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Could she really be this happy? This man offers her hope and a new life, but it is all a lie.

She is stuck in-between with an uncertain identity, so when this Rochester figure comes along proposing love she is swept away. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.” And I’ve heard English woman call us white niggers. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. Neither culture would accept Antoinette as one of their own, as she herself recognises: This sounds very similar to the role of the governess, a figure that belonged to no particular class structure. As a white European girl she was raised in Jamaica thus, she is neither fully Jamaican nor European. She is a hybrid, a figure that walks between cultures. What creates this insanity? For Antoinette it is the simple of act of belonging nowhere. Antoinette has a family history of insanity on the maternal side, but, again there is more to it than this. Rhys names the character Antoinette, a name Rochester refuses to use when he learns of her past.

Do you remember that scene in Jane Eyre where Rochester tries to dominate Jane and make her into something else by picking out her clothes? Perhaps Bertha had this but on a more intense scale. What's the answer to his problem? Marry some rich girl and steal all her money and not worry about the consequences, but there more to it than this. As the second son of a rich family, he needed a means of creating his own wealth.

But what drove her to this state? What made her this way? Well the simple answer is a man named Rochester. Bronte describes her as a semi-human, an animal that growls and raves as she stalks the hall of Thornfield like some unidentifiable spectre. Our crazy lunatic isn’t that far from Jane. Jean Rhys has, and she tells it to you in all its traumatic colours.

Bertha Mason is the madwoman in the attic she is the raving lunatic that is Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre,but have you ever stopped to wonder what her side of the story is? Have you ever considered that she may have a tale to tell?