Questioning the hierarchy of female characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - Is Bertha only a double?

Diósi, Zsófia (2018) Questioning the hierarchy of female characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - Is Bertha only a double? BA/Bsc, Szegedi Tudományegyetem.

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Abstract

This BA thesis aims to analyze the hierarchically organized interpersonal dynamics between two female characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian Bildungsroman Jane Eyre (1847). I wish to enter in a critical dialogue with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal feminist interpretation outlined in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) with the aim to challenge their reading of Rochester’s former wife, mad Bertha Mason as “the truest and darkest double” of the angelic new bride Jane Eyre. I wish to argue for the possibility of regarding Bertha as an autonomous figure unjustly marginalized in opposition to the more privileged white, uppermiddle class, British Jane who shows no empathy for the madwoman’s exoticized, eroticized otherness and hence seems complicit in the patriarchal strategy of marginalizing and subordinating women. To question Bertha’s status as a mere shadow of Jane’s character I shall rely on psychoanalytical concepts like Otto Rank’s notion of the double and Freud’s theory of the “uncanny”. My character analysis is grounded in a comparative analysis of Victorian stereotypes of femininity that explores the misogynstic functioning of the dualistic model contrasting the Angel in the House with the Fallen Woman. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) provides a significant starting point for my intersectional feminist analysis of the two female figures that is meant to reveal the interconnections of patriarchal, colonial imperialist, ableist exclusionary strategies.

Institution

Szegedi Tudományegyetem

Faculty

Faculty of Arts

Department

Angol Tanszék

Discipline

Humanities

Institute

Angol-Amerikai Intézet

Specialization

anglisztika

Supervisor(s)

Item Type:	Thesis (BA/Bsc)
Subjects:	06. Humanities
Depositing User:	szerkesztő BTK
Date Deposited:	2019. Apr. 25. 09:41
Last Modified:	2019. Apr. 26. 09:44
URI:	https://diploma.bibl.u-szeged.hu/id/eprint/74311

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