Madness And Instability In Jane Eyre

My purpose in this dissertation is to explore the relationship between madness and physiological instability since madness is regarded as a female malady in nineteenth century England, an analysis of women's social position has also been talked about since both mental disease and its victims should not avoid the social elements. Charlotte Bront?'s novel Jane Eyre literarily depicts several womanhood and could be well exemplified.Different from traditional critics who regard Jane Eyre primarily as a drama of the psyche where society plays the role of backdrop while fail to register the ways in which the language of psychology is itself politically defined and charged in the novel, and different from feminists who celebrate depictions of sexual rebellion while fail to take into account the ways in which the novel is framed by the discourse of Victorian psychology, this dissertation tries to focus on the relationship between female bodily condition and insanity from medical texts of the Victorian age, which few essays have dedicated to it so far. Its significance lies in that it shared with Victorian psychiatry a preoccupation with the realms of excess: with the workings of insanity, nervous disease, and the unstable constitution of female body, which are reflected in two figures: passionate child Jane and mad Bertha.In the first chapter, starting with a brief review of Bertha, and Bront?'s direct experiences from her domestic and local social circle, it discusses medical texts play a crucial role in mid-nineteenth-century society, in which madness is regarded as a female malady, which means women are more easily declined to insanity than men. Moreover, industrialization influences mental diseases with a conclusion'madness becomes the offspring of an advanced society'. However, more attention has been paid to the relationships between madness and instability of female reproductive system, which is mainly talked about in chapter two focusing on the female powerlessness and subjection to the female body according to Victorian medicine. The ideas are supported by the example of Bertha's attack on Rochester, and passionate Jane's bursting into emotions in her adolescence in the symbolic red room, as the medical texts do speak of this as a possible age for puberty. In chapter three more attention has been put to unstable psychological conditions, such as moral insanity, penetration and concealment. In the last chapter, women's marginal social position has been talked about with the example of Jane both as an orphan and a governess with a purpose that the insatiability of women's social condition contributes to its mental decline as well.Having analysed the instability of female reproductive system and female insanity with Victorian culture, a conclusion can be reached: madness, though regarded as a female disease in Victorian age, should have both physical and social reasons. The workings of mind and its body are unified: irregularities in the female body would produce insanity. Moreover, the accepted social norms of"being a lady"may also contributes to the fact that women occupy the majority of patients in the Victorian public lunatic asylum.