Inconvenient People (34 page)

Charles Reade found this out when he published
Hard Cash
in 1863, which featured as its hero Alfred Hardie, wrongfully incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by his villainous father, who plans to grab Alfred’s £14,000 inheritance. Reade drew heavily for his plot on the Richard Paternoster case of twenty years earlier, and the case of Edward Fletcher, who in 1858 had been confined in an asylum by his greedy uncles (see Appendix 3,
here
). Reade also cited the 1851
Mathew
v.
Harty
case in Dublin, a real-life plot in which fact was more hackneyed than any fiction would dare to be: after being freed, the alleged lunatic, a young man, sued the elderly doctor who had certified him, and in the dock the doctor revealed himself to be the boy’s long-lost father. Reade was a campaigner against many social abuses, and did not hesitate to use his novels as a blunt instrument – which led to him being denigrated in some quarters as ‘the novelist with a purpose’ and a ‘newspaper novelist’. Lunacy law abuse was perhaps his most passionate cause, and he gave shelter to a number of individuals on the run from the mad-doctors. The heavy traffic between fiction and fact meant that while the newspaper novelists and the Sensation novelists
^fn1
took plots, characters and atmosphere direct from life, they in turn were referred to and quoted in official documents and newspaper commentary on real cases. Verdicts unguessable, personas hidden or multiple, secrets in peril of exposure: these fill the records of disputed lunacy cases as well as the novels and plays of mid-century.

Hard Cash
, which Reade subtitled
A Matter-of-Fact Romance
, became a touchstone for commentators on lunacy disputes, and in that sense it was an influential book. However, the novel’s serialisation in
Charles Dickens’s magazine
All the Year Round
, starting in June 1862, caused circulation to fall as readers failed to see the allure of a story of a sane man being mis-certified and maltreated in an asylum. While confined, Alfred endures sexual advances from two asylum attendants – Mrs Archbold and Babyface Biceps, a strapping great nurse – which turned the collective stomach of
All the Year Round
’s readership. Forty weeks and 275 pages later, Dickens insisted that
Hard Cash
be brought to a hasty end, and the denouement is achieved at breakneck pace. Alfred Hardie’s plight was of interest to no one, and besides, Reade seemed to be impugning one of the mad-doctors Dickens most admired – Dr John Conolly. By the end of the century, Reade was unread and ‘perchance half-forgotten’, as one acquaintance of his regretfully stated.

So we do not know
Hard Cash
today; nor the excellent Wilkie Collins short story ‘Fatal Fortune’ (1874), based on the true case of a mis-certified, eccentric and very rich young man who wished to marry
against his family’s wishes. Now, as then, mass readerships (and audiences) reject stories that feature a highly strung or unorthodox male as a victim of lunacy conspirators. ‘Torture the heroine’ was the formula that nineteenth-century playwright Victorien Sardou recommended in the search for a crowd-pleasing entertainment. It is still ladies that we like to see, ‘going mad in white satin’ – Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s hilarious skewering of a theatrical cliché in his 1779 play
The Rivals
. ‘Going mad in white satin’ shows that the bonkers pretty girl, or emotionally fragile young heroine, was a well-established literary ‘type’ that could not fail to pull the punters in.

Ophelia can probably be blamed for much of this; she is exquisitely sensitive, intelligent, high-born, and is confronted with the murder of her father and rejection by her lover. The loss of her wits is not only understandable but laudable: it is a mark of her refinement and the depth of her love – and she stays beautiful throughout. No one wants to go mad like Bertha Mason, though. ‘It snatched and growled like some strange wild animal . . . The clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind feet’: the scene in the Thornfield attic is perhaps the most vicious depiction of an insane person to have been committed to paper. Charlotte Brontë places her readers in the position of the penny visitors who came to gawp at Bedlam; few mad-doctors, even the hardest hearted, ever wrote of their charges in this language. Bertha is descended from a line of ‘idiots and maniacs through three generations’, as Mr Rochester tells Jane, and her life of heedless sensual indulgence led her prematurely but inexorably into the full-blown raving insanity that was her inheritance. The purple-faced, shaggy-haired, corpulent, murderous beast of the upper storey is the product of a vicious lust- and drink-filled earlier life – behaviour dictated by the tainted Mason blood running in her veins. She was first a moral maniac, and then her intellect collapsed.

Where did Bertha spring from? Most answers tend to be as crudely reductionist as any mad-doctor dabbing his scalpel into brain matter to try to find the seat of a delusion.
Jane Eyre
is endlessly rich in rereading because Brontë’s writing hand was hooked up to a wilder part of her own mind. This is why her novel has been forced repeatedly on to the psychoanalyst’s couch, and a mini-industry in academia has larded multiple meanings on to each and every scene
and protagonist. Brontë herself tried to explain how the imagination worked:

(Forty years later, Wilkie Collins, in response to being asked about the creative process, replied in a similar mode: ‘My perverse brains set to work without consulting me,’ he told the
Ladies’ Treasury
magazine.)

Among the storms that the pseudonymous publication of
Jane Eyre
created in 1847, the depiction of Mrs Rochester brought an element of ‘blame’ that Brontë had not anticipated. In response to reviewers who had described Bertha as ‘shocking’, Brontë wrote:

More immediately problematical, Brontë was told that she might have caused pain to Thackeray, to whom she dedicated the second edition of the book. Brontë had known nothing of his wife’s mental state and her single-patient confinement, and was mortified to learn that her harsh depiction of Mrs Rochester might be read, by those in the know, as a
reference to the mysterious Mrs Thackeray. Others believed that ‘Currer Bell’ (the name under which the novel was originally published) was really Thackeray’s governess, who had fallen in love with the master of the house when his wife had gone mad. Fortunately, he had not been perturbed by the rumours, and the friendship between the writers continued.

In the late 1840s readers would have understood that Mr Rochester’s refusal to place Bertha in an institution was a mark of his nobility, not perversity, or brutality. As we have seen, even in the most exclusive private asylum, a violent patient might have been subjected to the strait-waistcoat and the cold-water treatment, and – even though they were no longer permitted by the Commissioners – to manacles, the darkened room and other types of restraint. Home-based care would therefore have been seen as the option of a hero, not a scoundrel. In his words, Bertha was Mr Rochester’s ‘filthy burden’ and not to be palmed off on strangers. She was also his punishment for his failure to go against his father and brother, whose greed for Bertha’s £30,000 dowry had coerced him into the match fifteen years earlier. It was punishment, too, for his youthful vanity: he had rushed into the alliance partly because he was so flattered that the beautiful and rich Miss Mason favoured him over all the other young men in Spanish Town, Jamaica.

Why did he not seek a parliamentary divorce? Bertha’s adulteries alone gave him the right to this. Lunacy was not grounds for divorce, so long as the spouse had been sane at the time of the wedding; and Brontë cleverly suggests that Bertha probably was incipiently mad at the point of the marriage, but that Rochester would have had no chance of proving this. More importantly, the first readers of
Jane Eyre
will have understood that to force a raving wife through the process of a divorce on the grounds of adultery would have been cruel and ‘unmanly’; he would have to be able to prove that Bertha had known of the consequences of her adulteries at the time she had committed them. Less honourably, it would have made public the very shame that Rochester was seeking to conceal.

Brontë insists that we understand his impulse to decontaminate, and rejuvenate, himself with the woman who least resembles Bertha, Blanche Ingram, Céline Varens and all the other black-haired coquettes with whom he has dissipated himself. Mr Rochester’s moral lapse was not locking his mad wife in the attic, but his perfectly understandable intention to commit bigamy, and to practise a deception in order to secure the real love that he had found in Jane.

Regarding Bertha, he had sought to ‘bury her in seclusion’, and his other home, Ferndean Manor, was indeed more isolated; but the damp of the woodland in which it lay would have polished Bertha off; Thornfield’s third-storey ‘secret inner cabinet’ was the solution. So that she would have permanent, personal care, he hired Grace Poole from the Grimsby Retreat, where her son was the keeper – ‘Retreat’ indicating an advanced, humanitarian, Quaker-inspired institution, where physical restraint was minimal. Grace has the wherewithal to tie Bertha to a chair once in a while, but for the most part, Bertha is free to scuttle around in her ‘goblin cell’. Unfortunately, she gains herself a little more freedom than that, and Grace’s understandable solace-seeking in gin-and-water leads to the eventual catastrophe. Only Mr Rochester, Grace, Grace’s son, Bertha’s brother Richard, and the surgeon, Carter, ever knew of the lunatic wife up at the hall, although there had been local rumours. ‘Who or what she was, it was difficult to conjecture,’ a local man later tells Jane. Even Wood, the vicar, the usual repository of such parish secrets, had known nothing of Bertha.

In 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published their famous theory – that Bertha is Jane’s alter ego: a personification of the rage engendered by pent-up female energy, especially sexual energy. But despite Gilbert and Gubar’s sophisticated comparisons of the patterns of metaphor and imagery common to Jane’s experiences and Bertha’s story, Bertha actually appears to be – among other things – a figure who shows the potential fate of a woman who in her early life failed to assert herself (as Jane asserts herself) and who took refuge in commonplace thoughts, activities and appetites. Bertha sought freedom in promiscuity and drink, but Jane knows, as Mr Rochester has learned, that that kind of libertinism is an illusion of freedom – for man as much as for woman. If Bertha is an echo of anyone in the novel, it is surely Blanche Ingram – the vacuous, conventional drawing-room beauty that Bertha herself once was, in Spanish Town. Bertha is what happens when you have no true sense of a self, and the language used to describe Blanche and Bertha (in her youth) also bears comparison – they are raven-ringleted, dark-eyed and magnificent, imperious for no good reason; and the Dowager Ingram, Blanche’s mother, is already exhibiting Bertha-like physical attributes: her features are ‘inflated and darkened’ and her eye is ‘fierce’.

Bertha at Thornfield was being as well looked after as was possible in the early decades of the nineteenth century, though it isn’t easy for modern eyes to spot this fact. The depiction of a woman confined in her husband’s home brings a sense of unease. No law had been broken by Mr Rochester, and he had not forsaken his wife in her sickness; but Brontë nevertheless plays on the idea that some transgression has taken place. Newspaper and parliamentary bluebook revelations in the early 1840s, of relatives hidden away in sheds, cells and remote chambers, created a similar frisson, or shudder, for anyone who read them, even when it was clear that the family was often doing what it believed to be the best. And so the madwoman in the attic remains a troubling figure, no matter how hard we try to explain her. Three decades after publication,
Jane Eyre
was still the point of reference for those addressing the problem of family confinement and its potential for abuse. In 1879 the
British Medical Journal
worried that there was still ‘no law to prevent a Mr Rochester from locking up his mad wife in the attic of a mansion, with a keeper, as described in
Jane Eyre
’. Government attempts to persuade people to offer up their lunatic spouses, children, parents and siblings for certification and inspection had been a failure. Families still preferred secrecy.