I don’t know if Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester really is a baddie. Charlotte Brontë does give her a classic villainess’s evil laugh – Jane hears it echoing around Thornfield Hall in the dead of night, “demoniac” and “strange” – and her attic is a sort of lair. She does bad things, like setting fire to Mr Rochester’s bed, ripping up Jane’s wedding veil and attacking her brother. “She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart,” he says, haemorrhaging and horrified. She’s certainly villainised – she’s called a “clothed hyena”, a “tigress”, a “figure”, “some strange wild animal”, a “goblin”, a “vampire”, a “demon”, even, simply and inhumanly, “it”.
But this furious woman has a point. Why should her husband lock her in an attic, while he flirts with other women right in her own house? Of course she wrestles him. Of course she breaks into the bedroom of the shameless man-stealing hussy he is planning to marry and tears up her veil. She’s an avenging fury. And she knows she can’t rely on anyone else. Her well-meaning brother visits, and he does stop her husband marrying someone else, but he barely raises an objection to her imprisonment.
And her husband’s heart is totally closed against her. He even blames her for her madness, saying her mother was mad and drunk and she “copied her parent in both points”. As though she had a choice. He’s so nasty to Bertha that even Jane, caught up in the torment of realising she’s no longer a blushing bride but an unemployed homeless outcast, finds herself speaking up for her: “Sir, you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate – with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel – she cannot help being mad.”
Bertha often seems more victim than villain. As a teenager, I was persuaded by Jean Rhys’s seductive, complex Jane Eyre prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea, to see Rochester as a racist and misogynist who transplants Bertha from the scented paradise of Jamaica to cold dull England, changes her name, represses her sensuality, curbs her spirit and drives her into madness. But fantastic as Rhys’s novel is, it’s not the whole story. In Brontë’s novel, Rochester has been duped into marrying Bertha, and she doesn’t seem to have wanted him either, but she is not entirely powerless. She looms over the novel, and over Jane, like a dark sister, like the demon we all have within us, who comes out when we try too hard to be good girls.
Feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar who were so taken by this idea that they called their classic book after her. In The Madwoman in the Attic, they cast Bertha as a passionate, untrammelled woman who acts out Jane’s darkest, most secret desires. Jane hates Rochester dolling her up like a princess, so Bertha rips up her veil for her. Jane’s been controlling her passions since her aunt locked her in the Red Room when she was small, but “intemperate and unchaste” Bertha keeps bursting her bonds. And when Rochester bangs on about Jane being so tiny he could crush her, surely she sometimes wishes she has Bertha’s “virile strength” and could take him on.
In many ways, Rochester is the villain of the piece, what with his lying, his bigamy and his brutality. Him or Jane’s heartless Aunt Reed, or hypocritical Mr Brocklehurst who treats her so badly at school. Bertha’s just misunderstood, demonised and rightly furious. And at the end of the novel, she becomes something else. She sets fire to Thornfield Hall, and stands on its battlements, her “black hair … streaming against the flames”. It was supposed to be her house, it became her prison, and now she’s its blazing queen. She jumps to her death and it’s a horrible, violent end, but it’s also a radical leap of faith that sets her free.
She liberates Jane too, allowing her to marry Mr Rochester. And she even gives him the chance to redeem himself – which he does, brilliantly, diving into the burning building to try and rescue her. By the end, Bertha’s not a villain any more, and she’s not a victim either. She might even (whisper it) be a heroine.
Samantha Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine is published by Chatto & Windus.
