Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 61
onment and not its cause; or, as Showalter argues, “after ten years of imprisonment
she has become a caged beast” (100). She is presented as a being that consists
so thoroughly of passions and desires that it has lost its humanness. Not
being able to repress these passions and desires any longer, they plunge out of her
uncontrollably. She represents everything that could disrupt the symbolic in an
extent that appears abjected; she is not able to articulate herself but through eccentric
murmurs, threatening growling and snapping sounds – even her laugh is
preternatural. All these sounds recall Kristeva’s concept of the “semiotic chora”
that is an essential part of the semiotic.
Her rage is shown through an emphasis on her ‘big’, ‘corpulent’ and ‘virile’
body that is linked with an extreme fury and a want for vengeance against her
oppressors. As Bronfen notes, Bertha presents the female body as the dangerous
“Other” to men; she is described as “cunning and malignant lunatic, maniac,
monster, wild beast goblin and fury” (221). Her body is described as monstrous,
as polluted and “mad, bad and imbruted” because of her Creole heritage (221).
She is equally excessive as Helen is and falls short of the expected code. She
stands as a symbol for the pure, uninstructed, diffuse, aggressive and sexual drives
that constitute the semiotic and that must be controlled and restrained. Through
the fire she sets at Thornfield Bertha tries to destroy the external, the symbolic
that held her captive. Bronfen argues that Bertha’s death states that she had to
finally give into the “exertion that [her] body is equally termed by others as socially
defective and physically corrupt” (222).
That Bertha was meant to be a critique on standing social gender bias and not
as a critique on female sexuality is further underlined by in a comment by Brontë
herself:
[Bertha’s] character is shocking… [but] profound pity ought to be the only
sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is that I
have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too
predominant. (qtd. in Smith, Letters 3)
Accordingly, Bertha’s example reveals both the sheer impossibility to comply
solely with one order, as this eventually leads to death, which she has in common
with Helen. It also reveals Brontë’s warning of the violent force of denied desires
which will ultimately explode.
Two alternatives of behaviour have been presented to Jane in the form of
Helen and Bertha. First, the angel in the house, whose required angelic innocence
lead to death. Secondly, she encounters a wild and uncontrollable woman, who
lost herself in the semiotic, which leads to social rejection, imprisonment and in
the end to death. However, it is important to notice that Bertha’s total compliance
with the semiotic is a result of the symbolic, whose required sexual suppression
led to Bertha’s madness.