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: an heiress from Jamaica with a Creole mother, readings of her as Jane's dark double and as a victim of her husband, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel that tells her story.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
