Merits of Distance Reading?

[Pompey Bum]

Congratulations Kiki!

And Mona, you are indeed a star and a treasure. Your quick wit is one of the best parts of this site. (Plus you laugh at my jokes! )

[mona amon]

Ooh thanks, Pompey!

[kiki1982]

May we all rest in eternal peace. Maybe you can try to get on his ignore list as well, Mona.

I don't think the skin colour itself is an issue in Bertha's case. By the time we meet her she's purple , but when Rochester first sees her -

Whatever the meaning of 'dark' here, I doubt if it carried any racial imputation. Both Blanche Ingram and Bertha are considered by everyone to be suitable marriage material for an Englishman 'of good race'. Bertha's mixed race did not show in her face and was therefore not outwardly important. However, there's no getting away from Charlotte's unconsciously and casually racist (and often xenophobic) attitudes which get revealed in the text.

Everything that is said about Bertha implies a faulty genetic inheritance from her mother, 'the Creole'. From her she gets her alcoholism, her excessive sexual appetite, her insanity. There is really no point in making the mother a 'Creole' unless she was unconsciously linking her race with the other vices which she ascribes to her.

This attitude can be found again a few paragraphs later -


The West Indies - sulphur steam, bloody, mosquitoes, screams - a hellish atmosphere which is cleansed and refreshed by a fresh wind blowing from Europe.

Rochester may not have despised Bertha because of her race, but it seems like Charlotte did.

EDIT: All the Jane Eyre Quotes are from Chapter 27.

Haha, purple, tanned indeed.

I have been reading this.

It seems that back in the colonies the climate was considered to generally increase promiscuity (among white men and black or whatever women). That's interesting, because I had read before about the alleged promiscuity of Caribbean women (a view also expressed by Rochester) which can then give rise to madness, but it seems to have been a general view. It all started back in the 17th century apparently when the island was primarily populated by pirates, smugglers, deportees etc., i.e. depraved people, and later when the first plantation owners came, they had lots of natural disasters, which were presented as God's disapproval. Kind of Sodom and Gomorrah. Obviously the lack of white women didn't help white men to control their urges .

That's quite an amusing gloss on the 'fresh wind from Europe'. I wonder how that view reflects on Rochester subsequent debauchery, actually...

The increase in libido among white men and the lack of white women gave rise to a mixed-race population that ended up in 1820, when you can estimate Rochester travelled there, as 50-50 free and enslaved. Some white men cared for their mixed race children and gave them a good education, also bought them free. Others didn't and took no interest or favoured some and others not. Anyway, it seems that if you were mixed race, the whiter and more Europeanised you were, so the stronger your connection with your white heritage, the higher your standing in society was. Only by 1820, this thing starts to change, as there is a drop in whites travelling to the West Indies and a rise in mixed race people marrying and producing more mixed race children. So they start forming their own community (also appointing their own lobbyist in Westminster in 1823) and start separating their lot from the white community which they had connected themselves with before.

Incredibly, even slaves could inherit.

Although whites marrying mixed race people was a bit controversial, I can't help think Bertha was probably white. Old Mason (Richard's father) took a mixed-race 'nurse' (read mistress), herself a child of a white father and at least partially black mother, had white-looking children and then tried to look for a white man 'of good race' as Rochester says, thus reducing the black part in their ancestry. A white man wanting to marry Bertha in Jamaica would have been difficult to find, because most of them took mistresses and there weren't enough white men around. The ratio that stuck into my mind was 10 to 1, bu I may be wrong.

Mona amon, you are a star. I kept thinking that if Bertha was from a wealthy background, in Rochester's society, wouldn't that imply she was white? Simply because even on the colonies, people of mixed races or dark pigmentation would not be so formally presented to someone new, like Rochester, as a matter of racial respectability in those days?

Being mixed race seems not to have been such a problem over there, until the abolition of the salve trade, when differences started to be more defined (ironically). Even back home people seem to have been sympathetic, although that may also have been due to views of promiscuousness. The family itself became more important after Victoria's accession to the throne, so illegitimate children were not so welcome anymore, compared to in the 18th century, I'm thinking.
But it seems that back in the colonies mixed-race people were prevalent and some of them were prominent and reasonably rich, because their father had accepted them, given them an education (in England) and also a profession/an inheritance. In itself it's probably not entirely strange that she would have been presented to a white newcomer.