Jane Eyre and The Woman in White: a Study on Female Madness and the Impossibility of Self-determination

Abstract

The conversation about insanity has a long history, as the existence of Ancient Greek documents on the theme of derangement attests. In the 18th and 19th century insanity came to be perceived, in Europe, as a major problem that required a solution, thus leading to the massive construction of asylums and to the development of studies and theories on mental illness. In nineteenth-century England, medical theories on madness distinguished between generic insanity and female insanity; the latter was understood to stem from implicitly feminine, biological characteristics, such as volatility, weakness, sensitivity and irrationality, so much so that women became increasingly liable to the label of insanity.

This work investigates how Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859) represent how the threat of being labelled insane, with the subsequent deterioration of mental, physical and social integrity, was used as a weapon to curb women’s freedom. This thesis argues that the two novels depict Victorian women as standing in a precarious balance among definitions of insanity. Furthermore, it will demonstrate that the female figures in the novels illustrate the dynamics that prevented Victorian women from defining themselves, due to men's desire to define them according to Victorian ideals of propriety; and that those women who transgressed the boundaries of their social role as angels in the house were liable to the label of madness.