Jane Eyre Journal 5

       I do think Bronte endorsing colonialist attitudes through her depictions of characters and events in the last part of novel.

1. From the depictions on St. John.

 

      The never-sun-set empire, as a strong colonizer, needed to get knowledge of the colonies and control them by setting rules for them, including the imposition of language, law and culture. “The missionary activity is one of the social practices through which the British established their dominance” (Pg.12)

Bronte gave efforts describing St. John’s greatness for scarifying himself going to India to do missionary job. She beautified St. John’s character and his missionary career, and this actually covered the nature of Britain imperialism’s cultural aggression. 

2. From Bertha’s image and her end in the story

      We have discussed Bertha's characteristics—savage, crazy, “pigmy intellect”, “contamination”, which are all negative compared to Jane's. 

      In consideration of Bertha's origin—as a Creole from a Spanish Town of West Indies (the colony of the U.K), she was totally a devil in Bronte’s description. Bronte does not pay sympathy to Bertha but only stands on Rochester’s side in the novel—Bertha is the beast and the one who gained a marriage by cheating. What’s more, she was locked up in Thronfield and ended up dead by jumping out of the roof.

     What interesting is, there was a rule that widows should sacrifice themselves in India. There was an opinion by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (an Indian literary critic and theorist) that “Bertha's suicide is constructed in a manner that reflects her inferiority through imperialism”[1] , and her self-destruction was an innuendo to Indian widow's sacrifice.

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[1] Issues of identity between Jane Eyre and Antoinette-Bertha in the books Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea http://www.helium.com/items/1067613-issues-identity-between-jane-eyre-antoinette-bertha-books-jane-eyre-wide