Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
dark, and majestic. Her family wished to secure me, because I was of a
good race [...] She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasures
her charms and accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to
admire her and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited;
and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her.
[...] I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had
marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candor, nor refinement in
her mind or manners. 48
Already, Rochester throws into question Bertha’s morality. He effectively
reconstructs the stereotype of the lascivious woman who only knows pleasure.
The characteristics he observes to be missing in Bertha are those ever
present in well bred English women, like Jane. 49 Savagery is thus mixed
with beauty. Rochester juxtaposes his original impression with his final
and lasting opinion of his wife.
Her character had ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices
sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong. Only cruelty could check
them [...] What a pigmy intellect she had—and what giant propensities!
[...] Bertha Mason—the true daughter of an infamous mother—, dragged
me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a
man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste. 50
Illustrated then is the conflation of the scarlet woman, the base character
and the lunatic. Absolutely no redeeming character is present in this depiction
of a West Indian woman. Rochester’s description of Bertha as unchaste
pronounces the thematic similarity of the region. As Burton points
out, French men would argue that the doudou came after them, they did not
pursue her, thus, consolidating the idea of the wanton woman who knows
no limits. In Rochester’s discourse, Bertha’s very beauty is used against
her. It signals her foreign, exotic, inferior status. In a word it ‘Others’ her.
‘She is a threatening presence, confined to an attic room’. 51
Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea rescues or fleshes out the character
of the first Mrs. Rochester in Brontë’s novel. It is precisely through
such re-mappings that post-colonial criticism has brought about a different
understanding of a text such as Brontë’s, particularly when Jane Eyre
is read alongside Jean Rhys’s novel, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the
Caribbean Other. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism devotes an entire
chapter, ‘Consolidated Vision’, to rereading and re-mapping lines of
48
Brontë (1847), op. cit., p. 682.
49
See: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1929); See also: Ferguson (1992).
50
Brontë (1847), op. cit., p. 683.
51
Said (1993), op. cit., p. 73.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 305