The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of

Embodiment and Mental Illness

Author(s): Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Source: NWSA Journal , Autumn, 2002, Vol. 14, No. 3, Feminist Disability Studies
(Autumn, 2002), pp. 99-119
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4316926

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The Corpus of the Madwoman:
Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory
of Embodiment and Mental Illness

ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

In this essay, I position Gilbert and Gubar's quintessential madwoman

in the attic, Bertha Mason, as the "maddened double"' of second-wave
feminist criticism. Building on the legacy of previous feminist interpre-
tations of the madwoman, I propose a new disability studies reading
attuned to the connections between physiognomy and madness in Jane
Eyre. By departing from the established "madness as rebellion" narra-
tive, I seek to re-position the text and to open a theoretical space for
the analysis of embodiment and mental illness using feminist science
studies and theories of the body along with the insights of disability
studies.

Keywords: Bronte, Charlotte / disability studies / feminist literary criti-

cism / Jane Eyre / madness / mental illness / physiognomy

Over twenty years ago, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The
Madwoman in the Attic, a now classic text of early feminist literary criti-
cism (1978). Basing their title on the character of Bertha Mason, a mad-
woman secretly imprisoned in her husband's attic in Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre ([1847] 1981), Gilbert and Gubar argued that the "maddened
doubles" in texts by women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
tury "function as social surrogates," projecting women writers' anxiety
of authorship in a male-dominated literary tradition (1978, xi). Much like
the determined women who fueled feminism in the 1960s and 1970s,
these madwomen rebel against the strictures of patriarchal authority.
Since then, the figure of the madwoman as feminist rebel has had a sus-
tained cultural currency. As Elaine Showalter notes, "To contemporary
feminist critics, Bertha Mason has become a paradigmatic figure" (1985,
68). Furthermore, as Showalter also points out, feminist critics have a
sympathy for Bertha Mason that, ironically, Charlotte Bronte does not
seem to share (68-9).
Many factors, not the least of which is the proliferation of feminist
criticism and reading practices, have contributed to Bertha Mason's
paradigmatic status and to contemporary readers' newfound sympathy.
Perhaps most notably, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1985), a prequel to
Jane Eyre, has influenced a generation of readers' responses to Brontes
character. Rhys's novel tells the story of Bertha "Antoinette" Mason's life
in Jamaica before she marries Rochester and moves to England.' Rhys's

(?2002 NWSA JOURNAL, VOL. 14 No. 3 (FALL)

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 100 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

novel gives voice to the previously silent madwoman and depicts what
some might consider the causes of her madness-a difficult childhood,
a dangerous social climate, and her husband's ultimate betrayal. In her
depiction of the events that precede Antoinette's imprisonment in the
attic, Rhys departs in important ways from Jane Eyre's configuration of
madness, which I will discuss in greater detail below. By stressing the
causal factors that contribute to Antoinette's emotional state, Rhys also
makes it easier for readers to understand and to identify with the origi-
nally enigmatic and inarticulate character.
Another factor significantly affecting contemporary readers' sympa-
thy for Bertha Mason is the changing cultural thinking about psychia-
try, mental illness, and the asylum from the late 1960s to the present.
Psychiatry, feminist critics pointed out, unfairly pathologizes women.2
Mental illness, according to the anti-psychiatry movement, is a myth.3
The asylum, Michel Foucault explained, is primarily a form of institu-
tional control.4 The reception of Rhys's re-evaluation of Bertha Antoi-
nette Mason is in part a product of this particular historical moment in
England and the United States. In this context, Bertha Mason, and the
figure of the madwoman in general, became a compelling metaphor for
women's rebellion.
Yet this metaphor for rebellion has problematic implications. Although
Gilbert and Gubar warn readers against romanticizing madness, the
figure of Bertha Mason as a rebellious woman subverting the patriarchal
order by burning down her husband's estate has a certain irresistible
appeal. Gilbert and Gubar's text and Rhys's novel are, of course, not the
only texts that figure madness as rebellion. In Women and Madness,
Phyllis Chesler views women's madness as a journey of mythic propor-
tions: "women have already been bitterly and totally repressed sexually;
many may be reacting to or trying to escape from just such repression,
and the powerlessness it signifies, by 'going mad"' (1972, 37). In the face o
such repression, "going mad" might be considered the only sane response
to an insane world (Deleuze and Guattari 1977). The ability to "go mad"
also functions as a class marker of a higher sensibility: this sort of psy-
chological depth has "the glow of transgressive glamour" (Pfister 1997,
176). For example, in Mockingbird Years, Emily Fox Gordon describes her
stay at a mental hospital as "the fulfillment of an adolescent fantasy":

The status of mental patient would invest me with significance.... We had

seen the movie David and Lisa [Perry and Heller 1962], a tearjerker about a
love affair between two adolescent mental patients, and we were smitten with
the romance of madness. I think we believed that if we cultivated dissociation
we would become as beautiful as Lisa: our complexions would turn luminous,
our faces grow expressive hollows, our hair lie flat and glossy. We spent our
days edging cautiously around the grounds, taking drags on shared cigarettes
and muttering "a touch can kill," hoping to be noticed by the patients, drawn
into their glamorous orbit by the magic of proximity. (2000, 5)

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 101

Oprah Winfrey's recent new production of David and Lisa also illustrates
the enduring romantic appeal of madness (Winfrey and Kramer 1998).f
However it is romanticized, madness itself offers women little pos-
sibility for true resistance or productive rebellion. As Marta Caminero-
Santangelo argues in her aptly titled, The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or,
Why Insanity Is Not Subversive, Bertha Mason's madness only "offers
the illusion of power" (1998, 3). Using both fictional madwomen and
women's biographical accounts of asylum experiences, Caminero-San-
tangelo reveals the limited political efficacy of the mad subject. Similarly,
Shoshana Felman writes:

Depressed and terrified women are not about to seize the means of produc-
tion and reproduction: quite the opposite of rebellion, madness is the impasse
confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means
of protest or self-affirmation. Far from being a form of contestation, "mental
illness" is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence and
of political castration. (1997, 8)

Furthermore, and this is a crucial point for my argument here, using

madness to represent women's rebellion has undesirable effects due pri-
marily to the inevitable, as the previous quotation illustrates, slippage
between "madness" and "mental illness." While Gilbert and Gubar
make it clear that their discussion concerns madness as a metaphor, not
mental illness in the clinical sense, this distinction proves impossible to
maintain. Fictional representations of madness have a way of influenc-
ing clinical discourses of mental illness and vice versa. As Showalter
has demonstrated, the figure of Bertha Mason circulated in precisely this
way during Brontes time: "Bertha's violence, dangerousness and rage, her
regression to an inhuman condition and her sequestration became such
a powerful model for Victorian readers, including psychiatrists, that it
influenced even medical accounts of female insanity" (1985, 68).
Why is the association between women's rebellion/madness and mental
illness undesirable? In some ways it isn't. Beginning in part with this
insight, feminist critiques of psychiatry and psychology have provided us
with necessary and important analyses of the gendered politics of psychi-
atric diagnoses: it is certainly true that women have been disproportion-
ately and in some cases even falsely diagnosed as mentally ill. And it is
certainly true that psychiatry and psychiatric hospitals are in dire need
of outside critics. However, at this particular historical moment, one in
which disability studies and feminist disability studies are coming of age,
I believe that the madness/rebellion configuration subtly reinforces what
has become an almost monolithic way of reading mental illness within
feminist literary criticism and perhaps in the larger culture of women's
studies scholarship.6 This is undesirable, I would argue, because this
configuration of madness, if it remains widely accepted and uncontested,
may limit our inquiry into madness/mental illness.

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 102 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

Indeed, one could argue, when madness is used as a metaphor for

feminist rebellion, mental illness itself is erased. In Illness as Metaphor,
Susan Sontag describes "the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted"
about tuberculosis and cancer and attempts to counteract stereotyped
conceptions of these diseases (1977, 3). In comparison, the madness-as-
feminist-rebellion metaphor might at first seem like a positive strategy
for combating the stigma traditionally associated with mental illness.
However, this metaphor indirectly diminishes the lived experience of
many people disabled by mental illness, just as the metaphoric use of
terms like lame, blind, and deaf can misrepresent, in ways that have
ultimately harmful political effects, the experience of living with those
physical conditions. As someone who occasionally acts as an advocate
for people disabled by severe mental illness, I approach this subject with
a certain sense of political urgency. In my experience, theories that pay
attention exclusively to the social causes and construction of mad iden-
tity while overlooking the material conditions of the body, and the body
as a material condition, have a limited political scope.7 A feminist dis-
ability studies theory of mental illness that includes the body, one which
theorizes bodies as "material-semiotic generative nodes" and mental ill-
nesses as physical impairments, would be a timely and productive way
of developing the discussion of madness/mental illness within women's
studies scholarship (Haraway 1999, 208). Perhaps the most appropriate
and useful way to begin thinking through a theory of embodiment and
mental illness is with the paradigmatic figure of women's madness, fane
Eyre's Bertha Mason.

I. Rereading the Madwoman in the Attic

A feminist disability studies reading that stresses the connections

between madness and physiognomy, between the mind and body, pro-
vides us with an alternate way of conceptualizing madness in Jane Eyre.
This alternative view restores the novel's original emphasis on the physi-
cal basis of mental illness, and in so doing seeks to complicate current
constructions of madness within feminist theory. In this reading, Bertha
Mason's madness is a sociomedical condition, a secret family history
of mental illness. This family history precedes and supersedes Bertha
Mason's marriage. Jane Eyre's plot rests on a structure not exactly of m
doubles, but of juxtapositions between normative and non-normative
bodies, between the accidental and the congenital, between masculine
rationality and feminine embodiment, and between melancholy and
raving madness. Reading the body is a central practice in Jane Eyre: mad
ness gets its meaning from the novel's underlying logic of physiognomy.
While the novel, to a certain extent, deconstructs ideals of beauty and
the perfect body, it simultaneously is heavily invested in the notion of

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 103

physiognomy, of reading mora

Eyre's rival for Rochester's aff
example, is described as "moulded like a Diana.... The noble bust, the
sloping shoulders, the graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets
were all there" (161). Edward Rochester describes his supposed rival for
Jane's affection, St. John, as "a graceful Apollo ... tall, fair, blue-eyed,
and with a Grecian profile" (422). Yet these classically beautiful bodies
enclose flawed characters who are not successful in their matches. St.
John rejects the perfect beauty of Rosamond and is in turn rejected by
plain Jane. Blanche Ingram's face and her facial expressions contradict
her perfect form: "but her face? Her face was like her mother's; a youth-
ful unfurrowed likeness: the same low brow, the same high features, the
same pride . . . her laugh was satirical, and so was the habitual expres-
sion of her arched and haughty lip" (161). Beauty may be skin deep, but
expression and gesture are visually evident on and through the surface of
the body and, if read correctly, are accurate manifestations of inner moral
character and identity.
The narrator herself cannot escape becoming the object of the struc-
turing narrative of physiognomy. As Miss Ingram's mother remarks: "I
am a judge of physiognomy, and in hers [Jane's] I see all the faults of her
class" (166). Rochester, a much more sensitive reader than the Ingrams,
also reads Jane's body, more precisely her head and face. Borrowing from
the terms of phrenology, the study of character based on the shape of the
head, Rochester at one point describes Jane as having "a good deal of the
organ of Adhesiveness" (236; see Fig. 1).
According to phrenology, inner organs of the brain are associated with
specific personality traits and cognitive skills. The over- or under-devel-
opment of these inner organs can be read through the external shape of
the skull and its protrusions and recesses (Davies 1955, 4). Adhesiveness,
sometimes depicted as two sisters embracing (Fig. 2), signifies social
bonds and friendship.9 The offhand reference to "the organ of Adhesive-
ness" is never explained in Jane Eyre, which seems to suggest the audi-
ence's familiarity with this term. In keeping with this emphasis on the
continuity between the external head and the internal mind, Rochester,
while posing as a gypsy fortuneteller, quickly throws aside the pretense
of reading Jane's palm in favor of reading her countenance: "what is in a
palm? Destiny is not written there . . . it is in the face: on the forehead,
about the eyes, and in the eyes themselves, in the lines of the mouth"
(185-6).10 Jane, previously skeptical of the gypsy's powers, then states,
"Ah! Now you are coming to reality ... I shall begin to put some faith in
you presently" (186). Both Jane and Jane Eyre the novel partake in a deep
abiding faith in the discerning powers of physiognomy.
Physiognomy was also used to discern madness and idiocy, two mental
states that were commonly discussed in tandem. John Caspar Lavatar's
Essays on Physiognomy (1789) introduced to many English readers a

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 104 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

171, ? ~ Fig. 1. Numbered and listed

XE 2,(B ~ 5phrenological organs.

20 From Samuel R. Wells's New

6V200 , 1 Physiognomy (1871). (Courtesy

0 , 7 15of the Library Company of
45 El 5 22 P C 0 ~ Philadelphia.)
12 0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

< 9t X~~ ~ ~~~~ 33>3 2

76 2
. 1 X , v Fig. 14 . .\

NAMES, NUMBERS,
AND

LOCATION OF THE ORGANS.

A. ANIATIVENESS. 13. SELF-ESTEEM. 26. SIzE.
A. CONJUGAL LOVE. 14. FIRMNESS. 27. WEIGHT.
2. PARENTAL LOVE. t5. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. 28. COLOR.
8. FRIENDSIIIP. 16. HOPE. 29. OiDER.
4. INIIABITIVENESS. 17. SPIRITUALITY. 30. CALCULATION.
0. CONTINUITY. 18. VENERATION. 21. LOCALITY.
E. VITATIVENESS. 19. BENEVOLENCE. 82. EVENTUALITY.
6. COMBATIVENESS. 20. CONSTRUCTIVENESS. 33. TIME.
7. DESTIIUCTIVENESS. 21. IDEALITY. 84. TUNE.
8. ALIMENTIVENESS. B. SUBLIMITY. 25. LANGUAGE.
9. ACQUISITIVENESS. 22. IMIITATION. 86. CAUSALITY.
10. SECRETIVENESS. 23. MIILTI. 87. CONmPARISON.
11. CAUTIOUSNESS. 24. INDIVIDUALITY C. HUMAN NATURE.
12. APPROBATIVENESS. 25. FOEM. D. SUAVITY.

connection between facial expressions and insanity. By the time Bronte

was writing fane Eyre, Alexander Morison's depictions of madness in
texts like The Physiognomy of Mental Disease (1840) were familiar and
"greatly influential" (Gilman 1982, 100).11 When Jane first sees Richard
Mason, the madwoman's brother, she notes:

he was a fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination,

you detected something in his face that displeased; or rather, that failed to
please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large and well
cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life-at least so I thought.
(178)

On second sight, Jane, who fittingly has a distinctive talent for sketch-
ing revealing portraits, remarks, "I liked his physiognomy even less than
before.... For a handsome and not unamiable-looking man, he repelled
me exceedingly" (178-9). Immediately juxtaposed with Jane's examina-
tion, the Ingrams's perceptions of Richard's features differ significantly:
"a beautiful man," "a pretty little mouth," "what a sweet-tempered fore-
head," "such a placid eye and smile!" (179). The Ingrams, of course, are
not good judges of character. Jane's more accurate evaluation of Richard's
physiognomy is verified later when we learn about Richard's congenital
legacy. Richard is Bertha's brother, a Mason, and as such is more than
likely destined to hereditary madness or idiocy according to Rochester:
"he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind ... [but he] will prob-
ably be in the same state [as his siblings] one day" (291).

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 105

Fig. 2. Illustrated phrenological

organs. From Samuel R. Wells's
New Physiognomy (1871).
(Courtesy of the Library
Company of Philadelphia.)

Fig. 14&-'"OLIoAL H'AI

RM&RMN-NO. 1. AXAZVM b
repreDenbd by Cupld, with his bowv anld
amr. N!o. L AlDm z[v, by twro slt
emnbracing. No . LCosA^Trv=_per-
lrertad -by two boy conteading. No. 9.
AeWt 1Immviusfer oounlug hl gold. No. 10. SzozwmvtBE,by&eAt zwaMc
*Or R MOU66- B- SVUslJr" NlgEVa I ll 2L INDmDVUsMT, a boy with a telencope.
8L LooAL, by a traveler covuutWg a guide-board. K1 CAmAL:, Newtun studylw'
111e laws of gravityr by Ike faling of an apple. IL VzwAToN, devolAoa, and delhw
onse, rmpeet, nd pmyrer. It. BaiaoLawa, the Good Samaritan bealowing chtdy;
No. 17. BttsurArt Mloses, ont Mount Ilinai, reeetvilg tbe lables from HIeaven on
which were engraved the Ten OommsadmentL If. Horz, tbo anchor, and a shtp at
s_s 1& CoasteazuNrzovanzs, Ju2ske, with the scle in one hand and the sword In the
other, and so hbrtb. Each organ In represiented by a mbol, whiehk In some eae>o way
sbow the approptials, and In othem tbe ponerted aetlou The latter to show In eas of
the m1er, the ghlulond, anld tbe Aibting boyi It to used as si memt of Indicaing both
theo loestSon of the organs and to sowl their natural action as fequenlUy exhibited In life

The novel's assumptions about biological destiny are also explicitly

reinforced in the discussions about Rochester's ward Adele, "the ille-
gitimate offspring of a French opera-girl [Celinel" (135). Once Roch
discovers that his mistress Celine is having an affair, Adele's paternity
is cast forever in doubt: "the Varens, six months before, had given me
this fillette Adele, who she affirmed, was my daughter; and perhaps she
may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written in her
countenance: Pilot [my dog] is more like me than she" (135). Though
Jane searches Adele's face for a resemblance to Mr. Rochester, she "found
none; no trait, no turn of expression announced relationship" (136). In
the absence of a confirmed, legitimated paternity, Adele is defined by her
matrilineal origins-and she is indelibly, innately French. Jane sees in
Adele "a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her mother,
hardly congenial to an English mind" (136); "there was something ludi-
crous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devo-
tion to dress" (160). Rochester explains: "I am not her father; but hearing
that she was quite destitute, I e'en took the poor thing out of the slime
and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the whole-
some soil of an English country garden" (135). Adele's French nature is

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 106 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

checked by her English nurture: "As she grew up, a sound English educa-
tion corrected in a great measure her French defects" (431). For Adele,
female is to male as nature is to nation. And the nation is always Eng-
land.'2 Embodiment and the imperatives of the physical are a matrilineal
legacy. Enculturation and Englishness become patrilineal prerogatives.
That Adele is somehow tainted by her mother is in keeping with the
novel's anxious relationship to female and to disabled bodies.
The madness of Bertha Mason, "the true daughter of an infamous
mother," is similarly congenital (291). Grounded in her body, her mad
is contextualized as a matrilineal legacy of national, ethnic identity and
physical disorder: "Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family;
idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole,
was both a madwoman and a drunkard!-as I found out after I had wed
the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before" (277). Yet
the same time, the gestation of her madness is specifically linked to her
drinking and to her sexual appetites-failures of the will, not the body,
in Rochester's opinion. Therefore, despite Bertha Mason's fated madness,
Rochester still holds her morally accountable for her illness. For example,
at one point Jane upbraids Rochester for speaking of his wife with con-
tempt, "Sir . . . you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak
of her with hate-with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel-she cannot help
being mad" (286). However, according to Rochester, Bertha Mason can
help being mad, although to a limited extent: "her excesses had prema-
turely developed the germs of insanity" (292). Rochester also, for what it
is worth, distinguishes the source of his hatred: he claims not to hate her
for being mad, but for those excesses.
Bertha Mason would be recognizable to Victorian readers as an exem-
plar of "raving madness," depicted by Cauis Gabriel Cibber's well-known
sculpted figure over the gates of Bethlem "Bedlam" Hospital (Gilman
1982, 17-9; see Fig. 3, figure on the right). Cibber's figure is restrained by
chains, a common image in connection with raving madness or mania.
Rochester himself mimes key features of this image in a game of cha-
rades earlier in the novel: "Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his
clenched hands resting on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground.
... As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were attached fetters.
'Bridewell!' exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved" (172-
3). Bridewell refers simultaneously to the infamous prison and to the
secretly imprisoned bride Bertha, as well as to Rochester who is bound
to her by marriage. Paraphernalia of the prison, the fetters and chains,
were all-too-common paraphernalia of the asylum, despite the attempts
of reformers. For example, Edward Wakefield's influential 1815 broadside
publicized the case of William Norris, who had been fastened to a short,
foot-long chain by the neck and warehoused in Bethlem Hospital for over
ten years (Gilman 1982, 153-5). However, by the time Jane Eyre was first

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 107

.~ ~~ . ., .-

-A

1 TH 1L U

aii ur 4t-
Ai funad la5%ain *n-eu vunelu tetnt.S

D 1 iffil 5 IIIu't II0 liIuI11i fb ill uujuimp lubrtll-

Fig. 3. Cauis Gabriel Gibber's sculpted figures of right, "raving madness," and left, "mel-
ancholy madness" over the gates of Bethlem "Bedlam" Hospital, London. (Courtesy of the
Harvey Cushing-John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.)

published in 1847, only a handful of English,asylums had discontinued

the practice of mechanically restraining patients (Shortt 1986, 128 ).13 In
the novel, restraint and isolation are presented as necessary conditions of
raving madness. Once Bertha is declared mad, she, "of course," must be
sequestered: "since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had,
of course, been shut up" (292). When Rochester publicly reveals Bertha's
existence, he restrains her while Jane and others watch: "he mastered her
arms; Grace Poole gave him a cord, and he pinioned them behind her:
with more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a chair" (279). Even if
Jane Eyre should happen to go mad, she will not escape the requirements
of restraint, as Rochester explains:

Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still:

if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat-your
grasp, even in fury would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as
that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as
fond as it would be restrictive. (286)

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 108 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

Whether confined by a str

or by Rochester's fond embrace, the mad and manic body appears to war-
rant physical restraint (Gilman 1982, 153).
Above the gates of Bedlam, Cibber's sculpture of raving madness faced
its counterpart, melancholy madness (see Fig. 3, figure on the left). Simi-
larly, once Bertha dies in the fire that she begins, Rochester becomes her
would-be mirror image, the second half of Cibber's mad dyad. After the
fire, Rochester is "blind, and a cripple": he is missing one eye, has lim-
ited sight in the remaining eye, and has had one hand amputated (410).
Though Rochester's blindness and missing hand might have seemingly
little to do with Bertha's madness, these physical alterations mark him
as an icon of melancholy madness.'4 In Cibber's sculpture, the clenched
hands and chained wrists of the raving madness figure are juxtaposed
with the melancholic's hidden hands, which almost seem to disappear
at the wrist. In Seeing the Insane, Sander Gilman identifies hidden or
obscured hands as a conventional element in the iconography of melan-
cholia. Symbolizing "the melancholic's ineffectuality," the hidden hands
are also a common gesture of grieving (Gilman 1982, 14). When Rochester
shows Jane his amputation, his missing hand alludes to this tradition of
images: "'On this arm I have neither hand nor nails,' he said, drawing the
mutilated limb from his breast, and showing it to me" (417). Not only is
the hand missing, permanently obscured, but the blinded Rochester also
draws his hand from his breast. The gesture of hiding this absence further
marks him as melancholic. Jane recognizes this quickly, "I will be ...
eyes and hands to you. Cease to look so melancholy" (416).
At her death, Bertha's disabling mental illness is transferred to the
body of her husband as physical impairment and blindness, which, in
turn, are deployed by Bronte to depict melancholy madness. Paradoxi-
cally, Rochester's blindness helps to make madness visible. Rochester,
because of his blindness, invokes a notion of the inescapable predomi-
nance of interior vision, an interiority that threatens to separate the self
from the exterior world, just as a severe mental illness might. After his
impairment, Rochester retreats to the desolate Ferndean manor house,
and his self-imposed exile there parallels the seclusion of Bertha Mason:

one saw that all to him was void darkness. He stretched his right hand (the
left arm, the mutilated one, he kept hidden in his bosom): he seemed to wis
by touch to gain an idea of what lay around him: he met but vacancy still.
... He relinquished the endeavor, folded his arms, and stood quiet and mute
in the rain. (413)

Like an inmate in an asylum yard, Rochester's folded arms, his mute

gestures, and his inability to seek cover from the rain illustrate the self-
neglect and social isolation associated with melancholy madness.

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 109

In a text so occupied with looking and with the way faces look, Roches-
ter's blindness, and his "cicatrized visage" threaten to place him outside
of the novel's prevailing visual economy (417). Yet the vision of Jane kee
him firmly placed within this purview. After the fire, Rochester becomes
a safely specular object, and the invisible Jane can now gaze at Rochester
whenever she wishes: "in his countenance I saw a change ... that looked
desperate and brooding" (412). Jane's narrative encourages readers not to
stare but to gaze with pity upon Rochester's newly disabled body: "It is
a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes-and the scar of fire on your
forehead: and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for
all this; and making too much of you" (417).15
Despite the continuity between Bertha's raving madness and Roch-
ester's melancholy, Rochester's impairments differ in significant ways.
While Bertha's madness is congenital and chronic, Rochester's is coinci-
dental and curable. In addition to the associations with melancholy, Jane
also compares Rochester's impairments to Nebuchadnezzar's temporary
madness:

It is time some one undertook to rehumanize you . .. for I see that you are
being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort. You have a faux
air of Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you, that is certain: your hair
reminds me of eagle's feathers; whether your nails are grown like bird's claws
or not, I have not yet noticed. (417)

After Nebuchadnezzar has a prophetic dream of a blasted tree and the

dissolution of his kingdom, he undergoes a brief period of madness that
transforms him into an animal-like, subhuman figure: "he was driven
from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his . . . hairs were grown like
eagles' feathers, and his nails like bird claws" (Dan. 4: 33).16 Later, Nebu-
chadnezzar's reason returns to him. Similarly, Rochester's first marriage
proposal to Jane is followed by a lightening blast that destroys a tree, fore-
shadowing Rochester's future punishment and paralleling Nebuchadnez-
zar's dream. Just as Nebuchadnezzar returns to reason, Rochester wakes
from the dream of blindness and of disability. The closed eyes of the
sleeping dreamer seem temporarily blinded. Imprisoning and isolating
the dreamer, the dream state represents the threat of inescapable interior-
ity, or madness. Rochester wakes-regains his sight-in time to see his
newborn son and more importantly, his resemblance in his son's eyes:
"When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had
inherited his own eyes, as they once were-large, brilliant, and black"
(432). Rochester can therefore verify his son's paternity by sight, in direct
contrast to the inscrutable paternity of Ad&le. His son's eyes reinforce the
logic of physiognomy and disability in Jane Eyre: a legitimate patrilineal
succession corrects the female-based legacy of disability. Rochester's

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 110 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

restored vision and the exchanged gaze between Rochester and his son
confirms the primacy of hereditary traits and is presented as Rochester's
triumph over madness, disability, and the disabling female body. "Nor-
malcy," Lennard Davis notes, "has to protect itself by looking into the
maw of disability and then recovering from that glance" (1997, 26).17

II. Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory

of Embodiment and Mental Illness

fane Eyre's Bertha Rochester is mental illness incarnate; however, the

embodied nature of Bertha's madness, and the novel's insistent physi-
ognomy, often fails to register in a critical climate occupied with the
notions of mental illness as primarily socially produced and of mad-
ness as feminist rebellion. A feminist disability studies reading, in con-
trast, demands closer attention to physical bodies and to the theories of
embodiment that structure the novel. Moreover, feminist disability stud-
ies provides a framework for new and alternate ways of theorizing about
mental illness from a feminist perspective.
Victorian notions of physiognomy and madness might seem far removed
from the neuroscience and psychopharmacology that comprise scientific
thinking about mental illness today. Yet all share a basic understanding
of the brain as a territory to be mapped. Phrenologists drew comparisons
between the occurrence of mental disease and the development of organs
of the brain. Today magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans depict the
enlarged brain ventricles of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, posi-
tron emission tomography (PET) scans show increased glucose metabo-
lism in people diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and on the
cellular level neuropharmacology targets dopamine receptors between
nerve cells to alleviate the symptoms of severe mental illness. Although
there is a certain continuity between the medical imaging processes of
phrenology and modern neuroscience, there are also crucial differences,
and the types of pharmaceutical interventions that psychiatry practices
today are a marked departure from the moral treatment advocated in the
nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, I do want to suggest that the enduring importance of
medical imaging and madness might be productively linked to what
Donna Haraway would call the "tropic" nature of corporealization:
"bodies are perfectly 'real,' and nothing about corporealization is 'merely'
fiction. But corporealization is tropic and historically specific at every
layer of its tissues" (1997, 142).1' Though Bertha Rochester is merely fic-
tion, the system of phrenology and physiognomy in which fane Eyre par
ticipates is part of the corporealization of mad bodies in the nineteenth
century. One of the goals of a feminist disability studies theory of ment

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 111

illness should be to examine th

thermore, as Haraway suggests, it is possible to accept the "tropic and
historically specific" nature of corporealization (and of medical language)
while simultaneously thinking of bodies (and of mental illness) as real.
Beginning to think through mental illness using this notion of corpo-
realization will necessitate a pivotal shift from the model of madness-as-
rebellion currently in circulation within some women's studies scholar-
ship, and it will require a more detailed analysis of some of the central
terms and concepts of disability studies. More specifically, a theory of the
corporealization of mental illness demands a closer examination of the
relationship between impairment and disability The distinction between
impairment and disability, the material body and the socially-constructed
body, has been a crucial one within disability studies. As Lennard Davis
explains: "An impairment involves a loss . . . of sight, hearing, mobility,
mental ability, and so on. But an impairment only becomes a disability
when the ambient society creates environments with barriers-affec-
tive, sensory, cognitive, or architectural" (1997, 506-7). What Davis
describes here may be termed the impairment-disability system. Like
Gayle Rubin's configuration of the sex-gender system-the process by
which biological sex is transformed into cultural gender-the impair-
ment-disability system is the process by which biological impairment
is transformed into cultural disability (1975). This configuration of the
impairment-disability system has been particularly useful for people in
the disability rights movement, who combat stigma and who protect the
civil rights of people with disabilities: by shifting attention away from
the biological (impairment) to the social (disability), one can effectively
identify and address discrimination. However, while the politically stra-
tegic distinction between impairment and disability has been particu-
larly useful, it also has its limits. On one level the impairment-disability
system enacts a separation between an accidental, physical body (impair-
ment) and a transcendent, social identity (disability). Within the disabil-
ity rights movement, the subsequent focus on the social realm privileges
the notion of a transcendent civil identity and restricts further discussion
about the nature of physical impairment. If impairment occurs in the
body and disability occurs in society, then this posits an ideal, disembod-
ied social subject who seems to remain intact, unaltered, even normal,
despite physical impairment. The language of the Americans with Dis-
abilities Act of 1990 evokes this false ideal: the subject (American) is the
seemingly stable core that exists independently from the accidental body
(with Disabilities). However, the impairments of severe mental illness
challenge the normalizing logic of this model. Using a wheelchair does
not disrupt the notion of American quite so much as being delusional
does. For example, although the physical barriers that exist for wheel-
chair users are very real and pervasive, they are quite different in nature

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 112 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

from mental competency

vote or to refuse medication.
Theorizing about mental illness from a feminist disability studies per-
spective, I argue, demands a different focus on impairment. This reposi-
tioning, because it requires a shift toward medical models of illness, is
not without its risks. As Simi Linton correctly points out, medical defini-
tions of disability in the past have functioned to keep disability "within
the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter
and 'treat' the condition and the person with the condition rather than
'treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's
lives" (1998, 11). Borrowing a term from Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of
the Closet, Rosemarie Garland Thomson also points out that medical
definitions of impairments have fostered a "minoritizing" view of dis-
ability as private tragedy, rather than positioning disability as a universal
problem affecting everyone (1997b, 282).
Adopting a medical model also poses other risks. Thinking about
physical impairment, in particular congenital physical impairment, is
often characterized by concomitant reductive assumptions about biologi-
cal bodies. This is the case, for example, with Bertha Mason's madness
in Jane Eyre and with the definitive powers attributed to pathological
genes today. In order to steer clear of the pitfalls of essentialism and
biological determinism when conceptualizing mental illness as physi-
cal impairment, it is useful to begin with the understanding that bodies
are not simply born, but made. As Haraway explains, "bodies as subjects
of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries
materialize in social interactions; 'objects' like bodies do not pre-exist
as such" (1999, 208). Feminist science studies and feminist examinations
of the body can offer us the conceptual modes and the critical language
to begin a rigorous denaturalization of impairment within disability
studies. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler revised how we think of
the sex-gender system-arguing in part that sex is not the static, natural
category out of which the social construction of gender emerges (1993).
Similarly, reexamining the impairment-disability system, and moreover
repositioning mental illness as a physical impairment, seems appropriate
and particularly necessary when we speak of severe and chronic mental
illnesses within the disability studies rubric.
It is possible, in other words, to begin with the premise that mental
illness is a neurobiological disorder and still remain committed to a femi-
nist and a disability studies agenda-an agenda that fights discrimina-
tion, advocates for the rights of women, seeks to dismantle ideologies of
oppression, critiques medical discourses of mental illness, and demands
equal access to social services and medical treatment-and it is impor-
tant that feminists begin to think about mental illness in these medical
and physical terms.'9 The elision of the physical component of Bertha

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 113

Rochester's madness in contemporary criticism is not coincidental, but

is symptomatic of a larger, cultural anxiety surrounding mental illness.
This anxiety, I suspect, emerges from an inability (or desire) to recon-
cile medical discourses of mental illness, which describe the symbolic
failure of the self-determined individual, and competing discourses of
democratic citizenship in which will and self are imagined as inviola-
ble-a tension that lies at the heart of the impairment-disability system.
For example, during the trial of Andrea Yates, who was diagnosed with
schizophrenia and depression, the prosecution argued that Yates, though
mentally ill, was rebelling against her domineering husband when she
drowned their five children and was therefore culpable for these deaths
(Parker 2002). The defense's attempts to explain Yates's medical condi-
tion and the delusional systems of thought caused by her mental illness
failed to convince the jury, which was most likely influenced not only
by the argument that Yates was a rebellious woman, but also by the
popular suspicions and misconceptions surrounding mental illness. The
prosecution's use of the figure of the rebellious madwoman in this trial
illustrates both the cultural currency of the feminist configuration of
madness and our obligation to rigorously examine and complicate this
model.

I would like to thank Kevin Jackson for his research assistance in the
early stages of this project, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the
Harvey Cushing-John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University
for their help and permission to reprint images from their collections,
and the anonymous NWSA Journal reviewers for their insightful com-
ments.

Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Assistant Professor of English and Coordina-

tor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York Institute of Technology, Old
Westbury. Her current research focuses on disability studies, feminism,
and mental illness.

Notes

1. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman's maiden name is Bertha Antoinette Mason.

In Rhys's novel (1985), the parallel character's maiden name is Antoinette
Mason, n6e Cosway; the name "Bertha" is an invention of her husband
Edward Rochester and this re-naming emphasizes the formative role the
husband has in forging her mad identity in Rhys's text. I use "Bertha" to
refer to Bronte's character, and "Antoinette" to distinguish Rhys's character,
although, for those who have read both texts, a hybrid of the two-Bertha
Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester-might best describe the composite
character who emerges.

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114 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

2. Showalter's The Female Malady (1985) details the gendered nature of ideas
about insanity, and Chesler's Women and Madness (1972) describes a similar
phenomenon. For data on the predominance of women patients in the mental
health care system, see Guttentag, Salasin, and Belle (1980) and Howell and
Bayes (1981). See also Ehrenreich and English's Complaints and Disorders:
The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1973).

3. For very explicit statements of this position, see Thomas Szaz (1974; 1991).
Szaz is influenced by the work, and in particular the psychiatric labeling
theory, of R.D. Laing (1967; 1976).

4. Foucault (1988). For American versions of this form of institutional critique,

see Goffman (1961), Rothman (1971; 1980), and Grob (1983).

5. The previous film, David and Lisa (Perry and Heller 1962), is based on the
study by psychoanalyst Theodore Rubin (1961). See also the novel One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey 1962) and the subsequent film (Forman and
Douglas 1975). In Cuckoo's Nest, the patients fall into two categories: those
in therapy appear to suffer from socially-produced ailments and are distin-
guished from the chronic (real?) patients, who seem to fall outside the realm
of discourse, sympathy, and redemption. This is a point that Mitchell and
Snyder also discuss (2000, 173-4).

6. The impressive body of work by feminist historian Nancy Tomes is a notable

exception here (1990; 1994b). Tomes was an early critic of female malady
interpretations of insanity and of the madness as feminist rebellion configu-
ration.

7. My mother has had schizophrenia (a condition that was diagnosed, but never
treated) for as long as I can remember. Her emotional distress, her hallucina-
tions, and her other symptoms were formative parts of my childhood, and
these symptoms continue to affect her life and mine in important ways.
My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia ten years ago. After several
arrests, periods of homelessness and forced hospitalizations, he is now part
of a privatized, assertive- community-treatment program where he receives
discounted housing, inexpensive (as well as outdated and harmful) medica-
tion, and the much needed help of overworked and underpaid social workers.
My thinking about mental illness reflects this personal history.

8. Lennard Davis observes that Jane's unconventional plainness marks her as

an abnormal heroine for a novel (1998). Cora Kaplan also notes how "Jane's
constellation of defects . . . works as a defensive counterdiscourse" (2000,
309).

9. Walt Whitman was particularly proud of the development of his organ of

adhesiveness. See Whitman's phrenological chart in the second edition of
Leaves of Grass (1856), which was published by the American phrenologists
Fowler and Wells (reprinted in Stern 1982, 76-7). The image of the two sisters

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THE CORPUS OF THE MADWOMAN 115

embracing recalls Brontes relationship to her sisters as well as the many ref-
erences in Jane Eyre to the likeness between Jane and Rochester, "familiar to
me as my own face in a glass" (190).

10. Although palmistry as a science is discounted in this scene, the gesture of

hands is quite significant in Jane Eyre, a point that I discuss in greater detail
later.

11. In Seeing the Insane (1982), Sander Gilman has compiled an extensive collec-
tion of the icons of madness, including Lavatar's and Morison's illustrations.
My discussion here owes much to Gilman's work. Also see Hartley (2001) for
a history of physiognomic thinking in the nineteenth century.

12. Female bodies are often identified in tellingly reductive ways in fane Eyre.
Blanche Ingram, whose body is said to resemble Bertha Mason's, is "dark as
a Spaniard" (162), and Bertha Mason's mother is simply "the Creole" (277).
After Bertha Mason's madness manifests itself, Rochester embarks on a geo-
graphic search "for the antipodes of the Creole" and chooses an international
menu of mistresses-an Italian, a German, and finally the Frenchwoman
who is Adele's mother (296). See also Spivak (1985).

13. In addition to Shortt (1986), other helpful histories of asylum life and mental
illness in nineteenth-century England and America include Scull (1979),
Tomes (1994a), Dwyer (1987), and Wright (2001).

14. Admittedly, when Jane learns that Rochester is blind, she thinks to herself,
"I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad" (410). While this statement
makes a clear distinction between blindness and madness, I would argue
that the madness that Bronte is distinguishing from blindness here is raving
madness, not melancholy. Jane's fear or dread of raving madness is evident
from her previous reactions to Bertha and to Rochester's earlier threat to "try
violence," which she prevents in part by repositioning his hand: "I took hold
of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers" (286-7). In Jane Eyre,
though Bertha's raving madness is certainly "worse" than Rochester's blind
melancholy, they share a symbiotic relationship.

15. See Thomson for the distinction between the gaze and the stare-"the gaze
intensified" that frames the body as "an icon of deviance" (1997a, 26). See also
Shapiro's No Pity for a-critique of the politics of pity regarding the disabled
body (1993).

16. Although both Rochester's and Bertha's madness are presented as animal-
like states, Rochester's madness is nevertheless nobler. Bertha crouches on
all fours like a "clothed hyena" (279). Rochester resembles "some wronged
and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The
caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as
looked that sightless Samson" (412).

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 116 ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON

17. See also Mitchell and Snyder's recent work on "narrative prosthesis": a nar-
rative's "need to restore a disabled body to some semblance of an originary
wholeness" (2001). The birth of Rochester's son at the conclusion of Jane Eyre,
and this resemblance in and of Rochester's eyes is in keeping with Mitchell
and Snyder's notion of "prosthetic intervention."

18. Similarly James Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson have also previously
noted the potential contributions that corporeal feminism might make to
rhetorical studies of disability (2001, 3).

19. For many reasons, this is a difficult but necessary statement to make. Cath-
erine Prendergast characterizes this dilemma well when she writes, "For
an academic like myself with generally poststructuralist leanings, to think
of schizophrenia as a 'disease' makes me sound at best conservative and at
worst theoretically unsound. I am therefore left wandering far from my usual
terrain to find language with which I can address the dilemmas and gaps
in understanding that mental illness presents" (2001, 46). To conceive of
schizophrenia as a "disease," or of severe mental illness as a physically-based
impairment, does not necessarily curtail a conservative, biologically-reduc-
tive theory, however. Just as Judith Butler has complicated the notion of sex
in the sex-gender system, so too can we conceive of a more complex notion of
mental illness within the impairment-disability system.

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