i’m reading jane eyre; i’ve been warned plenty of times that the bit about rochester’s secret wife is Highly Problematic, but mostly what i’ve heard people say is that it’s a. very very racist, and b. also, incidentally, perhaps too obviously to mention,* rooted in a sexist idea of how marriage works and what an ideal wife should be. and, like, yeah! it’s both those things, but, also, uhhhh?
“My bride’s mother I had never seen; I understood she was dead. The honey-moon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too, a complete dumb idiot. The elder [brother] ... will probably be in the same state one day. My father and brother, Russell, knew all this, but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined [her family] in the plot against me [i.e., to persuade him to marry her]. ... I found her nature wholly alien to mine, ... her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher ... that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile.... [Her] character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank; they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use cruelty. [gee, what a martyr. /s] What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses these propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate [n.b. in victorian this word connotes alcoholism] and unchaste. ... I was rich enough now, yet poor to hideous indigence; a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings; for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.”
it is so intensely and overtly ableist and no one told me it would be!! which like... it’s fine. whatever. i’m hard to trigger; the way rochester and jane eyre talk about bertha mason’s mental illness pisses me off, but i was ready to be pissed off so that in itself is fine. i’ve seen this kind of thing too many times for it to wound me i think. but i am really fucking tired of the thing where we treat all other forms of bigotry like they’re downwind of racism and/or misogyny. it’s like when people say that “hysteria” is a word we used to use for women who didn’t behave, because medical abuse of actually-sick people is a less Empowering history to hear about and apparently that makes it less important. these characters’ racist othering of and contempt for bertha mason doesn’t become less real when you acknowledge that they justify this by appealing to her mental illness, ok? racism and sexism against disabled people are still bad!!! i promise
*this is me trying to imitate the casualness w/ which i’ve heard lecturers on jane eyre mention its sexism; i don’t mean to second the notion it’s not important, though i do kind of empathize w/ their apathy since like. if you’ve read any victorian novel before then you do kinda know what to expect
