Jane Eyre: Fanning the Flames and Seeing Double
Jane longs to escape Lowood, yet another cold and unwelcome prison, where "[s]emi-starvation and neglected colds...predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time" (85). After her friend Helen dies, Jane looks toward the "hilly horizon" and realizes that the "blue peaks" are "those [she] longs to surmount" (93). Taking the initiative, Jane applies for a governess position and acquires one at Thornfield, a cold, prickly place where she will collide with her fiery other, secreted away in her own attic prison. (It's interesting to note that Bertha is in the attic rather than in the basement-symbolic, perhaps, of society's attempt to squelch the female imagination.)
Although not apparent at first, Rochester, the lord of Thornfield and Jane's future husband, has met his match in Jane, whose wrath filters through Bertha. As Sandra M. Gilbert proposes:
[E]very one of Bertha's appearances - or more accurately her manifestations - has been associated with an experience (or repression) of anger on Jane's part. Jane's feelings of "hunger, rebellion, and rage" on the battlements...were accompanied by Bertha's "eccentric murmurs." Jane's apparently secure response to Rochester's apparently egalitarian sexual confidences was followed by Bertha's attempt to incinerate the master in his bed...Jane's profound desire to destroy Thornfield, the symbol of Rochester's mastery and of her own servitude, will be acted out by Bertha, who burns down the house and destroys herself in the process, as if she were an agent of Jane's desire as well as her own. (492-493)
Hence, Bertha, this mad double, mirrors the mad young Jane who once panicked in the red room. When fire consumes Bertha, Jane's identities merge and she becomes whole. Rochester, however, is maimed, some critics contending that he has been metaphorically castrated. In the end, plain Jane triumphs (regardless of what the reader may think of Rochester) in that she secures a home and a husband. Furthermore, she is no longer servant to Rochester but rather views herself as his equal. She proclaims, "I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine" (439).
As Jane transfers her anger to Bertha, one might argue that, similarly, the novel provides an outlet for the author's transposed frustrations. The nineteenth
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