The lowood episode is.
Jane eyre woman in the attic book.
I remember being gripped by two aspects when i first read jane eyre at the age of 10 or 11 the horrible school at lowood and the mad woman in the attic.
One like jane curtailed over the years to fit into the conventional victorian angel of the house the other bertha suffering her confinement and being eventually pushed towards madness madwoman in the attic two terms used by sandra gilbert and susan gubar in a reading of jane eyre their very famous.
The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination.
Gilbert and gubar s the madwoman in the attic in 1979 two american academics sandra gilbert and susan gubar published a ground breaking volume of feminist literary history called the madwoman in the attic.
The real life attic that was the inspiration for a section of jane eyre where mentally ill character bertha mason is confined before she commits suicide is now open to the public.
The madwoman in the attic.
Even though jane eyre is a revolutionary book for its time and relevant even today it has some elements that are problematic like confining women into only two possible boxes.
The incident of the madwoman in the attic is probably the most famous in jane eyre and it has given rise to innumerable interpretations and symbolic readings.
She is described as the violently insane first wife of edward rochester who moved her to thornfield hall and locked her in a room on the third floor.
The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination is a 1979 book by sandra gilbert and susan gubar in which they examine victorian literature from a feminist perspective.
For example bertha mason could represent the horror of victorian marriage.
In some ways brontë s decision to merge the identities of the angel and the monster in the two primary female characters of her novel can be seen as a personal statement about the conflict between passion and passivity in her own life.
Bertha mason full name bertha antoinetta mason is a fictional character in charlotte brontë s 1847 novel jane eyre.