Bertha Mason — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Bertha Mason
Characters
What you need to know
How Brontë presents Bertha Mason, and how the character develops across the text: Rochester's hidden first wife, seen only through others' eyes, and the different ways she has been read.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart', 'it was a discoloured face—it was a savage face', 'the lips were swelled and dark', 'the foul German spectre—the Vampyre', 'it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal', 'a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane', 'Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations', 'the true daughter of an infamous mother', 'her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity', 'She was a big woman, and had long black hair', 'she lay smashed on the pavement'.
Form: Bertha never speaks for herself, and is seen only through Jane's fear and Rochester's account.
Context: a Creole heiress from Jamaica, readings of her as Jane's dark double and as a victim of empire and of her husband, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells her story.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
