Confined and Classified: Female Madness and Institutional Power in Jane Eyre and The Woman in White

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) represent female madness through spaces of confinement and systems of institutional authority. Although the novels differ in genre and narrative technique, both question the authority through which women are classified as mentally unstable and subsequently deprived of autonomy. This article examines Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White to argue that female madness is represented not merely as an individual psychological condition but as a category produced and reinforced through patriarchal, domestic, legal, and medical structures. In Brontë’s novel, Bertha’s confinement in a concealed room on the third floor of Thornfield removes her from social visibility and limits her narrative presence, while Rochester’s account of her condition becomes the dominant explanation of her identity. Collins develops the relationship between madness and institutional power more explicitly through the asylum, where Anne Catherick is associated with insanity and Laura Fairlie is subsequently confined under Anne’s identity. This substitution exposes the vulnerability of institutional classification and demonstrates how the designation of madness can become an instrument for controlling female identity and autonomy. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, Foucauldian approaches to madness and disciplinary power, and historical perspectives on Victorian confinement, this article compares the two novels to examine how institutional and patriarchal authority regulate women’s bodies, identities, mobility, and testimony. It argues that confinement and classification operate as interconnected mechanisms of power: the classification of women as mentally unstable legitimizes their confinement, while confinement further undermines their ability to define and defend their own identities. Ultimately, both novels expose the precarious relationship between female identity, narrative authority, and institutional power in Victorian culture.