Reading Bertha Mason Through Monster Theory

Sara Ezzat – December 2020

Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre is the story of one girl’s path from childhood to finding her place as a proper adult woman in English society of the mid nineteenth century. Many of the female characters in the novel can be read as virtuous examples to model herself after, and others as dire warnings of what to avoid. The starkest warning of all comes in the form of Bertha Mason, the wife of Jane’s beloved Mr. Rochester. There have been many interpretations of Bertha mostly branching off from readings of her as a shadow self, as Jane’s darker impulses (Lerner 124), or of her as an embodiment of the social and sexual hierarchies that underpinned Victorian society (Lerner 125). I intend to add to these reading of Bertha through Monster Theory. To examine how she is presented to the reader as a monster, particularly her body is presented as monstrous. I contend that this monstrousness of body is constructed to make visceral the warning she embodies of the dangers of straying from the social hierarchies of English Victorian society. Visible proof that to step out of the role of the submissive woman is to become monstrous, and in doing so she makes visible the stifling nature of those very hierarchies.

The role of dire warning is a common function of monsters in popular culture. In Monster Culture (Seven Theses), Jeffery Cohen uses this function as his fifth theses, “The Monster Polices the Boundaries of the Possible” which states, “The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot -must not- be crossed” (374). Put simply, the monster looks frightening to scare the protagonist, and the reader, into staying within the rules of society. The Big Bad Wolf exists to remind all Red Ridinghoods why you must not stray from the path to Grandmother’s house. One can examine Bertha’s position as monster of prohibition by looking at exactly which boundaries of the possible she polices; what rules of Victorian society Jane is threatening to cross.

Bertha is the secret wife of Mr. Rochester and appears in the text as Jane is preparing to marry him. Jane is a poor governess and Mr. Rochester is her rich and high-born employer. English Victorian society, in which Jane Eyre is set, operated on a ridged class system where people were expected to marry within their social class. A governess’s place within that society was complex; they were usually gentile, and it was a mark of status to employ one, but they were also poor and a figure of pity (Peterson 7). They were not the social equal of the men who employed them but not as below them as a servant, they were a “tabooed” woman (16). Marriage between Jane and Mr. Rochester would be a violation of the class system. Jane and Mr. Rochester’s courtship not only breaks the class hierarchy, the way Jane speaks to him, asking to be seen as a fellow spirit “at God’s feet, equal, as we are!” (Brontë 338) breaks the sexual hierarchy as well. Leading Victorian thinkers like Sarah Stickney Ellis admonished women that they should “be content to be inferior to men” (601). So, it is Jane and Mr. Rochester’s relationship which is the site of Jane’s societal rule breaking, and Bertha is the embodied presence which prohibits that relationship.

Having established Bertha’s role as a prohibition against violating social norms and which norms it is which Jane threatens to violate, now we must look closer at Bertha herself. At how she is presented in the text and what purpose that serves. Returning to Cohen’s seven theses on monsters, his second thesis holds that “The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body” (Cohen 186). That the body of a monster exists to be read and so we must read Bertha’s body.

The monstrosity of Bertha’s body is established in her first appearance in the text where she is presented to the audience by Jane describing to Mr. Rochester how she read Bertha’s appearance. Jane says she awoke to see a shape looming over her, which she then understands is a woman who is looking at Jane’s wedding outfit. Jane sees this woman try on her veil in front of a mirror only to rip it off and destroy it. The woman then glares at Jane who then faints. That is the action that Jane sees, but in her description, Jane focusses not on Bertha’s actions but on her looks. Bertha is presented as a shape first, then Jane emphasizes her size and the darkness and thickness of her hair. When Jane finally comes to describe Betha’s face she say it is “discoloured” and “savage” with “swelled and dark lips” (Brontë 370-371). These elements bare a resemblance to how women of colour were described in media of Brontë’s time (Plasa 8). We then have a description of Bertha that focusses on her body and her otherness.

Brontë’s othering of Bertha brings us to Cohen’s fourth thesis “The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” (Cohen 257) to paraphrase, the monster is the embodiment of difference, of what is foreign and other. In the introduction to their book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Jack Halberstam expands this, “The monster itself is an economic form in that it condenses various racial and sexual threats to nation, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie in one body” (3). With Bertha we can surmise from this first impression that she is other than white and that while Jane recognises her as a woman, she does not conform to the expected female appearance. This otherness is developed further in Bertha’s second appearance in the text when she is revealed as Mr. Rochester’s wife. Here she is first described as a figure that “whether beast or human being- one could not tell” (Brontë 380). Her size is emphasised again particularly saying how she is similar in size to her husband, and her behaviour is referred to demonic and animal (Brontë 381). Her racial identity is indicated in the text with the explanation that her mother was Creole, thus she is othered racially and geographically (Yurdakul 64) In Bertha’s body then condenses multiple differences and this multiplicity itself is part of monstrosity, to quote Cohen “they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systemic structuration” (Cohen 323). So, monsters are threatening because they are physically deviant from cultural norms in multiple ways that resist categories and hierarchies and that is exactly how Bertha is presented in the text.

In these two scenes in the novel Brontë clearly establishes Bertha’s monstrousness, but for her to function as a warning for Jane there must also be a connection between the two women. These scenes establish that as well. In the first scene, when Jane sees Bertha’s face it is in her own mirror wearing her veil (Brontë 370). This is Bertha acting as Cohen’s monster of prohibition. Jane seeing a monstrous face in her own mirror is drawing attention to the way in which her marrying Rochester would cross the boundaries of her culture. In an earlier scene when the housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax is uncomfortable about the match, Jane asks her “Why- am I a monster?” (Brontë 350) thus, the connection already exists between Jane’s unequal marriage and monstrosity. Likewise, the way Brontë draws attention to the unsettling equality of size between Bertha and Mr. Rochester reflects the way Jane seeks to be seen by him as an equal. These are the chief ways in which Jane threatens to violate the norms of her society. Jane’s violations may seem small by comparison to Bertha’s, but that is the function of Cohen’s “monster of prohibition” to present violating the expectations of the social order unthinkable and terrifying (Cohen 354) and so Betha, the monster presents a multitude of violations to frighten Jane from committing any.

There is one more parallel between Jane and Bertha which illustrates another element of Monster Theory, Jane has herself been held captive and raged against her captors. At the start of the novel Jane is a child in her aunt’s household and is punished for fighting with her male cousin by being locked in the red room. The members of the household view her as mad for not accepting her place in the social order of the family (Brontë 68-70). The audience is sympathetic to this captive madwoman, as it is her story. And so, when Bertha appears in her captivity she is monstrous, other, and frightening but there is also something we recognize in her. This speaks to Cohen’s final thesis that “fear of the monster is really a kind of desire” (Cohen 435). According to him, we fear the monster because it violates the constraints of our cultures, we also long to be free of those restraints, but fear that freedom (Cohen 438). With Jane and Bertha, Jane begins the story challenging the social order and is restrained for it. As her story progresses she learns to conform herself to her that order, yet her frustration with her lot is palpable in the book. In her essay The Ferment of Restlessness, Sue Thomas looks at Jane’s discontent and notes particularly how this was seen as subversive by reviewers when the novel was published (Thomas 83). Jane then follows the rules of her society while longing to be free of them. She is captive in the metaphorical attic of Victorian convention while her monster, her shadow self is captive in a visible attic.  Bertha then contains the feeling of containment while being the monster that frightens her into remaining within it. In the end Bertha is able to free herself from (Brontë 529) containment but must pay for that freedom with her life. Thus, the monster defeats herself and is removed from the story. This removal of the monster only happens after Jane’s social standing is raised by an inheritance (Brontë 479). Jane and Mr. Rochester now being more equal in social standing their marriage is no longer a monstrous thing and Bertha’s function as a monster is no longer needed.

Like Bertha’s face in Jane’s mirror, monster stories reflect a society to itself, all flaws and contradictions made manifest and undeniable. In Bertha we see the faults Brontë’s society wished to contain, to hide away in its own dark attic. The fear of difference, of women’s strength and voice, of physicality, of everything it could not comprehend and control. Bertha is all of these things contained in one being who cannot be contained and yet which acts as a warning for others to be contained. Thus, looking at her through Cohen’s Monster Theses, we see that Bertha’s body as is cultural body, one which polices what is possible, dwells in difference and resists category. A body that frightens and yet fascinates containing the tantalizing possibility of being uncontained. It is no wonder that Bertha has held such a hold on the imagination of generations of readers, this is a true monster tale. And as with any good monster story, one is left to wonder of what is truly monstrous, the woman or the society which seeks to contain her.

Works Cited

Brontë Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Richard Nemesvari, Broadview Press, 2004.

Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome. Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 171–624.

Halberstam, Judith (see also Halberstam, J. Jack). “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity.” Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 1–27. DOI:https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1215/9780822398073

Lerner, Laurence. “Bertha and the Critics.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 3, 1989,

pp. 273–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3045152

Peterson, M. Jeanne. “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society.” Suffer and Be Still (Routledge Revivals): Women in the Victorian Age, edited by Martha Vicinus, Routledge, 2013, pp. 3–18.

Plasa, Carl. “Prefigurements and Afterlives: Bertha Mason’s Literary Histories.” Brontë Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2013, pp. 6–13., doi:10.1179/1474893213z.00000000091.

Stickney Ellis, Sarah. “The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character, and Responsibilities.” Jane Eyre, edited by Richard Nemesvari, by Brontë Charlotte, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 600–606.

Thomas, Sue. “The Ferment of Restlessness.” Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre, by S. Thomas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 71–91.

Yurdakul, Selin. “The Other Side of The Coin: The Otherness of Bertha / Antoinette Mason In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” British and American Studies, vol. 25, 2019, pp. 63-69,283. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/docview/2253169931?accountid=14846.