Continued Scholarship Surrounding Bertha Mason

Thus far, many scholars who read The Madwoman in the Attic viewed female "madness" as a kind of rebellion against a patriarchal system. "Madness" had also been connected to women's imaginations and written works as a way to escape the confines of social and cultural expectations, and as a way to form identity and assert oneself in one's own narrative. Yet, later scholarship suggests that this positive view of "madness" may not have been one applied to Bertha Mason by Charlotte Brontë, whose portrayal of Bertha was considered by some to be "unsympathetic". In 1985, a further attempt to cast Bertha as a sympathetic character was made by Jean Rhys, who wrote The Wide Sargasso Sea as a way of explaining the potential causes of Bertha's "madness". Scholar Elizabeth J. Donaldson posits that approaching Bertha through this lense that focuses on her mental illness rather than as a symbol of "rebellion" allows for feminist theorists to examine the presentation of women's mental health by women writers instead of confining feminist interpretations to the parameters of social rebellion. While this has merit, considering the mental health of women characters, how it reflects the attitudes and potential feelings of the author, and what these presentations say about the culture contemporary to them is still a valuable way to understand the social implications of characteristics considered "other", and how women authors may have used their mediums to combat or critique this.

Works Cited: Donaldson, Elizabeth J. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal: National Women’s Studies Association Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 99–119. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/nws.2002.14.3.99.

 “Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 264–279. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/escrit/cgl003.