The Struggles of Mary Prince and Jane Eyre free essay sample

This essay will look at representations of black and white women in both The History of Mary Prince by Mary Prince and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and in doing so it will also look at the distinctions between what is perceived as normal and what is perceived as deviant in the two works. In order to discuss this I will look at the characters of Jane and Bertha in Jane Eyre. This essay will discuss how they are depicted within the novel and will include works such as The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Jenny Sharpe’s â€Å"Allegories of Empire† and Desire and Domestic Fiction by Pamela Armstrong. I will then compare the representations of these two characters with Mary in Mary Prince and will look at Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s â€Å"The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince†. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jane is an independent, liberated woman, who feels both men and women should be treated as equals; she is everything a Victorian woman is not meant to be. We will write a custom essay sample on The Struggles of Mary Prince and Jane Eyre or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Despite Jane possessing these characteristics and beliefs, she is a very calm person and so to emphasize her ‘un-ladylikeness’ Bronte provides us with the character of Bertha. Mason is Mr. Rochester’s part English, part Creole wife whom he keeps locked up in the third story of Thornfield, hidden like a dark secret, away from the public eye. Bertha was once a beautiful and wealthy woman from Spanish town in Jamaica, but suffers from a hereditary mental illness resulting in her becoming insane and extremely violent. The racial representations of Bertha are important as we are given the image of Bertha through Jane’s eyes. She describes her as a wild animal-like creature, â€Å"What was it, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face† (Bronte 258) The fact that Bertha is shown in an animalistic way signifies that not only is she not considered an equal, but she is barely considered a person. Bertha’s character represents an uncontrollable passion and insanity which sharply contrasts with Jane’s calmness and morality. In Jenny Sharpe’s â€Å"Allegories of Empire† she explains how Bertha is â€Å"Commonly read as a symbolic substitute for Jane Eyre and the monstrous embodiment of unchecked female rebelliousness and sexuality†. (Sharpe 80) In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain how Mr. Rochester considers his marriage to Bertha as his biggest mistake in life as he married for sex, money and status, for everything but love and equality (Gilbert and Gubar 356). He confesses â€Å"oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act† (Bronte 353). The fact that Rochester married a woman he did not love further shows his inferiority to Jane who previously stated she would â€Å"scorn such a union† (Bronte, 291), and more again Bertha’s inferiority to Jane. Rochester married Bertha for her beauty and wealth, he married what he thought would be the perfect Victorian wife. However this was not so, as the years went on and Bertha became mad he found out she was not the perfect wife. She was rebellious and violent and he felt the only choice he had was to lock her away as she could not function in society without harming herself or others. Due to her lack of education, complete dependency on Mr. Rochester and loss of control over her mind she could never live up to the woman Jane is. Jane’s education led to her to be able to hold various jobs throughout her life and be independent not to rely on a husband. Her intelligence led her to be clever enough to know how to present herself to society and act in a respectable way to those who did not treat her right. Where Bertha chooses rage and violence to vent her frustration at her mistreatment in life, Jane chooses to use her voice. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Pamela Armstrong explains how â€Å"Jane Eyre is the voice of a woman who seems to be empowered by her speech alone. With neither money, nor status, nor good looks, nor charm to recommend her Jane Eyre begins her rise to secure a position within the dominant class in a remarkably forthright manner† (Armstrong 42). Jane is everything Bertha is not, hence why Rochester falls in love with her. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argue how in male authored books, there are two types of women characters, â€Å"monsters† and â€Å"angles†. The â€Å"angles† being the perfect representation of how men think women should act in a male-dominated society, with the â€Å"monster† being the exact opposite, meaning anything which would cause a man anxiety. However, Bronte believes that women cannot be classified within these two fields and so states that Jane and Bertha possess both characteristics, but in different ways. Neither would be perceived as normal women, both are deviant. Jane is rebellious and refuses to abide by social expectations that men are superior and yet at the same time she possess morale, purity and is controlled when it comes to displaying her emotions although this is more of an appearance which she has learnt throughout her childhood. When it comes to Bertha, the combination of the two characteristics becomes somewhat more difficult to describe. We are shown the character of Berta when she is at her worst point. She has falling deep into the depths of madness after being locked away in confinement for many years so we are given this wild animal-like image. We do not see the woman before she became insane and there is very little contact between her and other characters, so it is difficult to try and see any of her â€Å"angelic† characteristics. Both Bertha and Jane possess mixtures of angle and monster characteristics, neither of them portray the norm or ideal image of what a woman should portray in a male-dominated society. Jane Eyre is a white woman struggling to accept her inferior status in a male-dominated world. There is no doubt she is treated unfairly throughout her life, but her suffering is in no way on the same level what Mary has to go through in The History of Mary Prince. Jane’s struggles include being physically and mentally abused while she in the Reed household, she is then consistently seen as inferior in both Thornfield manor by Rochester and Miss Ingrim and with St. John. Her main struggle in life is trying to be seen as an equal. Mary, however, is a black woman in a society which sees her as no more than an animal which can be sold. As a slave, she is put up for sale, bought and was then brutally used for labour. Not only is she inferior to a man as a woman, but as a creago woman she is inferior as a person. She is treated like an animal, like someone’s property. She was regularly beaten and abused, she was passed on from master to master with absolutely no say in the matter and when being sold would be examined like a butcher purchasing a calf or lamb. Although both Jane and Mary suffered, the level of suffering cannot be compared. Both characters go through similar events throughout their lives, but in very different ways. Both Mary and Jane are separated from their families at a young age, Jane’s parents die and she is taking in by her wealthy but cruel aunt, Mary is forced to leave her family as she was purchased at the age of three by Captain Darrell Williams and given as a gift to his granddaughter. Another similar event is how both women marry at some point in their lives but the marriage is deemed void. Jane’s marriage is not recognized due to the fact Rochester is still married to his previous wife, Bertha while Mary’s marriage is deemed void due to the fact both her and her husband are creago slaves, therefore their marriage cannot be recognized. Once again, the level of suffering each woman had to go through is hard to compare. The important thing to note about Mary Prince is that it is the history of a creole woman by a creole woman. It is Mary’s narrative of the events and experiences she went through throughout her life. In the introduction of the book we see how the purpose as to why Mary wanted to tell her story was because she wanted to make sure that the â€Å"good people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered† (Prince I). This provides the reader with a better understanding of how creole women were perceived in this time, how they were treated and what they had to go through. It is not an English woman attempting to describe the struggles a creole woman had to go through as in the case of Charlotte Bronte and Bertha. Although Jane Eyre can be seen as Bronte’s alter- ego, as many of the struggles Jane had to go through such as feeling like a prisoner in her society were similar to Bronte’s struggles, Jane Eyre is not a true story and so Mary Prince’s story has more of an effect on the reader. In â€Å"The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince†, Sandra Pouchet Paquet explains how Mary Prince’s narrative â€Å"recapitulates the emergence of an historically unaware, resistant voice as a facet of her quest for freedom† (Paquet 135). To conclude, both Bertha and Jane are represented within the novel in very different ways. Both are deviant women who do not live up to the ideal Victorian wife. But where Bertha lashes out at her mistreatment and inferiority in society with violence and rage, Jane remains respectable and calm and uses her intelligence and voice to push towards her goal in being seen as an equal as a person. However although Jane struggled to achieve this freedom and suffered a great deal throughout her life, her struggle cannot be compared to Mary’s suffering as a creago slave forced to live her life as someone’s property.