Theme Of Colonialism In Jane Eyre

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Recommended: Racism in the tempest play

Incidentally, Bertha Mason also reflects a side of colonialism, though Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre two centuries after The Tempest was produced. Beginning in the eighteenth century, British imperialism led to more racialized thought. Furthermore, the Europeans came to view new lands as "hostile environments" (Charters 216). Bertha is from Spanish Town, Jamaica in the West Indies. Her mother was a Creole—a person of mixed European and black race from the Caribbean. Consequently, Bertha is half-Creole and half-white. Though she does grow up aristocratically, she is still marked with the stigma of not being completely white. She is even described by Rochester as being "dark" (Brontë 395), and when Jane describes her to Rochester, she remarks on her face, saying, "it was a savage face… purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes" (371). …show more content…

When Bertha started to act insane in Jamaica, Rochester brought her back to Britain, because a "wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke… and the air grew pure… The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty" (399). Rochester 's experience of the wind from his home country suggests that he believes it is superior to Jamaica, a viewpoint that Jean Rhys supports in her 1966 book about Bertha 's early life Wide Sargasso Sea. There is a school of thought that "human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism" (Lerner 278). If so, it is possible that with the pre-existing racism of the day that Rochester saw Bertha as less-than a person because of her heritage, beginning her descent into

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