moral aspects: she is the "daughter of an infamous mother," "intemperate and unchaste" (270).1 The conspicuous emphasis of Bertha's creole descent also renders her into a monster on the basis of what John Block Friedman calls "climatic determinism" (2013, xxxi). The clearly pronounced racism that characterizes Rochester's choice of vocabulary illuminates the projection of Western European fears on cultural others, especially people from the

1 Rochester's description of Bertha's excessive and unchaste behaviour bears resemblance to what James Cowles Prichard defines as "moral insanity" in his Treatise on Insanity (1833): "Moral Insanity – This form of mental disease has been said above to consist of a morbid perversion of the feelings, affections, habits, without an hallucination or erroneous conviction impressed upon the understanding; it sometimes co-exists with an apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties" (14).

Caribbean. Ultimately, Rochester's characterization of his wife is a conspicuous conflation of the monstrous, the mad, and the racial other. The common bond in the background of the three terms is, however, first and foremost, that she is different from the culturally shared norm. All of the three terms are used as socially shared and accepted blaming strategies which supposedly justify the subsequent violence against Bertha: "since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up" (Brontë 1996, 271). Rochester's explanations and justifications clearly reiterate and reproduce patriarchal power structures that endow him with the social right to own, to define, and to manage his deviant wife. As Showalter pointedly states, "women were first defined, and then confined, as mad" (1986, 5). Yet, despite her classification and her confinement, the aura of anxiety that surrounds Bertha as a mad and monstrous presence is not fully dissolved. The ongoing threat of her monstrous otherness is symbolically insinuated since she repeatedly and unexpectedly finds ways to escape from the attic. Furthermore, the hint that Bertha's monstrosity is not only an inherited mental illness, but is at least encouraged by her moral deficiency, associates her monstrosity with an idea of possible contamination. This notion is further stressed by Rochester's depiction of his attempts to "repudiate[] the contamination of her crimes" and of how he "wrenched [himself] from connection with her mental defects" (Brontë 1996, 271). In a culture that fears mixture and hybridity, the idea of contamination is extremely threatening as it suggests flowing transitions, ambivalence and uncertainties. Additionally, the fact that young Rochester has been deceived – and could be deceived – with regard to his first wife's condition draws attention to what Six and Thompson describe as a Victorian fear that monstrosity is concealed and contained within the seemingly normal and virtuous (2013, 251). These anxieties communicate a tacit knowledge that a conceptualization of the world via clear-cut binaries does not stand up to reality. What readers witness in Rochester's description of his wife's diagnosed madness is an act of essentialising Bertha's perceived difference through an act of labelling in which social and medical discourses reciprocally support one another. According to Showalter, the process of "maddening" Bertha is characterized by the typical "division between feminine madness and masculine rationality" (Showalter, 1986, 2). Madness is fashioned as "the essential feminine nature unveiling itself before scientific male rationality" (1986, 3). Bertha's pathologization eventually implies a refusal to engage with and understand her difference.

I Am Not an Angel – Am I a Monster? The Public Display of Bertha as a Warning to Jane When Rochester dreams about travelling Europe with Jane, his future wife, he laments: "Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate and rage as my companions: now, I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel as my comforter" (Brontë 1996, 229). Clearly, in these lines he fashions Jane as the idealized opposite of his "demonic" first wife, Bertha. And he repeatedly comes back to these contrasting opposites: Jane is his "good Angel," Bertha his "hideous demon" (278).

Strikingly, Jane promptly counters his idea of her with a clear negation of the portentous Victorian concept of the wife as 'an Angel in the House' and states: "I am not an Angel" (278). That the angel-monster dichotomy also influences Jane in her thinking of the female self becomes clear in her response to Mrs Fairfax's reserved reaction towards her engagement to Rochester. When Mrs Fairfax warns her that "there will be something found to be different to what either you or I expect," Jane answers: "Why – am I a monster?" (233). While critics suggest that Jane here refers to her own class as a socially less worthy match than women like Blanche Ingram and that "monster" here has the status of social other (a rich Gentleman marries a poor 'hybrid,' the daughter of a Gentlewoman and a poor clergyman; cf. Chen 2002, 380), I would like to suggest that Jane's question rather serves to focus our attention on the risky and dangerous position of Victorian women as always already marked by and suspect of abnormality and, inextricably bound up with it, potential monstrosity. Even Rochester, who uses "modest" Jane as the perfect opposite to Bertha's excessiveness and fashions her as his "good Angel," does not refrain from also calling her "witch" (248).2 While Rochester repeatedly talks about freeing Jane from the "cage" of conventions that encapsulates her (121), he falls back on a language that is conspicuously permeated with the conceptualization of the female as always potentially on the verge of physical imbalance, if not madness. When Jane tells him of her plans to leave Thornfield, he commands her to be still: "Don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird" (223) and he characterizes her as "over-excited" (223). And also in the night before their planned wedding, when Jane is still under the influence of her nightly encounter with the "white woman" who entered her bedroom and burned her veil and when she speaks her wish that "this present hour would never end: who knows with what fate the next may come charged?" (246), Rochester again exploits medical half-knowledge (despite his own better knowledge) and insinuates that she is imbalanced, if not mad: "This is Hypochondria, Jane. You have been over-excited, or over-fatigued" (246). While Jane struggles to make sense of the "white woman" whom she saw in the night, he explains the phenomenon as a hallucination or a mental delusion: "The creature of an over- stimulated brain, that is certain. […] nerves like yours were not made for rough handling" (250). In his attempt to divert Jane's suspicions, Rochester joins the group that believes (or at least pretends to believe) that women are always prone to psychic instability. Jane, however, cannot be deceived. She knows herself and answers: "My nerves were not in fault; the thing was real" (251). Still, he dismisses the nightly incident as her "mental terrors" (251). What we witness in these passages is the "circular logic by which the gendering of madness as a female malady" (Valerius 2018, 95) also disempowers Jane. Although Rochester perfectly knows that Jane's account of the nightly incident is probably true and although he could offer an explanation for the incident, he decides to exclude her

2 "How well you read me, you witch" (Brontë 1996, 248). Though it seems that he appreciates her sharp observation and cleverness when she reads his mind and makes sense of his behaviour, his calling her a witch still plays with the stereotypical view of women as either angelic or demonic.

from his secret. This means that he is not only willing to keep her in doubt about her own experience, which consequently inhibits her trust in herself, but also that he willingly exploits a theory that pathologizes Jane's expression of her fears and her disorientation as feminine insanity, even though he knows that she is right and the events she describes are very real. Thus, their conversation exemplarily demonstrates how the gendering of madness and, inextricably connected to it, the "eternal type" of the monster, served as a male tool of oppression and as a readily available threatening gesture whenever women acted in opposition to male intentions, plans, or preferences. Regarded in this context, Rochester's 'freaking' of Bertha is simultaneously a warning for Jane. Chih-Ping Chen argues that Rochester's presentation of Bertha relies on "the rhetoric of a freak show host" (2002, 368). The way in which Rochester is described as lifting "the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door" (Brontë 1996, 258) renders Rochester into a performer who bids his audience enter into his curiosity cabinet. The following display of Bertha as a monster surely has its effect: not only on Jane's perception of the other woman but also on her understanding of the vulnerability of her own female self: In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. (258) While her depiction of Bertha first oscillates between association and dissociation, her language gradually reveals a growing distance towards the other woman whom she depicts as a "clothed hyena" that stands tall "on its hind-feet" (259). Eventually, Jane adopts the language and the perspective of the men around her when she tells us that: "[t]he maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage and gazed wildly at her visitors" (259). In image ("the figure ran backwards and forwards") and in dramatic composition, the description evokes the 19th-century freak show: The scene achieves much of its dramatic effect and intensity by evoking the entwined narrative forms that produce freak shows, including […] the advertisement account of the freak's 'extraordinary' life and identity, the showman's pitch that introduces the exhibited body by emphasizing its 'deformity' or 'anomaly', the staging that involves performance monitored by the showman, and the display that functions to establish the distance between the civilized spectator and the freak. (Chen 2002, 368; cf. Garland Thomson 1997, 7) By presenting Bertha in this way, Rochester not only urges his male audience to understand his misery, but he also provokes Jane to define her own female self in contrast to this "creature" (Brontë 1996, 273). In this way, Rochester's Bertha-show can be read as a patriarchal act of gender discipline in which the monstrous has the effect of a warning to Jane. The scene draws our attention to the way in which Bertha's monstrosity is used by Rochester to create and to define his "pure, wise and modest" Jane (258) as a counterfoil to Bertha.

In response to Spivak (1985) it might be suggested that staging this scene of male- defined female abnormality does not necessarily mean that Brontë agrees with it. On the contrary, Brontë's text does not simply exploit Bertha as the othered colonial woman that is sacrificed to successfully establish Jane as a happily and legally married Victorian wife and mother. Rather, the scene puts forward a much more ambiguous message that illuminates the shared oppression of both women on the grounds of their womanhood, which is a quality that renders them especially prone to become the victims of gender specific (false) attributions of 'abnormality.' A reading of Jane Eyre that is based on the intricate interweavings of madness, monstrosity, and femininity allows us to illuminate that Brontë is not merely using (and sacrificing) Bertha as the othered colonial woman that has to be cleared away to allow for Jane's progress into individual subjectivity. Rather, the text foregrounds that Jane's and Bertha's situation is likewise determined by the very same gender hierarchy that oppresses them. Both women's behaviour and conduct are interpreted as deviant womanhood whenever they behave out of the expected norm. The male-generated discourses on female insanity and the angel-monster dichotomy shape both women's lives. The fact that, in the end, Bertha is dead and Jane is alive and marries the disabled and dependent Rochester cannot only be interpreted in the way that Bertha was created to define Jane, but rather that, as I argue below, Jane was created to revenge Bertha.

Conclusion: Generic Doubles and the Subversive Potential of the Monstrous In the preceding passages I have elucidated how Brontë de-mystifies the monster, showing it to be a male-designed (poetic) form supposed to control female conduct. Simultaneously, however, Brontë exploits the monstrous elements of the text and its subversive potential by strongly relying on the typical generic features of the Gothic. The text's oscillation between realistic novel and Gothic storytelling allows her to explore the affordances of the Gothic to deal "with the things that are regarded as unmentionable or taboo" (Beville 2014, 71). Through the exploitation of Gothic conventions – the chestnut tree that is struck by lightning in the night after Rochester proposes to Jane (Brontë 1996, 226), the "hoarse, vibrating stroke" of the clock at midnight (246) and the apparition of the tall white woman with the dark hair, dressed in a white "gown, sheet, or shroud" (250) – the supernatural and the mythical is kept alive in Brontë's novel. Even though the plot is constructed in a way that allows for a rational approach in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, as the haunting image of the white woman is eventually explained and revealed as Rochester's mad first wife, it still exploits the Gothic effect of the monstrous. The Latin word 'monere,' to warn, the etymological origin of the word 'monstrous,' but also connoting an omen for things to come (cf. Beville 2014, 4), connects Bertha's mythical presence in the book with the tree struck by lightning. A tree struck by lightning is a natural phenomenon. Still, the fact that the incident happens after the proposal has a supernatural aura and functions as an omen. The same is true for Bertha: her insanity offers a scientific explanation for her perceived monstrosity. Nevertheless, her apparition- like appearance in Jane's room and her vampiric outer appearance preserve her status as

an inaccessible monster that defies definition in the reader's imagination. Following from this double coding of the text (realistic/ Gothic), Brontë is able to communicate with her readers on two levels. On the one hand, she tells a story which follows the plot of a (romantic) Bildungsroman. On the other hand, she explores the potential of the monstrous to develop a counter-narrative that allows for an alternative view of femininity beyond and outside of the "patriarchal definitions" (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 17) that enmesh her as a woman and as a Victorian woman writer. 'The monster' as a placeholder for the uncanny and the inexplicable occupies an ambivalent space in the Victorian imagination. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes the monster's ambiguity as "a code" and "a presence or an absence that unsettles what has been constructed to be received as natural" (1996, ix). Cohen's approach to the monstrous helps us to realize that the madwoman in the attic functions not only as an effective Gothic stock-type character, but as "a simulation of the real that is absent" (Beville 2014, 10). In contrast to Gilbert and Gubar, I suggest that this "real that is absent" which is represented by 'the monster' does not only represent the unarticulated female rage against male oppression, but can also be interpreted as a continuous threat that 'the monster' poses for the male oppressor. This threat is embedded and embodied in the subversive potential of the Gothic, which is part of the double-coding of the plot. Thus, the motif of the double, typically explored in literary texts throughout the 19th century, is not only present in Jane and Bertha as well as the female author and her fictional avatars, but it also shows in the generic affiliation of the text. It is this generic doubling that allows us to read Rochester's condition in the last chapter, which describes his reunion with Jane, as a hint that male oppression is finally revenged. Jane describes Rochester's countenance as changed. He reminds her of "some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson" (Brontë 1996, 382). Strikingly, in this depiction of Rochester, he becomes the beast (an attribute he earlier bestowed upon Bertha) and he becomes the caged bird (an attribute he earlier bestowed upon Jane). Furthermore, comparing him with Samson, the Israelite judge from the Old Testament who was betrayed by his wife Delila and then blinded by the Philistines, further suggests an interpretation of Rochester's fate as fashioned by female revenge. Similarly, the second allusion to the Old Testament, in which Rochester is compared to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Brontë 1996, 386) who conquered Jerusalem and exiled the Jews to Babylon, supports a reading that interprets Rochester's condition as the result of revenge. Did Rochester not exile his Caribbean wife by bringing her to England? This, at least, also is the interpretation underlying Jean Rhys' postcolonial re-writing of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Finally, "his thick and long uncut locks" (Brontë 1996, 386) also remind the reader of the description of Bertha's "dark grizzled hair, wild as a mane" (258) and his "faux air" (386) draws a parallel to her madness. And what else is Ferndean Manor, if not a second attic, an isolated and remote site "deep buried in a wood" (380)? Further parallels between Nebuchadnezzar and Rochester besides their connection to exile are evident. In the Book of Daniel, we read that Nebuchadnezzar, punished for a lack of fear in God, turned mad, lost his home and lived in the woods

(Dan. 4, 24-30). Furthermore, both men see their fate symbolically prophesied in a dying tree ("I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard;" Brontë 1996, 393). It is through highlighting the intertextual relations between the Biblical story and her own text that Brontë subversively suggests that the supernatural and the monstrous quality of her text cannot simply be logically explained. Rather, she makes use of the monster and the supernatural as a warning and as a threat that powerfully hints at the possibility that there will be punishment and revenge for the confinement of women in male-defined masks, roles, psyches, and bodies. By eventually turning towards exemplary figures of male madness, Brontë throws light on the fact that madness is not, and never has been, a condition especially connected to females. She draws readers' attention to Biblical narratives in which God punishes male misbehaviour with insanity and thereby adds another element to her resistance to the medical linkage of femininity and madness.

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