Brontë cleverly constructs a female language by giving her heroine a ‘gothic’ imagination. On another level, Jane Eyre tells her ‘Reader’ how she was influenced by this Gothic imagination as a child. The younger Jane wants the book she reads to be ‘‘stored of pictures.” Jane’s imagination, being unlike the one of “contended, happy little children,” and having a nascent, “underdeveloped understanding,” construes the images she finds in “Bewick’s History of British Birds” in her own unique way. For “the fiend pinning down the thief’s back” and the “black horned” things were objects of terror for her. These “half comprehended” but ‘strangely impressive notions are also influenced by Gothic novels like “Pamela” and “Henry, Earl of Moorland” and later “maturing youth” adds “to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give.” Ironically, the Gothic imagination she imbibed through the male authored texts translates into the language in which she tells her story. Her gothic does not solely breach the classical, as Robert Heilman (“Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic”) notes, but it is a medium through which both Brontë and Jane present their feminist story in a female language otherwise unacceptable to the Victorian readership.
Having established this, the Gothic is used through the imagery of enclosed spaces of the house to explore the constrictions placed on the female body and the fear of “female incarceration within domestic spaces” (Smith). Ironically, by using ‘enclosure’ to explain female constrictions, Brontë gives space to the female body in literary texts. The red room incident has multiple symbolic meanings, one of which is the entrapment of Victorian women in the confines of the male dominated space of the house. The “square chamber” with its “red carpet,” “crimson cloth” against the “white” pillows, “snowy” counterpane suggests the entrapment of the Victorian woman as either the angel in the house, or the mad woman in the attic, as having either extreme restraint or passion. Later Jane expresses “the restlessness” which “agitated me to pain” when she is confined to the ‘battlements’ of Thornfield. Given Brontë’s seclusion in her house, and her life as a governess, she writes of what Gilbert and Gubar (”Infection in the Sentence”) call, “the woman writer’s sense of powerlessness” and fears about occupying “incomprehensible spaces.”
The representation of the entrapped female body leads to the issue of suppression of female sexuality. Bertha Mason is the Gothic symbol through which female sexuality and passion are represented. Bertha is described as “a clothed hyena,” the “foul German spectre-the vampyre,” displaying “virile force” and being almost equal to her husband in stature. The intention of this Gothic representation is to show that if a woman was not trapped within the limits of socially approved domesticity, she would be shut behind the “small black door in some Bluebeard’s Castle.” As Elaine Showalter notes (“Charlotte Brontë: Feminine Heroine”) the periodicity of Bertha Mason’s attacks suggest a connection to the menstrual cycle. This is a critique of society which was bent on controlling female sexuality, the expression of which was labelled as ‘madness.’ For, the 19th century physicians “worried” that menstruation “could” cause temporary insanity, making the woman attack people, destroy furniture- just as Bertha Mason ‘apparently ‘ does when she bites her brother Richard Mason, and Jane is called in for help to ensure that this event in recoded in her memory to recount to the ‘Reader.’