Although Disability Studies (the study and framework based around disabilities, both physical and mental, and what roles they play in society, or cultural perception) didn’t come to fruition until the late 20th century, I think that it can be used to analyze the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, a nineteenth century novel.
We get introduced to the character of Bertha in Chapter 26, when Mr. Rochester is explaining to Jane why their wedding got interrupted – and more importantly, why a woman who was his ex-wife had been living in the attic that was deemed “insane.” Rochester describes Bertha’s insanity to Jane, that he had “been awakened by her yells – since the medical men had pronounced her mad […] I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language! No professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she! (302)
What intrigues me about this quote, and the way Mr. Rochester handled the situation with his ex-wife is that there seemed to be a lot of ignorance when it came to mental health in those days. Obviously, Bertha was crazed and a lunatic, as she was yelling in the night and exhibiting other sickly behavior while married to Rochester, but locking her in an attic doesn’t seem like the best solution to me. Even though “medical men” were mentioned in this passage, who I assume are the professionals that diagnosed Bertha as “crazy,” the care and treatment of people with mental disabilities wasn’t something that was prioritized. After all, would a doctor today really advise locking a mentally insane woman in an attic? Sure, there are things like solitary confinement for really mentally ill patients today, but would Bertha really be qualified as such if she was being treated? To me, Bertha’s side of the story and her illness is ironically being silenced by her screams and needs to be heard. I can’t help but wonder if Bertha would be considered this insane if given the proper treatment, and why exactly did mental illness have such a stigma at the time?
Your post made me wonder how much worse Bertha’s treatment was because she was a woman as opposed to a man. Our reading on Freud touched somewhat upon female mental health with the mention of hysteria. I think the stigma of mental health still exists, but it was certainly much worse in those days. A good way to understand how mental health was perceived in Britain is to review the history of the eugenics movement (which came into being with British Francis Galton in the late 19th century, but its ideas go back to Plato). Eugenics upheld that some people were simply “feeble-minded” and not fit to breed, viz. they were innately defective. Therefore, one reason Bertha may have been ostracized and maltreated as poorly as she was was because Mr. Rochester viewed that there was something fundamentally wrong with her as a person and not because she was sick or in need of help. This was common thinking at the time and surely contributed to how mistreated the English mentally ill were.
I believe the stigma surrounding mental illness, or in this case “otherness” came from religion, as the interpretation of religious texts promoted the idea of racial hierarchy, and the casting out of demons. I feel like a lot of Rochester’s solution came from the racial differences between the two of them; as Bertha’s skin pigment is different to the ‘porcelain white’ of the novel’s protagonist. Thus, I feel that due to his own embarrassment to being married off for money to a woman that was considered ‘racially inferior’ to him, and then for her to ‘go crazy’ caused Rochester to act on instinct and hide her away, to essentially erase her from his life, and look good in the eyes of God.