Introduction

60
Vanessa Mangione
the wilful female, the fallen woman whose sexual hunger drives her into madness.
However, it appears useful to discuss Bertha’s madness both as unregulated female
desire and as a consequence of patriarchal suppression of female sexuality.
She embodies everything a woman had, according to the symbolic, to suppress,
but yet in Jane’s own words “could neither be expelled nor subdued by the
owner” (185). Furthermore, Bertha functions also as a warning against complying
fully with the semiotic, as a warning against having nothing of the passion controlling
symbolic within oneself.
As Showalter comments, Bertha is the incarnation of the flesh, of “female
sexuality in its most irredeemably bestial and terrifying form” (98) that is “a potential
dangerous force that must be punished or confined” (98). Thus, Bertha’s
madness can also be translated into unregulated sexual desire. Female sexual appetite
was considered as something unwomanly, even bestial. When Jane meets Bertha
for the first time, the later is not even considered as a human being but is associated
with a wild and dangerous animal that cannot be constrained:
In the deep shade, at the further 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 … the
clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind feet. (258)
Bertha embodies the resistance and defiance of repressive, symbolic cultural notions
and gives herself fully to the semiotic that is expressed through an animalistic
and masculine violence against others:
The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and
gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognized well that purple face – those
bloated features …
‘Ware!’ cried Grace. The three gentlemen retreated simultaneously. Mr
Rochester flung me behind him: the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat
viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled. She was a big
woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she
showed virile force in the contest – more than once she almost throttled
him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow;
but he would not strike: he would only wrestle. At last he mastered her
arms; Grace Pool gave him a cord, and he pinioned them behind her: with
more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a chair. (258)
The paragraph does not even depict her as a woman but as an uncontrollable, wild
animal which needs to be conquered as it is otherwise a threat to society.
Bertha embodies everything that lies beneath acceptable femininity. Her animal
appearance and behaviour however, are the very consequence of her impris-