A feminist intepretation

(Cfr. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979, pp.336-371)

Jane Eyre is the emblem of a passionate, barely disguised rebelliousness.

It is her refusal to accept the forms, customs and standards of society which shocked many Victorians reviewers, even if there are explicit hints to sexuality too. What horrified the Victorians was Jane's anger. In fact, giving vent to repressed rage is far more dangerous to the order of society than expressing repressed sexuality.

Jane's encounter with Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, is an encounter with her own imprisoned "hunger, rebellion and, rage".

The drama that occupies the entire book is Jane's anomalous, orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles and house, and her attempts to escape. Jane is a Byronic heroin yearning for true liberty, while Thornfield is the gloomy mansion which reiterates all others settings of Jane's life.

Jane's first meeting with Rochester is a fairy-tale meeting, he appears the every essence of patriarchal energy, a kind of Cinderella's prince, but at the same time they are also spiritual equals: he likes very much Jane's uncommon independence. However, Jane senses that even the equality of love between true minds leads to the inequalities and minor despotisms of marriage as it was conceived in her society.

On a figurative and psychological level it seems clear that the spectre of Bertha is another avatar of Jane's. What Bertha does is what Jane wants to do: put the wedding off, tear the garment up. In other words, Bertha is Jane's truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self she has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead.

Furthermore, Bertha, burning down the house, acts out Jane's profound desire to destroy Thornfield, the symbol of Rochester's mastery and of her own servitude. The literal and symbolic death of Bertha frees her from the furies that torment her and makes possible a marriage of equals - makes possible, that is, wholeness within herself.

Only after leaving Rochester, Jane may gain the strength to begin to discover her real place in the world; in fact she also finds a job in a school, which makes her free and independent.

When she goes back to Rochester, the situation between them has changed. Apparently mutilated, he is paradoxically stronger than he was when he ruled Thornfield, for now, like Jane, he draws his powers from within himself, rather than from iniquity, disguise, deception. Now, being equals, he and Jane can afford to depend upon each other with no fear of one exploiting the other.

In conlusion, Jane Eyre shows Charlotte Brontë' dissatisfaction with the social order, even if she herself was unable clearly to envision viable solutions to the problem of patriarchal oppression.