4 ideas
Antoinette is a Creole heiress in 1830s Jamaica. Freed former slaves burn her family's estate, Coulibri, and her mother, Annette, is driven into confinement and abuse. A penniless younger English son, the unnamed Rochester, marries Antoinette for her £30,000 dowry, which English law gives to him outright, then turns against her, renames her Bertha, and locks her in the attic of an English house, where she dreams of setting it on fire.
Rochester's belief that Antoinette carries inherited madness comes from a vindictive informant, Daniel Cosway. That belief justifies isolating her, stripping her of her money and her home, and confining her. The breakdown this treatment produces is then presented as proof of the original diagnosis, so the label creates the condition it claims only to describe.
When Rochester insists on calling Antoinette 'Bertha', he replaces her identity with one he authored and can control. She recognizes the act, saying 'Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else'.
After the 1833 Emancipation Act, white Creoles are despised from both sides. Black Jamaicans mock Antoinette as a 'white cockroach', and the English treat her as not truly white or English. Seeing her as caught between a fallen planter class and a metropole that disowns it explains her lack of any protector, which makes her easy to dispossess.