• From the novel:

“What Janet! Are you an independent woman? A rich woman? “Quite rich, sir…”But as yiou are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who will look after you, and not suffer you to devote youself to a blind lamenter like me?” “I told you I am independent, still, as well as rich: I am my own mistress.” “And you will sta with me?” “Certainly…”(Brontë 536).

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.
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  • Critical Commentary:

“Theres, in examining Jane Eyre as Brontë’s rebellious commentary on the conventional marriage model as one that leaves wives in a powerless subject position, I both place the novel into a social context and explore the importance of doubles. In readings of Jane Eyre as Brontë’s critique of nineteenth-century marriage, one element of doubling that has been considered only tangeltially is that of remarriage. By placing the novel within the novel within the nineteenth-century social practice of doubling I argue that the gothic device of the doppelganger reveals the potentially powerless subject position of both first and second wife in that Brontë contstitues Jane as Bertha’s alter ego, rather than the other way around”

“Nicole A. Diederich, Gothic Doppelgangers and Discourse: Examining the Doubling Practice of (Re)Marriage in “Jane Eyre” • Issue 6.3 • Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.” Www.ncgsjournal.com, www.ncgsjournal.com/issue63/diederich.html.
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  • Historical Context:

“A woman of twenty-one becomes an independent human creature, capable of holding and administering property to any amount; or, if she can earn monet, she may appropriate her earnings freely to any purpose she thinks good…But if she unites herseld to a man, the law immediately steps in, and she finds herseld legislated for, and her condition of life suddenly and entirely changed. Whatever age she may be of, she is again considered an infant – she is again under ‘resonable restraint’ – she loses her seperate existence and is merged in that of her husband. “In short,” says Judge Hurlburt, “a woman is courted and wedded as an angel, and yet denied the dignity of a rational moral being ever after”. “

Smith, Barbara Leigh, and Boston Public Library. A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women : Together with a Few Observations Thereon. Internet Archive, London : Holyoake and Co., 1856, archive.org/details/briefsummaryinpl00smit/page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed 5 Dec. 2023.

Garrett, Edmund. “The Figure of Bertha Mason (1897).” Illustration of Bertha Mason, The British Library.