According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “freak of nature” became a part of general vocabulary in 1847. The popularity of this term demonstrates the general public’s obsession in 1840’s Britain with the bizarre and abnormal. In this same year, Charlotte Bronte published her classic novel Jane Eyre. The connection between the appearance of the term “freak of nature” and Jane Eyre is interesting when considering the role of Bertha Mason in the context of the novel and the time period in which it was written. Bertha Mason is described as a lunatic in the novel and while there is a difference between lunacy and physical deformities or peculiarities, the manner in which Bertha Mason is presented in the novel clearly portrays her as a “freak of nature”. For example, once Mr. Rochester’s secret is revealed he theatrically proclaims, “I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole’s patient, and my wife!” (292). Upon taking his audience to the room of Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester ignores the petitions of Grace Poole and Bertha’s brother to leave, rather wrestling Bertha Mason, eventually tying her to a chair. The text then reads, “Mr. Rochester then turned to the spectators: he looked at them with a smile both acrid and desolate. ‘That is my wife,’ said he” (293). Clearly, there are elements of performance in Mr. Rochester’s presentation of his wife and the manner in which he does so mimics the popular Victorian pastime of attending “freak shows”.   

There are several reasons why Charlotte Bronte would have included this exhibition in her novel. For one, “freak shows were…one of the few kinds of Victorian entertainment that explicitly catered to, and succeeded in attracting, an extremely broad audience that cut across lines of class, gender, age, and region” (Durbach 1). Thus, Bronte was able to make her novel appeal to a wider audience by including the presentation of Bertha Mason as a freak of nature. However, Durbach posits, "to dismiss freak shows as either merely prurient or entirely exploitative thus oversimplifies what were in fact complex performances that addressed critical questions about difference. Freak shows were selling much more than merely a cheap peek at a monstrous body. In fact, they helped to educate the public about their place in the hierarchy of classes, races, civilizations, and nations that was so crucial to the nineteenth-century worldview (3)." Durbach is explaining how freaks shows are evidence of how the Victorian’s justified British imperialism. This was done particularly by freak shows containing “performers who were in fact quite ordinary examples of cultural or racial difference” (Durbach 1). Durbach further adds, "by conflating bodies that were anomalous in relation to the human species and those that merely diverged from the white British ‘norm,’ these spectacles suggested that racial difference was not merely a natural variation in the human species, but a freakish bodily deformation. Freak shows further underscored this point by drawing the public’s attention to perceived, and often exaggerated, physical and cultural differences among racial 'types.' In the process they established for audiences across the class spectrum, and in all parts of the nations, the inherent superiority of the British imperial ruling race, and thus justified the maintenance of the empire (2)." Therefore, freak shows and freaks of nature were a means to establish Britain at the top of a perceived national and racial hierarchy developing in conjunction with the railroad and increased cross-cultural communication. This concept is thoroughly evidenced in Jane Eyre’s portrayal of Bertha Mason. For example, when Jane Eyre first encounters Bertha Mason she describes her by exclaiming, “I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face… [It] was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed, the black eye-brows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes” (283-4). Her description also points out characteristics such as “tall and large” and “thick and dark hair” (283). When Jane Eyre sees Bertha for a second time she comments, “I recognized well that purple face, --those bloated features” (293). It’s significant how much emphasis Jane Eyre puts on the appearance of Bertha Mason, particularly considering that Bertha’s ailment is one of the mind—one that should have little to no bearing on her skin color or her physical and facial features. Thus, it is evident that Jane Eyre sees Bertha Mason’s racial characteristics as a freakish deformation rather than a natural human variance. Bertha’s imprisonment therefore becomes symbolic for the colonization of other countries by the British empire. In summation, we can see that Bertha Mason being presented as a “freak of nature” is more than an attempt to reach a wider audience, it is a justification and an establishment of British superiority. Or in other words, “these displays…stimulat[ed] debate amongst…a mass consumer public about how to distinguish male from female, human from animal, civilized from savage, evolved from primitive, the races from each other, and by implication, governed from governing” (Durbach 3).

Works Cited:

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Oxford, 2008.

Durbach, Nadja. “On the Emergence of the Freak Show in Britain.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=art_emergence_of_the_freak