Who is Bertha??

             Rochester’s first use of the name Bertha really caught me off guard. I had to reread the passage to understand what was going on, because I thought that Bertha was another character that Rochester was talking to as opposed to his new name for Antoinette. Rochester begins to call her Bertha after he becomes upset that she is supposedly crazy. Antoinette and Rochester have a long discussion about Antoinette’s past and what her Cosway heritage means. Antoinette explains that her past is “forgotten except the lies. Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow” (Rhys 119). This is Antoinette trying to explain to Rochester that she isn’t actually crazy, and giving him context for some of the reasons why she acts as he does.
            Rochester effectively ignores all of this and continues to call Antoinette Bertha. While Antoinette is a quintessentially French name, symbolic of her Creole background and outsider status, Bertha is very English (and kind of plain) sounding. It seems like Rochester is trying to strip away Antoinette’s background and personality and transform her into a perfect English housewife. This is also shown in one of their conversations about her new name. When Antoinette asks Rochester if he will say goodnight to her he says “Certainly I will, my dear Bertha”. To this she pleads “Not Bertha tonight” but when Rochester demands that “On this of all nights, you must be Bertha” she submits to his request (Rhys, 123).
            Renaming your wife is such a weird thing to do, so I was trying to think about reasons why Rochester would do this. First of all, as I’ve mentioned above, he is trying to strip her of her background. Rochester feels alienated in the Caribbean, and gets the sense that everyone knows something he doesn’t. This paranoia is “validated” in Daniel Cosway’s letter to him which explains Antoinette’s supposed insanity, and the giggles and weird glances Rochester receives from the servants. He renames Antoinette Bertha to not only distance her from this world which he has no control over, but also to assert his dominance over her. Rochester married Antoinette to get her money and become independent from his father, so it makes sense that he would feel insecure about this—like she is somehow helping him, and insists that she responds to the name he picked for her as a way to show that he is in charge.


            

Comments

  1. Nice post. I think the point made today in class about how when Rochester continues to call Antoinette Bertha, he essentially missed the main point of her background story and the importance of calling her by her real name. Great job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really think the point of Rochester calling her Bertha in order to assert dominance over her is important. Rochester has a serious complex when it comes to needing to feel like he is in total control. It seems to stem from his background of being the overlooked son. His actions towards Antoinette are really disturbing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kat, I like your argument and I really agree. In trying to rename Antoinette, he is trying to remake her into something she is not: his. The idea of reshaping a living person is not new, however, and it's something that has come up previously in the book in talking of zombies (which in Caribbean practices are living people who have been remade). For all of Rochester's talk of how vile obeah are and Christophine's magic practices were, it's funny how he is doing the first step in a making a zombi ritual...

    ReplyDelete
  4. What I think is sort of ironic, is that even after renaming Antoinette Bertha to Englify (English + fy) her, when they get to England, he never visits her, which I see as representing him not being able to handle looking at a piece of the West Indies.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There's no question that Rochester's renaming of Antoinette is deeply creepy, and it does represent his attempt at dominance, as well as his desire to turn her into "an English girl"--less foreign-seeming, "alien," and strange. But Rhys is maybe also reminding us that this kind of renaming comes along with traditional marriage--just as Antoinette presumably signs over her family name when she signs over her inheritance to Rochester. We never hear her called "Mrs. Rochester" or "Bertha Rochester" in the novel--she's "Bertha Mason" in England, I assume, in order to hide the fact that they are married. But as Woolf points out early in _Mrs. Dalloway_, traditional conventions of marriage and naming do mean that "Clarissa Dalloway" becomes "Mrs. Richard Dalloway." A loss of a personal (and feminine) name is indeed inherent in traditional marriage, and Rhys just gives Rochester and Antoinette/Bertha a more extreme version of this practice (befitting Rochester's more extreme will to dominate her?).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment