The definition of gender is usually based of social performance. Gender doesn’t exist but it is the result of a practice. It is “continually produced, reproduced, and certainly altered over common performance of gendered acts, as they project their own claimed gendered identities, ratify or challenge others’ identities, and in various ways support or challenge systems of gender relations and privilege”. (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 14). Jane Eyre tests the tough gender structures and identity. I will mainly be focusing on Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason and how they perform and how it then forms their gender identity.
‘I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more creation than I have; your claim to supremacy depends on the use you have completed of your period and experience’. (Bronte, 48)
This reflects that Jane tests Rochester by saying because he’s older and he’s active doesn’t mean he’s cleverer. It hinges on how he has handled the seventeen years he has on her; perhaps he hasn’t learned anything. He agrees and says she’s right but he wants to be able to command her around.
In nineteenth-century England, gender roles powerfully influenced people’s performance and identities, and women tolerated patronising attitudes about a woman’s home, intellect, and speech. Jane strives to grow independent. It begins with a number of men who do not admire women as their equals. Rochester, Mr Brocklehurst, and St. John all try to command females.
The author Charlotte Brontë suggests marriage in the novel depict the fight for power between males and females. Though, the character Bertha Mason is described as a ‘madwoman’, she is a challenging sign of how wedded women can be blocked and controlled. This is why Jane pushed away marriage proposals that would kill her identity and seeks for fairness in her relationships. The novel is a representation of Jane’s struggle for gender equality, it was fundamental during its time. Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason are both oppressed by the patriarchal system during nineteenth century Britain. Much of the women refuse to agree to the patriarchal society, but the way in which the females go against the culture ultimately shows a very different future. By portraying contrasting reactions to the subjugation, Bronte effectively shows the difficulty of women in the nineteenth century. Which effectively results to how they behave and what their identities are.
Many women in the plot, in Thornfield search for the way out to release them from the repression of their “metaphorical attics” (Logan, 23). However, despite the novel’s subversive nature, the author’s narrative suggests a caution against female anger and rage which Bronte communicates through the character of Bertha Mason. Towards the end, Bronte demonstrates that a woman’s anger is extremely radical and to be an angry female in nineteenth-century in England is a very dangerous and is a neighbour to insanity. For the “madwomen” of similar novels the path of time permits for gradually complete disclosure of their stories, in which their spouses are less and less able to regulate their storytelling. This reinforces patriarchal ideology as it is expected a woman to be kind and gentle beings and it also suggests that if they do show some negative emotions they will be deemed to be crazy or even a madwoman. Many feminists would argue and say that it is just a way in which patriarchs (such as Rochester) have control over females. And similarly, feminists would argue that this is a violation of women’s rights as they are constrained and guided on what is acceptable behaviour and what behaviour can get them into trouble.
When Jane is nine years old, she has gathered a great amount of resentment towards the injustice she received at Gateshead Hall. This has led to Jane rebelling against the cruel treatment that she received from her family. Because of this, the family and school considered her need to study and her solo thoughts to be disobedient and her punishment becomes so intolerable that she could no longer maintain herself. This is where the labelling theory takes place through the eyes of sociologists. A child is given a certain nickname which would describe them i.e. as a student, and the child either lives up to that name by accepting it or in total rejecting it. In Jane’s case, she was said to be disobedient with her thoughts therefore after ill treatment at Gateshead Hall, she probably had enough and John Reed happened to be in the right place when she decides to attack him who she described to be behaving “like a mad cat” (Bronte, 475) and is then locked away in an isolated chamber known as the red room. In total, Mr Brockhurst is the highest authority at the school and he can control those lower than them. And it also shows a way in which Jane was feeling as if she was backed into a corner and had no other way to express her anguish, so she lashed out to relieve her pain and stress.
However, when Jane was an orphan and then a governess, she existed in a space both inside and outside the domestic scope, which permitted her to detect social codes and conventions. In her marriage to Rochester, Jane, at last, alleviates her class and her gender identity.
There is a big difference between Jane and Bertha, they were both socialised and brought up in different backgrounds. Jane established herself and Bertha had difficulty with her anger. The reader can see that Jane was more privileged than Bertha because of her position and view that society had on her.
The reason women like Bertha Mason are locked away could be because of an unjust distribution of power. Bertha is described to have a “discoloured face”, “savage face” (Bronte, 301). And Bronte does this to characterise Bertha as something other than a woman. As the word ‘savage’ suggests something that is non-human and animalistic. Furthermore, Bronte diminishes Bertha to “a foul German spectre–the Vampire” (Bronte, 301). Bertha is not only inhuman and uncivilised but rather she is horrific. The author works inside the agreements of society and consequently casts the crazy woman without a voice. Who is only skilled at “snarling canine noises” (Bronte, 219). This here suggests to the reader that Bertha is not a human being and not a female. The way Bronte described her was to be of an animal a madwoman. She is locked up and she is alone with her fears. Shoshana Felman stated that “If the madwoman is throughout the story seen as, and compared to an animal” then it suggests that there is a requirement to ‘seize the animal and tame It” (Goodman, 116). Similarly, this is what happens to Bertha Mason, as she is seen to be the madwomen of the story and she represents the stereotypical Victorian beliefs about mayhem and the fallen woman. So, therefore, there is a need to seclude her from the rest of society to make her feel somewhat normal. This is societies explanation of capturing Bertha and locking her away from the rest of the world.
Bertha is not much referred to as feminine, she is somewhat described the opposite. The fact that Bertha is more masculine than feminine makes her stand out more to be fallen, especially in a society that looks at femininity on a higher level. She holds the unfeminine features of both anger and madness which threaten the patriarchal authority of Victorian civilisation. Bertha must be controlled because she is not compliant like other females in the novel. Female madness fluctuates on the notion of the ‘other’, Shoshana Felman states that the woman is mad since the woman is different. But madness is not a womanly trait, but madness is not womanly since madness is the lack of similarity. Elizabeth J. Donaldson drew upon Brontë’s engagement with contemporary science and its influence upon interpretations of gender and social roles, Donaldson focuses on the inconsistencies in Bertha’s description to assign her a more modern psychological diagnosis.
Although Bertha is in solitary imprisonment she manages to remain untamed, this probably is why Richard Mason claims that Bertha ‘sucked his blood’ (Bronte, 224). Her determination could reflect that she is furious or could possibly show to the fact that Bertha’s temper continues to burn years after the marriage failing and her imprisonment. It’s only certain that she will attack her brother who has abandoned her and allowed her to be locked up in Rochester’s manor.
The extreme female in the novel is Celine Varens who is at the waste of men, she has a successful number of lovers who care for and pamper her, however, she treats them like dirt. Similarly, in Janes intervention, it looks like Adele might have followed Celine’s footprints. The way Celine has performed and the lifestyle which she has lived her life portrays her identity to be a modern ‘Madonna’, she in some ways is portrayed as the devil that wears red in most modern literature who tempt men into their downfall. However, Blanche Ingram lives in a very respectable society, her destiny to lies in finding a well-suited rich man to marry and care for her. The way in which she decorates her body, suggests her role as an item in a social nuptial market. The way in which Ingram is described is as if she wants to sell her body, even if she has the best intentions of a happy marriage life. The way she performs gives her the identity of desperate. Finally, Georgiana Reed she is another woman who is driven by vanity and she is someone who allows her life to be determined by the values of the shallow social world in which she lives in. these women here, all somewhat contradict themselves, they have the purest intentions perhaps but can’t help but give to what society expects of women.
‘Anybody may blame me who likes’. (Bronte, Chapter12) this creates a question in the reader’s mind, what were they blaming the author for? Jane used to go up on the roof when Mrs Fairfax was making jellies and she looked over the fields in her sight. And she hoped, and that’s why they would blame her. The fact that she ‘…longed for a power of vision which might overpass that, limit…then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here within my reach’. (Bronte, Chapter 12) by reading this Virginia Wolf clarified in what way women are projected to be. ‘…but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint; and it is narrow-minded to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags’. (Woolf, 56-57). It is inconsiderate to sentence them or tease them if they want to do further or study more than the norm has marked necessary for females. Jane hopes for something more than what females are expected to do, she desires for something which is beyond the female world. However, because of her identity and her gender, society will frown of what she hopes for. Therefore, just making her obligate to something that she is expected of her to do so. For example, when she met St. John and dedicated herself to religion.
Inclined by Freud’s view of the uncanny double, Elisabeth Bronfen frays with the disturbed contrast of the ‘Jane and Bertha dynamic’ which is underlined by their very different relationships to the finish. ‘Jane Eyre illustrates the most conventional association of femininity with death, the innocent, passive, fading woman as a signifier for the desired Otherness of the sublime and the powerful, self-assertive woman as a signifier for the threatening Otherness of the body, of nature, of sexuality’ (Bronfen, 223). Jane is not naturally obedient and lacks in passion, she almost gives in to an unknown death of malnourishment and contact in the moors, this is how she establishes herself. In many ways as an ‘average’ woman, in the feminine submission of that death, abandoning her typical anger, and devoting herself to religion.
The author permits Jane to stay accepted to society as well as her own self. She was an orphan unrestricted and forced with a household who didn’t love her, her existence depended on her following the instructions of those above her. Moreover, even in an underprivileged state, she could gain the benefits of living with people who were privileged, like reading books available and learning social etiquette. However, Bertha Mason, on the other hand, was not exposed to boundaries as a child and has not learned to control her drives into more compliant ways. She was burdened because of the social duties of the time, though, she was also without course or commands as to how to act like an accountable adult.
In ‘The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness’, Elizabeth J. Donaldson argues that the storyline uses comparisons/juxtapositions between the females and then the males to reflect the male’s reasonableness and the female personification and amongst the melancholy and frenzied insanity. (Donaldson, 102). In common social relations, the novel doesn’t test the status quo.It demonstrations religious falseness and the misuse of prosperity and honour in relations to females, but does not argue for any significant alteration in the construction of society.
To end by presenting the two contrasting responses of, Bronte is more successfully able to part the dilemma of women in the nineteenth century. She states that strongly driven women can make most of their conditions, even in a troubled society and social order, even if they remain baffled. It’s obvious saying that a mindset does play a part to women gradually becoming more purpose-driven and educated, which then empowered them to have some control over their lives in the framework patriarchs have set above them.