The use of the "double" or "second self" in literature is a tool often used to represent hidden or repressed aspects of the main character's identity. “The figure of the literary double extends from the Romantic period to the present day. It went from supernatural origins, harbingers of evil and death, to an element of individual psychology and a domestic trait” (Miller 416). By examining the doubling between and within the characters of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I consider the different representations of the feminine gender and the way in which Jane's doubles, Bertha Mason, Helen Burns and Mrs Reed, contribute to the construction of the gender of Jane. love can be seen as a measure to establish one's identity as a woman in a society in which women are expected to be submissive. In order to maintain her autonomy, Jane must explore her true inner self. Karl Miller argues, in his book Doubles: Studies in Literary History, that “doubles can appear to come from without as a form of possession, or from within as a form of projection” (Miller 416). While Bertha Mason appears in the book as a minor character, the figure of Bertha has acquired various meanings through numerous analyzes of Jane Eyre. The argument has often been made that Bertha is actually Jane's double who expresses Jane's repressed anger against the constraints of gender and patriarchy in the Victorian era. Claire Rosenfield says that “the novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological doubles can either juxtapose or duplicate two characters; one represents the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalizes the free, uninhibited and often criminal self” (Rosenfield 328). For example, disti...... middle of paper ......y, love and independence.Works CitedBrontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000.Lerner, Laurence. “Bertha and the Critics” 19th Century Literature, Vol. 44, no. 3 (December 1989), pp. 273-300 Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in literary history. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Print Rosenfield, Claire. Daedalus, Vol. 92, no. 2, Perspectives on the novel (spring 1963), pp. 326-344Thomas, Ronald CHAPTER The Publicity of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: A Case Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Worhol, Robyn R. “Double Gender, Double Gender in Jane Eyre and Villette.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, no. 4, 19th century (fall 1996), pp. 857-875