Big Bertha

So Bertha is a character that I question a lot.  I wonder if she is just a character to spice up the book or if there is a larger meaning to her that Charlotte Bronte wanted preach.  I read a little more about it online from other people's opinions and a lot of what I read said that she is a symbol for wives in the Victorian time era or women in general.  One opinion I read had said that she represented women, because women back then weren't looked at as workers they were looked at as precious objects that shouldn't be able to do anything.  I can definitely see this, because Bertha is locked up in the attic and not allowed to come out.  Another opinion that I read was this:

"For Charlotte Brontë, Bertha seems to become a strange kind of alter ego. Bertha is rejected by the man who was supposed to love her; Charlotte never married and fell in love with an unattainable man. Bertha is kept prisoner in a lonely house on the English moors; Charlotte traveled a little, but spent most of her life shut up in her father’s house in Yorkshire, away from any big-city culture. Bertha is only able to show her powers to the world in what seem like insane, destructive ways; women novelists were common but their works were often considered ridiculous and their abilities inferior to those of men. The parallels are too strong to ignore, and perhaps Bertha does double-duty, both representing the restrictions that Charlotte felt and becoming Charlotte’s wish-fulfillment of breaking through those restrictions to inspire fear and awe."  ---http://www.shmoop.com/jane-eyre/bertha-mason.html

I find this strangely coincidental...

Another thing that I wondered about was when Bertha came into Jane's room and tore apart her wedding veil.  A lot of people had suggested that this was a warning to Jane about Rochester; the liberty that Jane would lose if she married him.