Madwoman in the Attic: Representations and Criticism

This assignment delves into critical analyses of Bertha Mason, the character famously known as the 'Madwoman in the Attic' from Charlotte Brontë's novel *Jane Eyre*. It examines various scholarly interpretations of Bertha, exploring how she has been viewed and understood through different feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural lenses. The assignment requires students to critically engage with a range of sources, including essays, articles, and potentially film adaptations, to develop a nuanced understanding of Bertha's complex character and her enduring significance in literary history.

Running head: MOVIE REVIEW
Movie review
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1MOVIE REVIEW
The Victorian era has witnessed a lot of remarkable changes in the thought process of
female writers. The position of the women was challenged and they were analyzed from a
different of view. It was first time seen after the romantic age that the patriarchal society was
targeted and a new revolution came into being which is known as the feminist revolution. The
rage of feminism came as a blow to the patriarchal society. The contributors of the revolution
were eminent feminist writers like Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, Emily
Bronte, George Eliot and many other female writers. The essay majorly consists of the
comparison of Jane Eyre with The Mad woman in the Attic. Mad Woman in the Attic was
written by Gilbert and Gubar. This piece was the outcome of the inspiration of the character
of Bertha Mason by Charlotte Bronte. Both the movies were the adaptation of the novels. The
movies have portrayed a good picture of the novels. The stereotypical thought of treating the
woman was altered in the movie. The character of the woman in the Mad Woman in the Attic
was in line with the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. The feminist point of view was
highlighted in the movie.
The similarity in the movie, the mad woman in the attic and Jane Eyre, lies in the
similarity of the character of Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre. The comparison lies in the fact that
both the characters are treated as an insane character. The character of Bertha Mason in the
Jane Eyre and Mad Woman in the Attic the protagonist has been treated as the typical
Victorian-era women who are found to be relatable with every woman who has been viewed
by some other woman who has served as the emblem of early feminist characterizations. The
most remarkable character in both the movies is Bertha Mason. She is also known as the most
problematic character. She is the first wife of Rochester who is the male protagonist of the
play. Within the entire time period of the movie no special account of herself was found. Her
madness was evident in the movie. Her madness was the primary evident when her husband
Rochester brought her back to England (Schulz and Youn 2016). It was then that her

2MOVIE REVIEW
condition started getting deteriorated. The viewers get to see her in the worst form when her
voice was less heard and she found to express herself through her rebellious actions. In the
initial part of the movie she is audible only through her strange laughs and screams and
incomprehensive babbling. She is made visible in the movie only in term of ghostly
apparitions. There was one instance in the movie where she was lying on the bed and she
gazed at Jane with a ghostly look. She attempted to set fire on Rochester`s bed. Bertha
appears in the novel in the later half. The truth about her madness was revealed in the latter
half of the movie. The sight of Bertha comes into the picture when the marriage of Rochester
and Jane was stopped by Bertha. The only direct sight of Bertha comes into the picture when
the second marriage of Rochester and Jane was about to occur (Poore 2016).
There is a difference between being insane and mad. Charlotte Bronte portrayed
Bertha as an insane woman in her novel. In the movie Bertha Mason was an insane lady who
was not in her senses. In the movie, the Mad Woman in the Attic, the protagonist was
portrayed as a mad woman. The fine line between mad and insane was mixed. The reason
behind this was the background of the age that was the nineteenth century. The aspects of the
Victorian age were prevalent in both the movies. Bertha was portrayed as the burden of
Rochester. This was the common trait of the Victorian age (Johnson 2014). The revolt of
Bertha signified the revolt of the female writers. The uprising of the female writers signified
their revolt against the patriarchal society through their writings. The movie showcases the
entire scenario of the Victorian era. The concept of sanity, insanity is prevalent in the movie.
Bertha is placed in the both the movies in the position insane. In mad women in the attic, she
is placed in the position of a mad woman. In the latter movie she is dysfunctional and
biologically stated as a mad woman. She has been portrayed as a mad and ghostly woman
whose actions are like a ghost and this add up to the gothic feature of the movie. The gothic
feature has been portrayed in both the movies (Verheul and Hartmann 2016). However

3MOVIE REVIEW
Bertha in Mad woman in the attic acted as a symbol of more generalizing the sense in which
the female voice was often silenced or muffled in the nineteenth century both in the society
and in literature. It is seen as an uncomfortable and disturbing voice (Tweed 2014). The voice
of Bertha in the movie acts as the voice against the men who is against the truth and who do
not wish to acknowledge the same. In the movie many critics reviewed and argued that the
silence of Bertha has been perpetuated in another sense, by the ways in which a male-
dominated literary history has tended to either demote the writings of women to a lower rank
or to ignore all but very few of the many women from the Victorian age. The reason of this
can be thought that it was the wish of the movie directors and the script writers to not make
the voice of Bertha Mason audible to the rest world (Hood 2014).
The movie can however be argued from the feminist point of view. The movie
however moves around the life of an orphaned girl. Jane is the real protagonist of the movie
who struggles to get over certain external and internal battles. She comes up to accept that
she fell in love with her employer Mr. Rochester who was double her age. Her life turns
upside down when she came to know about the ex-wife of Rochester. The more surprising
thing for her was that the mad state of mind of his wife. The character of Jane has been
portrayed in the movie as a groundbreaking, rebellious (Hillsburg 2017).
On the contrary the character of Bertha has been termed as more rebellious and
violent. She has been termed as crazy and mad. Eventually Bertha was found committing
suicide and Jane married Rochester. One interesting part of the movie is that in spite of the
fact that Bertha was an important figure in the movie, there was no single dialogue of her in
the movie. In the movie Bertha did not speak a single word. In the movie the character of
Bertha has been portrayed as a flesh-eating creature. The laugh of the character is like a
demon and many critics have stated that there was something really mad about her. One
school of critics opined that the reason behind this was the years of loneliness. The isolation

4MOVIE REVIEW
of Bertha was the major reason behind her action. The bestial image of Bertha has been
formed though there has been no proof of it. In the movie Bertha seeks to attain emancipation
that was snatched away from her. Through her suicide she rejects the confinement that was
imposed on her. The voice of Bertha represented the voice of many other women of the age
(Fraser 2015).
On the other hand the directors of the mad woman in the attic argued that Bertha
Mason`s madness has been attributed to her features, `red eyes`, `black hairs`. The actor who
portrayed the role of Bertha in the movie had attractive black hairs and red eyes. Her
portrayal as an insane bestial woman is further problematic as a case of racial prejudice. It
has been however noticed that the White Victorian Women possibly could not go mad. The
movie therefore avoids the fact that people from all cultures would essentially have anger
resulting in irrational behavior if suppressed by society and treated as a passive, second class
citizen (Williams 2014). The directors of the film described Bertha as a woman of Creole
descent. Even there were rumors regarding the presence of a strange woman in the house.
The woman was no one nut Bertha Mason. The rumor was presented in the form of truth.
This concept can be related to the idea that madness is usually reserved for women that do
not conform to the Victorian code of conduct (Matta 2015). The movie contained a detailed
narrative about the `Wide Sargasso Sea`. It becomes impossible to not see through the
implied madness of Bertha but giving no account of it and no voice to her. The treatment of
the director towards both the characters conform to the idea of having an essential
madwoman or devil in the house, in order to affirm to the other woman`s status as `angel of
the house` (Coon and Hassan 2015).
The gothic romance attracts everyone with a deep tidal force. Part of the feeling of
watching a gothic movie is the eroticism squirming to escape from just beneath the surface.
The plot has been set on the gothic background. The background of the movie was set in the

5MOVIE REVIEW
gothic environment. The dark hero of the story is not Rochester that is for sure. The twenty-
year old Australian born Mia Wasikowska gives a self-possessed performance in the leading
role as Jane Eyre in the movie. She carries the appropriate style of Jane Eyre, with the
bonnets and the middle-parting and fiercely self-deprecatory references to her own plainness
as only a sensationally beautiful film star can (Woodcock 2014). Michael Fassbender plays
the role of Rochester with a measured observant intensity which mirrors Wasikowska`s Jane.
The treatment of other famously dramatic episodes that is the wedding scene and the outcome
of Bertha Mason is rather brisk and especially compared with the unhurried way the rest of
the film dwells on the countryside, and Jane`s extremely lonely and frustrated place in it
(Butler 2014).
On the contrary the movie Mad Woman in the Attic, the quest women had in order to
overcome their anxiety and be successful in the public world. Some of the quest hat has been
portrayed in the movie are mimicry, revision and hiding. In the movie the director did the
task of recovering the body of female literature as well the neglected female history that is
clearly reflected in it. The attention to the patriarchal dominance and the liberal power of the
creativity of women has been highlighted in the movie. The neglected women and the
concept of male chauvinism are projected in the movie (Smith 2014). The oppression of the
males against the females is brought out in the movie. The mental sickness is thought to be
devilish. This is the case only for women. The sickness of a woman brought her moral down.
This made her an immoral woman. The movie however focused more on the rebellion of the
woman than the oppression. The attic was the space of escape for Bertha. The movie clearly
brought out the raising of the voice of women. It was a hard hit to the entire Victorian age. It
came as a hard blow to the male society and the breaking of the stereotypical thoughts
(Brown 2017).

6MOVIE REVIEW
Therefore while summing up the review and concluding the essay this can be
mentioned that the breaking of the stereotypical thought was the ultimate aim of both the
movies. The common content of both the movies was the empowerment of the feminist
thought that was represented in the novel itself. Therefore, the character of Bertha Mason was
a challenging character in the history of the Victorian era. The Victorian era was completely
projected in the movie. Both the movies applied the theory of feminist to establish the
character of Bertha and to prove the point that women were treated either as the devil or as
angel. There was the belief that if the thought of woman did not match with the society she
was considered to be insane. The rebel was a strong one in the movie and it was brought out
in a marvelous manner.

7MOVIE REVIEW
References
Brown, C.A., 2017. Introduction: Women, Writing, Madness: Reframing Diaspora
Aesthetics. In Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions (pp. 1-16). Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham.
Butler, K., 2014. Kristeva, Intertextuality, and Re-imagining" The Mad Woman in the
Attic". Studies in the Literary Imagination, 47(1), pp.129-147.
Coon, E. and Hassan, A., 2015. Did the" Woman in the Attic" in Jane Eyre have Huntington
Disease?(S44. 005). Neurology, 84(14 Supplement), pp.S44-005.
Fraser, R., 2015. The ‘Woman Question’and Charlotte Brontë. Brontë Studies, 40(4), pp.314-
319.
Hillsburg, H., 2017. Mental Illness and the Mad/woman: Anger, Normalcy, and Liminal
Identities in Mary McGarry Morris’s A Dangerous Woman. Journal of Literary & Cultural
Disability Studies, 11(1), pp.1-16.
Homans, M., 2015. Jane Eyre, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and the Varieties of
Nineteenth-century Feminism. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, p.27.
Hood, M., 2014. Mad Woman in the Attic.
Johnson, H.E., 2014. " This face with that mask":" Jane Eyre", Bertha, and the
mirror (Doctoral dissertation, University of Alaska Anchorage).
Matta, M., 2015. From ‘Madwoman in the Attic'to Queer Stranger in the Closet': Sexuality
and Migration at the. Dislocating Globality: Deterritorialization, Difference and
Resistance, 40(1), p.97..

8MOVIE REVIEW
Poore, B., 2016. Karen E. Laird. The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920:
Dramatizing Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White.
Schulz, J.L. and Youn, J., 2016. Monsters and Madwomen? Neurosis, Ambition and
Mothering in Women Lawyers in Film. Law, Culture and the Humanities,
p.1743872116673162.
Smith, A., 2016. “Meet My Wife”: Bertha Mason as the Abject in Jane Eyre and its 2011
Film Translation. LURe, 6(1).
Smith, K., 2014. The Attic of My Grandmother's
Subconscious’:‘Whiteness’,‘Illegitimacy’and Migration in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
and Honor Ford-Smith's ‘Grandma's Estate. Women: A Cultural Review, 25(3), pp.287-304.
Tweed, H., 2014. Review of The Madwoman and the Blindman. Disability Studies
Quarterly, 34(1).
Verheul, S.W.M. and Hartmann, A.R., 2016. Male and Female Viewers’ perception of the
degree of emotion expressed via body Language and prosody in two film adaptations of Jane
Eyre (Bachelor's thesis).
Williams, C.E., 2014. " She Was Not Even Normal": Unreliable Narratives Of Female
Insanity In Jane Eyre, Rebecca, And Wide Sargasso Sea.
Woodcock, D.M., 2014. Becoming Bertha: The sociomedical discourse behind the
madwoman in the attic (Doctoral dissertation, College of Charleston).