Another Possible Source for Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre

Abstract

IN a recent article in Notes and Queries, Helena Kelly has convincingly argued that a literary source for the figure of Bertha Mason, the notorious madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), could be found in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde (1789).1 The latter features a madwoman, whose husband makes a mistress of his governess and moves to Paris with her; besides, the book is partly set in Jamaica, where we find a character named Anthonietta, which is quite close to Bertha Mason’s second name, Antoinetta. There is, however, another literary source, as yet unacknowledged, that may have contributed some of the inspiration for Bertha Mason’s character, her fiery end, and even her first name. In Nathan Drake’s gothic novel Montchensey, part of his miscellany Noontide Leisure (1824), the hero is no less than William Shakespeare himself, who uses his psychological insight to unravel a mysterious plot.2 On a visit to the house of his friend Montchensey, he is confronted by a nocturnal appearance that seems very similar to a scene from his own Macbeth. Alone at night, he is awakened by the sound of someone trying to open his door (II, 175). From behind the arras, a sleepwalking woman appears. Her golden hair is ‘wild and disheveled’, her pale face shows signs of ‘a wildness … that assumed the appearance of insanity’ (II, 176). As she is bearing a candle, Shakespeare is ‘apprehensive … of danger either to herself or to what was around her from the light she carried’ (II, 177). Next morning, he confronts his host, Eustace Montchensey, with these facts, and is told that the woman he has seen is in fact Montchensey’s wife, Bertha Neville, who has gone mad with sorrow. She has ‘once again … escaped the vigilance of her attendants’ (II, 184). Bertha now lives ‘altogether apart from the family, in a suite of rooms appropriated solely to her use, and which are situated over the very gallery into which she had last night, I apprehend, wandered during her sleep’ (II, 192). She lives there ‘perfectly secluded, with the exception of one old servant, from the rest of the household, who have been purposely taught to look upon these apartments with a superstitious dread’, and ‘attended by a lady whose time is exclusively devoted to her service’ (II, 192).