The Madwoman in the Attic

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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A dark faceless shape tears a wedding veil in a candlelit white room as a woman reaches toward it. — In the white room of the inn, a heavy shape crossed without opening any door and tore the wedding veil clean down the middle, leaving it at her feet.

A small procession walks down a long cold corridor toward a locked door, with a young woman at the rear. — Rochester led the company up past the third story of Thornfield, and at the end of the corridor stood a door with a double lock.

Tall dark woman with wild hair in a cold attic room, lit only by a single candle. — A tall, wild-haired woman stood at the center of a low attic room, her eyes burning with the only light the chamber held, while Jane watched from the threshold.

The night before I was to be married, I lay awake in the white room at the inn, unable to quiet the strange tremor in my chest. I rose to look at the veil I had hung, the long veil I had once spurned and now chose with my whole will. The candle guttered. A draft moved through the room that I had not opened. Before I could turn, a shape was there — heavy, dark, deliberate — and in a single wrenching motion, it seized the veil and tore it clean down the middle. I saw the face, briefly, before it fled. It was not a dream. The fabric lay at my feet in two pieces, like a country divided. I gathered them in silence. I told no one what I had seen, only that the veil was ruined and must be replaced. Rochester, when I confessed it in the morning, brushed it off with a strange, half-smiling urgency. He said nothing of consequence. He did not look at me. I should have known then. A man who hides his alarm is a man who knows what his secret will cost.

At the altar, before the clergyman had finished the first prayer, a voice broke in. A solicitor stood forward, and with him a man I had seen once before — Mr. Mason, Rochester's guest from the West Indies, who had arrived and departed so strangely in the days before. He declared, in a voice I will not soon forget, that Rochester had a wife still living. The church did not fall silent; it seemed to contract around me, every sound sharpening. Rochester did not deny it. His face went the color of old bone. He turned, after a long moment, and bade the whole company — me, Mason, the parson, the witnesses — to follow him. He led us up through the house I thought I knew, past the third story, into a corridor I had never been allowed to enter. At the end of it, a door with a double lock. He opened it.

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What was inside was not a room of the kind I had imagined. It was a cage, and in it a woman. She was tall, dark, savage of aspect, her hair black and wild about her shoulders, her eyes burning with the kind of light I have seen only once before — the night she, though I did not know it then, came to my chamber and bent her face close to mine. She was Bertha Mason, Rochester's wife, the daughter of a Jamaica planter, mad since before our acquaintance began. Grace Poole, the woman I had suspected and dismissed a dozen times, was her keeper. The laughter I had heard through the corridors, the fire that had burned in Rochester's room, the attack upon Mr. Mason — all of it fell into place like the closing of a lock. The secret of Thornfield had been a single secret, and it had been standing over my bed all along.

Rochester spoke, then, and tried to justify himself. He spoke of a marriage made in his youth, of a woman whose family had bound him to her, of pity, of madness, of years. He begged me to stay. He offered me a life in France, half his income, a name that was not his to give. He wept. He raved. He called on Heaven to witness his wrongs. I listened. I pitied him, in the way one pities a man struck by the very ruin he has built and hidden. But I did not bend. I told him plainly that I was not a lawyer to argue his case, nor a confessor to ease his conscience, nor a woman who would consent to be made half of a lie. I said that I had been given myself to govern, and that no passion of his, however eloquent, could induce me to throw that governance away. The carriage waited. I stepped into it. My heart was a struck match; I would not let it light the whole of my life.