The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre traces the pilgrimage of the title character from her unhappy childhood at Gateshead with distant relatives to her maturation and marriage to her true love and spiritual equal, Edward Rochester. Jane’s first experience with imprisonment takes place at the age of 10, when she is living with the Reed family. Jane is sent to a red room, where her uncle Mr. Reed died, as a punishment; in her isolation, she goes “deeply into herself” and becomes terrified (340). She escapes from this room only when she has a “fit,” which is a predictor of later episodes of confinement-related madness that Jane experiences in the novel.

Jane’s pilgrimage starts at Gateshead with the Reed family. When she asserts her misery to Mrs. Reed, Mrs. Reed rejects her as punishment for Jane’s refusal to accept unhappiness. Jane then lives at Lowood, a Christian boarding school led by Mr. Brocklehurst, where she will “learn to govern her anger while learning to become a governess” (344). Already, Jane’s true emotions are deemed unacceptable by authority figures in her life. At Lowood, Jane learns most from Miss Temple, a virtuous paragon of ladylike behavior, and Helen Burns, a fellow orphan who suffers her fate courageously. From both of these females, Jane learns “to compromise,” even while she longs, rebelliously, for freedom, and this practice causes Jane to experience significant psychological stress.

Jane’s unclear status as a governess at Thornfield, home of Edward Rochester and several women in service to him, causes Jane problems. Here, Jane’s rational self, well-trained and thoughtful, and her irrational self, full of rage and rebellion, “intersect.” When she hears Bertha, Rochester’s wife, laughing in her attic bedroom, Jane’s own disordered self, the one that first introduced herself to Jane in the red room at Gateshead, reappears. According to Gilbert and Gubar, three “negative ‘role-models’” for Jane help her understand her position at Thornfield—Adèle Varens is Rochester’s daughter and Jane’s charge, Blanche Ingram is “Jane’s classically wicked stepsister” (350), and Grace Poole is Bertha’s nurse and keeper—but they all impact her in damaging ways.

Edward Rochester, though he is Jane’s employer, is certainly Jane’s equal, a status that him an acceptable partner for Jane though their path to true love is not straightforward. When they meet, Rochester must rely on Jane’s assistance, and Jane comes to Rochester’s rescue at other points in the novel. When Rochester and Jane finally declare their love, Rochester himself takes note of their “parity and similarity” (354). Though this social and emotional equilibrium seems promising, Bertha’s presence as well as Rochester’s rakish Byronic past prove to be “impediments” to their love and their hopes of marriage. The discovery of the secret of Bertha renders Rochester less powerful because she is proof of his “self-exploitation.” In addition, Jane has second thoughts about Rochester that manifest in bad dreams, and as her wedding day approaches, her insecurities intensify. The accumulation of these negative feelings causes Jane to lose control of her reason, so Bertha’s violence towards Jane’s bridal veil is a demonstration of the violence Jane would like to perform on herself and her own intentions to marry Rochester.

Scholars debate the role of Bertha in Jane’s life. To some, she is Jane’s double, “the angry aspect of the orphan child” (360), while others believe she is a cautionary figure, warning Jane of danger. Jane wants Thornfield ruined, as it represents her problematic relationship with Rochester, but Bertha is the person who burns it down. Jane heeds Bertha’s warnings, and when she escapes Thornfield, her pilgrimage takes her to Marsh End, where she meets relatives named Diana, Mary, and St. John Rivers and finds herself in “her real place in the world” (364). Here, her personal pilgrimage ends; in her newly found sense of “selfhood,” she decides not to marry St. John Rivers, who acknowledges Jane only partially, choosing wholeness instead.

The ending of Jane Eyre is optimistic despite the destruction of Thornfield, the death of Bertha, and Rochester’s blind and maimed state. Jane and Rochester meet again as equals, and neither are able to exploit the other. When they marry at Ferndean, Jane is isolated, but Gilbert and Gubar believe the outcome still feels hopeful. 

Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley takes place during the Luddite uprisings in the north of England, and frequent metaphors of food and hunger represent feelings of angry rebellion in both the author and her characters. The characters of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and their hunger, as well as characters of other women writers like Austen, Shelley, and Emily Brontë, represent the authors’ appetite for “sustaining fictions of their own devising” (374). The food and the fiction that appear to enable men to thrive make women sick, just as Eve’s desire for the Edenic fruit of knowledge caused her, and all of womankind, great suffering.

In addition to this exploration of hunger, Gilbert and Gubar point out that Brontë seeks to link discrimination against women to “mercantile capitalism,” revealing the potential of patriarchal society to cause harm to everyone. In Yorkshire, the manufacturers and their workers struggle against the backdrop of the Napoleonic war; the two key female characters, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, are particularly disempowered by the economic consequences of war in unique ways.

Caroline Helstone lives with her uncle, taking over household duties for Mary Cave, her uncle’s dead wife. Caroline is “docile,” but she is assertive in her thoughts; she knows that she secretly loves Robert Moore, a cruel and undeserving mill operator, and she comes to the realization that financial independence would serve her well. When Caroline feels rejected by Robert, receiving only “stones” when she seeks warmth and sustenance, she learns to repress her feelings. Like Jane Eyre, Caroline’s status as a dependent woman unable to survive on her own is “the real source of tribulation” (380).

Shirley Keeldar, on the other hand, is an heiress and a provider, much like men in patriarchal societies. She satisfies Caroline’s hunger for “poetic imagination,” living freely while Caroline must live imprisoned by her own unfulfillment. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Shirley is “Caroline’s double, a projection of all her repressed desire” (382), and this argument plays out in Shirley’s relationship with Robert. Shirley can support Robert financially with a loan, but Caroline has nothing to offer Robert except her love. Caroline’s discontent with her domestic lot manifests in other ways throughout the novel; when Caroline grieves her sorrows and stops eating, she experiences one form of agency. Controlling her own body in this damaging way enables her to reject what others in her society deem sustaining.

At the end of the novel, Shirley submits to a man named Louis, agreeing to marry him, and Robert finally notices Caroline’s “resemblance to the Virgin Mary” (397). Still self-centered even while he contemplates a marriage to Caroline, he imagines her as an ideal “Sunday school mistress” for his future employees (397). Robert’s business is safe, and his ambitions can grow, but “the myth of Mother/Nature has been betrayed in mercantile, postlapsarian England” (398).

According to Gilbert and Gubar, Villette reflects Charlotte Brontë’s “deepening pessimism about women’s place in man’s society” (399). Themes of deprivation and loss permeate the story of Lucy Snowe, whose emotional disappointments parallel those of her creator.

Though Brontë acknowledged the Romantic obsession with living a life in touch with one’s own “hidden self,” she could not enjoy the freedoms that were available to her male contemporaries. According to the authors, though Brontë could write poetry that revealed her understanding of her hidden self, the verses must compete with the “mundane” facts of life that characterized the lives of all women. The exploration of one’s own hidden self is not a cause for celebration for women, but yet another opportunity to feel like a victim. Rather than focus on “the buried self” (402), Brontë may have preferred simply to be her imaginative writing self. Villette is one of several results of this preference.

Like Jane Eyre and Caroline Helstone, Villette’s protagonist, Lucy Snowe, “is caught in an anomalous family position” (403). An orphan, she lives with her godmother, Mrs. Bretton, at the start of the novel, and there she meets Polly Home, whose father leaves her with Mrs. Bretton while Lucy is there. Lucy later looks after Miss Marchmont, living with her until her death, when Lucy begins her “mythic pilgrimage” to Villette, a small village in France. Here, Lucy will teach English for Madame Beck at a school for girls. Brontë reveals Lucy’s psychology to the reader “through a series of seemingly independent characters” (408), including Madame Beck, her daughter Desirée, Madame Svini, and Ginevra Fanshawe. According to the authors, the link between Ginevra, a student at the girls’ school, and Lucy is the one that best demonstrates Lucy’s desire for liberty from her limited existence.

Because Lucy is trapped in a state of seemingly perpetual “confinement,” at times, she mentions a preference for death over the current state of her life. Lucy lives, however, because “like most of her desires, that longing had to be negated” (412). Repression and internal conflict lead Lucy to a “complete mental breakdown” (412). When narrating various difficult episodes in her life, Lucy employs water imagery to describe her unhappiness and pain; these discussions have the desired effect of confusing the reader and hiding elements of truth from the reader and from other characters.

Lucy’s sense of isolation deepens when she visits a museum with Dr. John Bretton, when she attends a concert, and when she sees a performance by “the actress Vashti” (421). These artistic pursuits only exacerbate Lucy’s isolation because they remind her of the dramatic ceremonies of the Catholic Church. Lucy is an English-speaking Protestant in a French-speaking Catholic country, so she feels like an outsider who is, like the actress Vashti, “rejected by proper society” (423). Vashti’s transgressive art as a dramatist performing struggles on stage echoes Lucy’s own struggles, which take place internally. For example, Lucy’s troubling visualizations of nuns reflect Lucy’s decline, symbolizing her “rejection of romance” when Dr. John chooses another woman over her (427).

Though Lucy may feel disillusioned when Dr. John disappoints her, her friendship with a fellow teacher at the girls’ school, Monsieur Paul, revives her interest in living. That they share many similarities, like “a love for liberty, [and a] hatred of injustice” (429), suggests they are “equals,” but when Lucy becomes Monsieur Paul’s “student,” the dynamic of their friendship destabilizes. Eventually, Monsieur Paul expresses his romantic commitment to Lucy, giving her hope for the future, but when he decides to leave France and go to the West Indies, she is again disappointed. Before he leaves France, he manages to arrange for Lucy to take over the position of headmistress at the school, which means Lucy has “a room of her own, indeed, a house of her own” (437). The ending of the novel is ambiguous: Monsieur Paul’s crossing will surely be treacherous, but Lucy holds close his promise to return to her in three years, when they will marry. While this conclusion is not a particularly happy ending, it is an honest one.