Barbaric Woman

"With an attempt to distinguish between the old and the new, Charlotte Bronte creates the character of Bertha Mason as the exhibition of female repression and desire frequently found in the East. Bertha Rochester is the emblem of Eastern society, one which the British see as static and barbaric, and Jane Eyre is representative of the Western Civilization. In Reaches of Empire, Suvendrini Perera argues that "if the barely human prisoner caged in the Thornfield attic is the truest expression of women's anger and aspiration . . . [it is overlooked] that she is also the racial Other incarnate - a bestial, violent creature with an inordinate hexual appetite, caught in the colonized West Indies and confined 'for her own good' by a master who has appropriated both her body and her wealth""

"This article discusses Seneca's use of the myth of Medea to explore the relationships between Rome and its borderlands. In his Medea, Seneca's characters express anxieties about the consequences of cultural conflict that reflect larger Senecan concerns about imperialism. While leaving the periphery clearly affects the emigrant, as indicated by Medea's changing perceptions of her own character, bringing the periphery to the center also changes the nature of the center. Such concerns ultimately reveal trepidation about the loss of traditional Roman identity in the quest for imperial power and in the desire for the wealth of peripheral lands."