Bertha Flashcards
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on the ‘monsters’ (Bertha, Frankenstein’s monster)
fear of the power of female creativity by female writes helped produce ‘monsters’ as displaced symptoms of authorial anxiety
‘it snatched and growled… _____ wildly at her visitors’
gazed
‘the lunatic ____ and grappled his throat viciously and laid her teeth to his cheek’
sprang
‘she was a ___ woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest - more than once she almost throttled him’
big
‘this is what I wished to have.. this young girl, who stands so ___ and quiet at the mouth of hell’
grave
‘compare these ___ eyes with the _____ yonder’
clear
red balls
‘this face with that ____ - this form with that ___’
mask
bulk
Adrienne Rich’s influential early feminist reading; she finds in Rochester’s insistence upon…
the absolute distinction between Bertha’s sexually aggressive animalism and Jane’s puritanically bridal virginity a crystallisation of sexual double standards of Victorian masculinity
Quote Rich
‘the nineteenth-century loose woman might have sexual feelings, but the nineteenth-century wife did not and must not’
sexual ________ is imprisoned in the third-storey attic at Thornfield
virility and excess
Bertha’s appetite is of
‘giant propensities… the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw’
Bertha’s appetite of ‘giant propensities… the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw’ threatens…
encroach on the protected space of domesticated femininity
Is Bertha
a) a warning against the perils of passionate sexual inclination
b) a critique of Victorian repression of female sexuality and the associated distortions of that repression
c) or both?
The meaning of Bertha is unsettlingly protean and multiple
Bertha focalises ____________ anxieties, in ways which are similar to the figures of the governess and the child with whom Jane is aligned
Victorian cultural
Sally Shuttleworth: the two figures in Victorian psychological discourse
‘who demarcated the sphere of excess were the passionate child and the madwoman’
Bertha’s dramatic power is that she gives disturbing________ to Jane’s psychological fears
physical presence
In the gypsy scene Rochester ventriloquizes Jane’s habitual suppression of her stronger feelings to find the ____ inside Jane
Bertha
Embodied within Bertha as Jane’s alter ego are all the feared ____ possibilities of Jane’s measured demeanour
inverse
what are the inverse possibilities of Jane’s measured demeanour?
energies unleashed and uncontrolled in primal snarls, growls, demoniac laughter (embodied within Bertha as Jane’s alter ego’
there is a _________________ or proximity between the incidents of Bertha’s escape into inhabited areas of the house and moments of high emotional intensity for Jane
successive narrative overlap. e.g. the fire and Rochester’s revel of his erotic backstory.
Bertha’s incontrovertible presence suggests…
Jane cannot control her own deeper and Truer self and story
Bertha is not just what Jane could or might be….
she represents what Jane demonstrably is
When Rochester dramatically points to the antipathetic opposition -“Compare”- between Jane and Bertha in Chapter 26…
he makes explicit the connection between them, a connection which is submerged during most of the Thornfield section of the novel
When Jane finds her ‘sole relief’ on the third storey, venting the ‘restlessness’ which ‘agitated me to pain sometimes’, she hears the…
‘eccentric murmurs’ of Bertha and replicates the prisoner’s desire for liberty, even aping her very actions walking ‘backwards and forwards’ along the corridor