The Madwoman in the Attic: Literature as a Patriarchal, Colonial, and Disabling Tool

Author: Carla Billon, McGill University

Editors: Sophie Hill and Diana Yamada

Introduction

“[One] can hardly imagine a human being in a more degraded and brutalizing situation than that in which I found this female.”[1] These were the words of an inspector who visited Bethlem Royal Hospital — also known as Bedlam — in 1814, for a national report on madhouses in Britain. Bedlam is Britain’s oldest operative asylum, having opened in 1330, and it is widely known for its abusive practices and patient neglect.[2] Knowledge of Bedlam was widespread in society, as the hospital permitted tourists to visit. Though Charlotte Brontë planned a visit there in 1853,[3] it is very likely that she knew about the institution long before, as traces of its influence can be seen in Jane Eyre.[4] From this novel, Gilbert and Gubar identified a trope: the madwoman in the attic. They saw the mad characters as “asocial surrogates for docile selves,”[5] embodying a way for female writers to rebel against the patriarchal order. This paper will argue that drawing on the history of institutionalization and ableist social beliefs enables a new way of understanding literature, one that reveals intersectional power structures of race, class, and gender in a colonial context. In short, literature functions as normative technology that produces disability by transforming social non-conformity into pathological deviance, thus sustaining the oppressive mechanisms that created it.

Theoretical framework

The twentieth century was marked by the rising influence of psychiatry in legal systems, despite its medical biases towards women and people of colour. In “About The Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-century Psychiatry,” Michel Foucault analyzes the use of madness as grounds for legal impunity, examining various cases that were labelled “homicidal monomania.”[6] One of these centered on a peasant in Selestat, who, in 1817, killed a child and an infant, whom she dismembered with a knife and boiled to eat. She was acquitted of her crimes on the ground of moral insanity and sent to an asylum.[7] Foucault underlines that the pathologization of bodies was intertwined with questions of “public hygiene” as psychiatry became a “medical science as much for the societal body as for the individual soul.”[8]Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason’s gendered and racialized body – rooted in her Caribbean origins - is caught in this mechanism after she stabs her own brother[9] and is described as “mad,”[10] born from a mother “shut up in a lunatic asylum.”[11] Insanity is thus framed as a genetic problem, a logic that culminates in the late-nineteenth-century emergence of the “born-criminal”[12] rooted in social Darwinism. Brontë’s early articulation of this concept highlights the influence of literature in constructing social norms. Simultaneously, Jane Eyre is indubitably anchored in the same social context as Bedlam, with its systematic seclusion of patients echoing Mr. Rochester’s confinement of Bertha Mason.[13]

Despite Bertha Mason’s key role in shaping Jane and Rochester’s relationship, her presence in the novel is almost inexistent. Her name appears seven times throughout the novel, confined to just two passages, including a narrative retelling of her death. In contrast, her caregiver Grace Poole is mentioned over thirty-two times. Bertha Mason becomes a prime example of narrative prosthesis as her insanity acts as a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,”[14] without “[taking] up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions. She is reduced to a narrative tool, a framing that dehumanizes her and her experience. Yet, Bertha’s madness became a fundamental trope in literature: the madwoman in the attic.[15] The repeated exposure to that image in various literary texts like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,[16] Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”[17] or Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City[18] shaped dominant understandings of madness, reinforcing the association between women and hysteria central to Charcot’s and Freud’s theories. As such, literary texts act as a technology that creates norms and conveys ideology beyond their mere content. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, “the media is the message”[19] because “they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”[20] Despite its fictional nature, literature has such a wide reach that it shapes social norms from race, gender, class to disability.

Herein lies the problem with disability studies: it lacks intersectionality. In its application to literature, it reveals its failures. Much like the traditional English canon, disability studies are predominantly White. Gilbert and Gubar’s examination of the madwoman in the attic trope was censured for its lack of critical attention to race and class. Spivak criticizes their study of Jane Eyre as they reduce Bertha to “Jane’s dark double,”[21] ignoring her Jamaican roots. Donaldson also addresses the pathologization of dark skin and race as instrumental in constructing the figure of the madwoman based on physiognomy and racist medical biases.[22] Additionally, Jasbir Puar’s claim that racism, classism, sexism and other forms of oppression stem from ableism[23] and the devaluation of the body supports the need for intersectionality, a point Chris Bell underscores when he argues that disability studies has failed to “engage [with] issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity.”[24]

A Note on Structure

The essay will focus on the role of madness as a narrative prosthetic in establishing literature as a technology. First, I will look at how it constructs normalcy by analyzing who is labelled as ‘mad’ and who is deemed ‘normal,’ drawing on Lennard Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy to explain why literature reproduces normative patterns. I will then explore how madness is portrayed meta-textually to convey the violence undergone by characters in the fictional world and how it reflects real social patterns. I will analyze how literature produces pathology through the invasion of psychiatry into literature – much like how psychiatry invaded the legal system. Finally, I will seek to show that these mechanisms lead to the constant repetition of oppressive patterns and that often, even progressive and revolutionary texts end up replicating marginalization, thus highlighting the need for intersectionality.

Constructing Normalcy

Society and literature co-construct the concept of normalcy by hierarchizing bodies, which creates a dichotomy between the normal and the abnormal. Disability is tangled up in the abnormal as it rests on the pathologization of difference.[25] Impairments are turned into defects arbitrarily: while men’s anger is often celebrated, framing them as “influential” or “commanding,”[26] women’s anger is interpreted as hysteria, thus medicalizing and regulating the female body through pseudo-science.[27] The construction of the ‘normal’ operates on various levels: eugenics use statistics to quantify populations and divide bodies into categories, which are then sorted into desirable and undesirable[28], based on the ability to participate in the capitalist economy;[29] language attributes value to the various categories through the adjective ‘abnormal’ that regulates and controls behaviours;[30] and literature draws from these to structure narratives. As such, novels seek “to reproduce, on some level, the semiologically normative signs surrounding the reader, that paradoxically help the reader to read those signs in the world as well as the text.”[31] Normalcy and disability are co-produced. Simultaneously, the ‘normal’ is based on the ideology of ability. Disability is devalued due to the “preference for ablebodiedness” as humanity becomes determined by “the measure of body and mind.”[32] This hierarchization of bodies is the basis for ableism, derived from society but fueled by literature in a vicious reproductive circle that functions as a form of biopower.[33]

However, the power to identify as disabled creates more inequalities within the disabled community. Claiming disability as a label stems from a position of privilege. For example, people of colour sometimes resist the label of “disability” because of its ties to disability studies, a predominantly White discipline “which can be so focused on identification that other issues get lost.”[34] Similarly, disabled women “may feel that they are not welcomed in women’s organisations or events.”[35] This idea of ‘double’ or ‘triple’ disadvantage – though simplistic – underscores the struggles of disabled people whose identity is often intersectional. Colonization and the persisting North/South division fuel the tensions within disability studies as the ability to claim disability rights and access aids like prosthetics, wheelchairs, or socialized medicine is based on extraction of wealth from elsewhere, often in former colonies or poorer countries.[36] Racism and ableism are entangled as people of colour face more difficulties than White people to access disability-related financial aid as well as social and medical support.[37] Literature encourages these disparities by almost always having “some reference to the abnormal”[38], a move that produces “the Other, the disabled, the native, the colonized subject, and so on.”[39] As such, disability becomes instrumental in pathologizing difference and forcing communities into further marginalized positions.

This oppression does not manifest itself uniformly, as differential access to racial, gender, and class privilege shapes lived experiences. Psychiatry and medicine are historically known for their racial and gendered biases: they became a “tool of colonialism […] in the reconfiguration of resistance as individual pathology or madness.”[40] Psychiatry as a practice was also the direct result of the patriarchal world order, as doctors sought to regulate women’s behaviours and institutionalize those who were defiant. The overdiagnosis of hysteria “acted as a platform for maintaining male dominance within a drastic power imbalance,”[41] and doctors’ own biases skewed scientific studies.[42] Simultaneously, psychiatry invaded literature as the Renaissance and the nineteenth century increased depictions of madness in fictional narratives,[43] thus leading scholars to question the legitimacy of the concept of madness. Questions such as “Is madness a medical concept [...]? Are psychiatric treatments and institutions different from other methods of controlling and coercing those who violate laws or behave differently [...]? And is the actual practice of psychiatry shaped more by social and moral values than guided by a preponderance of valid medical evidence [...]?”[44] were raised, which some authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman took up. However, in the nineteenth century, madness was rarely more than a narrative prosthesis.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre participates in constructing the madwoman by framing race as a defect and madness as moral failing, rather than a consequence of patriarchal oppression and colonialism. Bertha Mason is a Jamaican woman whose identity revolves around madness. Throughout the novel, she is described as a “wild beast”[45],45 “a being {Mr. Rochester} was cheated into espousing” with a “quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane.”[46] She is rarely given a voice, besides animalistic yells and groans, and Mr. Rochester frames his side of the story as the only one. In an extended monologue framed through Mr Rochester’s voice, Brontë details the circumstances of his marriage to Bertha Mason, using the lexicon of betrayal to solicit the reader’s pity. He describes the marriage as a “plot against [him],” and a “treachery of concealment,” positing himself as a victim that was “dragged […] through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste,” which almost led him to suicide.[47] This form of racist, biological essentialism turns Bertha Mason into a narrative tool rather than a human character, narrativising women of colour as inherently unstable and mad because of their race; further indicated by Rochester’s concerns about Bertha’s mother and family.[48] By directly labelling Bertha as mad, Brontë participates in the perpetuation of patriarchal, colonial, and ableist views by reducing madness to psychiatry. Bertha’s behaviour is better understood as a response to Rochester’s confinement of her and violent repression of her attempts to free herself. As such, Bertha’s role in the novel is to construct normalcy by being a foil to Jane Eyre’s White, angelic, and Puritan identity.

Conveying Violence

Beyond shaping the idea of the normal, the novel also acts as a technology to express the violence enacted on abnormal bodies, both in fiction and in reality. While Jane Eyre is widely recognized as a feminist novel, it ultimately exemplifies White feminism. Her characterization of Bertha is intentionally shocking, directing the reader’s pity towards Mr. Rochester instead. After the novel’s publication, Brontë herself admitted that she “erred in making horror too predominant” and that Bertha is too “demonized” and should have inspired pity.[49] Bertha structures Jane Eyre through negative space, as her haunting absence and subtle presence build tension. In the novel, Bertha lives on the third story of Thornfield, yet many scholars, including Gilbert and Gubar, confine her to the attic, the “realm of the nonnarrative As such, secondary scholarly literature reproduces the novel’s biases by marginalizing Bertha and removing her to an even more liminal space. Her literal and textual erasure echoes the dynamics of the narrative prosthesis. Bertha is a crutch, an artificial attachment to the missing limb of the novel, forced on by an ableist society that values ‘normal bodies’ instead of impaired ones. Bertha is entirely dehumanized. Her presence in the novel is insincere, as Brontë refuses to represent Bertha’s experience beyond what is deemed necessary for the plot. This violent erasure of a woman of colour reveals how literature is influenced by society and reversely, shapes society.

The canonization of Jane Eyre exacerbates this problem as the literary canon is “fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time,”[50] and therefore reproduces harmful stereotypes, as noted by feminist and critical race scholars.[51] Simultaneously, Mr. Rochester’s visual impairment is not pathologized, as his White male privilege shields him, while Jane assumes the role of caretaker, a submissive and highly gendered position. Mental impairments like Bertha’s “madness” are pathologized and marginalized in the text, whereas Mr. Rochester’s physical impairment – blindness – is not seen as an obstacle to romantic relationships. Mental illness is represented as less deserving of support than physical disability, a view that still pervades medicine today.[52] By relegating the mad, the mentally ill, and all unwanted populations to asylums as commonplace in the nineteenth century, society framed mental impairments as personal defects, thus reinforcing sexist and racist pseudo-scientifical claims. The literary canon reproduces biases because those who carry these prejudices have the power to maintain unfair standards of ability and sanity.

Jane Eyre emerged from the social reality Charlotte Brontë lived in. Literature is but a “mirror carried along a high road.”[53] Mr. Rochester’s treatment of Bertha’s madness through confinement and physical restraints was in line with the horror stories that came out of mental institutions like Bedlam. These facilities contributed to the pathologization and invisibilization of populations deemed undesirable, like women and people of colour. In her study of the systemic medicalization of women’s behaviours, Elaine Showalter showed that by the nineteenth century, “women had become the majority of patients in public lunatic asylums.”[54] Psychiatry became a tool of the patriarchy which enabled men to use this discipline for colonial conquests on those deemed abnormal. Additionally, this subjugation of already-marginalized communities allowed White men in positions of power to suppress and erase the “the experiences of racialized mad people even more so than those of White mad subjects. This becomes, then, not only the erasure of psychiatric violence and sanism, but also the erasure of racism within this same dynamic.”[55] By denying Bertha the reader’s pity, Brontë feeds this oppressive mechanism. Labelling Jane Eyre a feminist novel may reveal the patriarchal violence against women, but it erases an enduring colonial reality. 

Conclusion

Finally, as the origin of the madwoman in the attic trope, Jane Eyre embodies the ways in which literature can produce and enforce social rules. Narrative forms like the novel are deeply entangled with cultural value judgments and contribute to the creation and reproduction of social norms. Brontë’s novel is anchored in its historical moment, as Bertha’s madness is attributed to her mother and her race, alongside the period’s techniques for managing such perceived deviance. Despite her integral role in the novel, Bertha is labelled by scholars as a “minor figure,”[56] effectively reinforcing her marginalization and invisibilization from the public eye. Non-White racialized female bodies become ‘abnormal’ bodies, pathologized as deviant due to individual failings. Jane Eyre’s narrative helps construct the idea of the normal, equating gender and racial differences as problems. This can further lead male characters with physical impairments to avoid pathologization, – like Mr. Rochester – which could be seen as resistance against ableism. However, Mr. Rochester’s blindness is also a narrative prosthesis meant to inspire pity from the reader, as it is considered a devalued state of being. The various layers of ableism intersect with racism, sexism, and imperialism to sort people into categories and assign them metaphorical value. Studying the ways in which literature interacts with psychiatry unveils the social nature of disability. While Charlotte Brontë lived and wrote within a medical model of disability that advocated for institutionalization and other abusive practices, framing Bertha’s madness as a product of oppression highlights the importance of the social model. Yet, looking at disability as a metaphor for Bertha’s oppression is also problematic, as it incites readers and scholars to overlook disability.[57] Literature plays an integral role in this process, as metaphor underpins every literary work. As such, literature becomes a tool of disablement, portraying marginalized communities as abnormal and reinforcing their exclusion through metaphors that turn disability into narrative prosthesis.

Endnotes

[1] S.W Nicoll, An Enquiry into the Present State of Visitation, in Asylums for the Reception of the Insane; and into the Modes by Which Such Visitation May Be Improved, (1828), 14.

[2] Greig Watson, “Torture or Treatment? The Rise of Nottingham’s Pioneering Asylum,” (BBC, 2025).

[3] Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, (Oxford University Press, 2004), 108.

[4] David Bolt et al., The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, (The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 98.

[5] Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, (Yale University Press, 2020), xi.

[6] Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry,” no.1, 6.

[7] Pierre-Antoine Bernheim, Cannibales!, (The Internet Archive, 1992), 334.

[8] Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry,” 7.

[9] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, (Engage Books, 2020), 292.

[10] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 276.

[11] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 289.

[12] Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, (Duke University Press, 2006), 188.

[13]  David Russell, Scenes from Bedlam : A History of Caring for the Mentally Disordered at Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley, (1997), 123.

[14] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis : Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 49.

[15] Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic .

[16] Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, (Oxford University Press, 1976).

[17] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Ohio University Press, 2006).

[18] Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City, (MacGibbon and Kee, 1969).

[19] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man, (Gingko Press, 2013), 12.

[20] Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, (Random House, 1967),

[21] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry, (no. 1 1985), 248.

[22] Elizabeth J. Donaldson, “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness,” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002)110.

[23] Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim : Debility, Capacity, Disability, (Duke University Press, 2017).

[24] Christopher Bell,  “Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?,” The Disability Studies Reader, (2016), 275.

[25] Natasha Saltes, “Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the Paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society (2013).

[26] Jessica M. Salerno et al., “Closing with Emotion: The Differential Impact of Male versus Female Attorneys Expressing Anger in Court,” Law and Human Behavior (2018), 385.

[27] Jeffrey L. Geller, “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time,” Psychiatric Services (1998).

[28] Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy : Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (Verso, 1995), 30.

[29] Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy : Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (Verso, 1995), 74.

[30] Mel Bonis, Le normal et le pathologique, 12th ed. Georges Canguilhem, (Quadrige. 2017), 132.

[31] Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy : Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (Verso, 1995), 41–42.

[32] Tobin Siebers, “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment: For Identity Politics in a New Register,” In The Disability Studies Reader, 5th ed, Lennard J. Davis.” (Routledge, 2017), 314.

[33] Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” : Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, 1st Picador pbk. ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey, (Picador, 2003), 242.

[34] Samantha Dawn Schalk, Black Disability Politics, (Duke University Press, 2022), 138.

[35] Mary Wickenden, “Disability and Other Identities? - How Do They Intersect,” (Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, 2023) 3.

[36] Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism, (2022).

[37] Navdeep Goraya et al., Black Disabled People’s Experiences of Ableism and Medical Racism in Healthcare, (2023).

[38] Lennard J. Davis, “Seeing the Object as in Itself It Really Is - Beyond the Metaphor of Disability,” (The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 43.

[39] Davis, “Beyond the Metaphor of Disability,” 42.

[40] China Mills, ““The Mad Are like Savages and the Savages Are Mad - Psychopolitics and the Coloniality of the Ps,” Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2017), 205.

[41] Samantha Franco, “Female Hysteria: The Social Epidemic,” Footnotes 11 (2018), 1.

[42] Joel L. Schiff, Hysteria and Victorian Women in Art – Journal of Victorian Culture Online, (2021), 3.

[43] Valerie Pedlar, “The Representation of Madness in Victorian Fiction,” (University of Liverpool, 1993).

[44] David Cohen et al., “The Attributes of Mad Science,” (Routledge, 2017), 187.

[45] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 200.

[46] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 276–77.

[47] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 289–91.

[48] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 276.

[49] Brontë, “To W. S. Williams, 4 January 1848,” The Letters of Charlotte Brontë.

[50] Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory : An Introduction, (John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 1996), 110.

[51] Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” (The Massachusetts Review 57, 2016).

[52] Kendell, “The Distinction between Mental and Physical Illness.”

[53] Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 446.

[54]The Female Malady, 3.

[55] Gorman and LeFrançois, “Mad Studies,” 109.

[56] Laurence Lerner, “Bertha and the Critics.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44, no. 3 (1989), 300.

[57] Davis, “Beyond the Metaphor of Disability,” ix.