Bertha Mason: is she an abused wife, or just "the madwoman in the attic"?

Bertha has become especially famous in literary criticism because her situation
supplied the title and central theory of a major 1979 book of feminist criticism,
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. have She is seen by
critics as a symbolic representation of the trapped Victorian wife, who is
expected never to travel or work outside the house and becomes ever more
frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration and anxiety.Basically, the idea is
that the intensely powerful, passionate, and talented woman who is
seen as crazy and in need of confinement by the world represents the
nineteenth-century woman writer, whose abilities threatened the
dominant good-old-boy literary network. Obviously, this has a lot of
interesting implications for Bertha as a character, for Charlotte Bront as an
author, and for the "Autobiography" of Jane Eyre.In fact, Bertha is such an
intensely powerful character that even as a prisoner in a remote
country house across the ocean from her home, with no friends or
family or resources, everyone around her trembles in their boots when
she gets loose!
For Charlotte Bront, Bertha seems to become a strange kind of alter ego.
Bertha is rejected by the man who was supposed to love her; Charlotte fell in love
with an unattainable man (Constantin Heger). 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 fathers 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 Charlottes wishfulfillment of breaking through those restrictions to inspire fear and awe
Everything we learn about Bertha in Jane Eyre we learn through Rochester as hes
telling the story about her to other people around him. The only things we really
"know for a fact" because we as readers have seen them are that Bertha is
violent toward Rochester and her brother, that shes extremely disturbed in some
way if not actually insane, and that shes kept locked in the attic.