Psychologists, psychiatrist, and others, please check in. What kind of diagnosis

[raccoon]

do you think Bertha Mason Rochester in JANE EYRE would have? :shrug:

[elehhhhna]

1. Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

[Glorfindel]

2. As an unqualified "other," I would have guessed Paranoid Schizophrenia

but that's just a guess. I always thought she was a pitiable character and ill-treated to boot. I was a little scared of her nurse, Grace Poole, whose name I misheard as "Gray Spool" as a child.

[Orrex]

3. Jean Rhys offered an interesting answer to that question

[raccoon]

4. I read her book but don't recall what she said Bertha's problem was. nt

[pitohui]

5. at the time of reading i assumed it was paranoid schizophrenia as i believe many others did too

even into the 1960s it was assumed that paranoid schizophrenia was caused by stress/trauma and (it has been a long time since i read either book) IIRC it was implied in the "wide sargasso sea" that she developed to the point of raving, not being able to tell the diff. between reality and fantasy and so on -- in other words, she was a paranoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies -- it was not then known that this illness is likely caused by genetic factors where you are programmed to get it in early adulthood even if you had just a peachy upbringing

i am just a reader, not any type of person who could give a dx -- but i think a person like that today, there are more possible dx out there -- she could have a schizo-affective order or even a severe case of bipolar syndrome (the type where the person doesn't seem to realize how much they are lying/inventing/imagining stuff) and it would probably still fit the storyline

at the time "jane eyre" was written, there was no good diagnosis, women were just "mad," to describe the woman's condition all the author could really do was describe her symptoms/actions -- plus we're getting it from jane's viewpoint and she seems to find the woman truly a monster

we forget how recently we really had good dx available to offer people, hell, many people today still struggle to get correct psychiatric dx