criptions of behavior tell the story. Bertha has been "'rather snappish, but not 'rageous.'" Jane explains that the "maniac bellowed; she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors." Bertha attacks Rochester effectively because she is "a big woman, in stature almost equaling her husband, and corpulent besides," but Rochester "would not strike--he would only wrestle" (Bronte 252), thus demonstrating his sanity and sympathy for the lunatic. Later, Rochester explains that "kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile . . . I repressed the deep antipathy I felt" (Bronte 263).
Bertha's dreadful madness remains Rochester's to bear when Jane leaves Thornfield, as she thinks, for good. He is bound to a wife "at once intemperate and unchaste" (Bronte 264). By the time she returns to Thornfield, now an heiress, the fact of Rochester's "lunatic wife" is common gossip (Bronte 365), especially the wife--"the mad lady . . . cunning as a witch" (369)--has lately torched Thornfield and herself died in the process. Rochester, heroic to the last, tried "to get his mad wife out of her cell" and in a frenzied rescue attempt watches her, "waving her arms" and with "her long
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