Bertha Mason Quotes

On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear…I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking…I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms…I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches that I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me…I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 25. As they are about to be married, Jane tells Rochester about two dreams she had the previous night. In the first she is on a long and dark road trying to reach Rochester, while a small terrified and crying child clings to her neck and impedes her progress. The second dream takes her to Rochester’s Gothic ancestral manor, destroyed and in ruin, and she loses her balance and drops the child as Rochester rides away from her. Jane’s prophetic dreams are foreshadowing of the end of Thornfield Hall when Bertha sets fire to the place, and also of trouble ahead in her relationship with Rochester. Jane has the ability to foresee the future in her dreams.

My bride’s mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too – a complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one day. My father and my brother Rowland knew all this; but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against me.
These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger – when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile – when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders…I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had – and what giant propensities!

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Rochester is describing his clandestine wife Bertha Mason, the mad woman in the attic. Only after he wed her in a marriage arranged by his father, did he learn of her violence and temper. He also discovered that her mother was mad and shut up in a lunatic asylum. He describes his wife’s behavioral and cognitive decline during their first four years of marriage.