Ø Love Versus Autonomy
Jane Eyre is very much the story of a quest to be
loved. Jane searches, not just for romantic love, but also for a sense of being
valued, of belonging. Thus Jane says to Helen Burns: “to gain some real
affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would
willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me,
or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest”
(Chapter 8). Yet, over the course of the book, Jane must learn how to gain love without sacrificing
and harming herself in the process.
Her fear of losing her autonomy motivates her refusal of
Rochester’s marriage proposal. Jane believes that “marrying” Rochester while he
remains legally tied to Bertha would mean rendering herself a mistress and sacrificing
her own integrity for the sake of emotional gratification. On the other hand,
her life at Moor House tests her in the opposite manner. There, she enjoys
economic independence and engages in worthwhile and useful work, teaching the
poor; yet she lacks emotional sustenance. Although St. John proposes marriage,
offering her a partnership built around a common purpose, Jane knows their
marriage would remain loveless.
Nonetheless, the events of Jane’s stay at Moor House are
necessary tests of Jane’s autonomy. Only after proving her self-sufficiency to
herself can she marry Rochester and not be asymmetrically dependent upon him as
her “master.” The marriage can be one between equals. As Jane says: “I am my
husband’s life as fully as he is mine. . . . To be together is for us to be at
once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. . . . We are precisely
suited in character—perfect concord is the result” (Chapter 38).
Ø Religion
Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance
between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and
attention to her body. She encounters three main religious figures: Mr.
Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each represents a model of
religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith
and principle, and their practical consequences.
Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that
Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr.
Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging
his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations
and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly hair of one of
Jane’s classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of
course, Brocklehurst’s proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his
hypocritical support of his own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of
the Lowood students shows Brontë’s wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen
Burns’s meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too
passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for
it.
Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of
Christian behavior. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme
self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her emotional deeds for the
fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require
her to be disloyal to her own self.
Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion,
she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God.
When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As
she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her survival in the hands of
God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochester’s lustful immorality, and
she refuses to consider living with him while church and state still deem him
married to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the
only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what
she knows would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27).
Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual
understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst’s, nor does it
require retreat from the everyday world as Helen’s and St. John’s religions do.
For Jane, religion helps curb immoderate passions, and it spurs one on to
worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full
self-knowledge and complete faith in God.
Ø Social Class
Jane Eyre is critical of Victorian England’s
strict social hierarchy. Brontë’s exploration of the complicated social
position of governesses is perhaps the novel’s most important treatment of this
theme. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure
of ambiguous class standing and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for
the characters around her. Jane’s manners, sophistication, and education are
those of an aristocrat, because Victorian governesses, who tutored children in
etiquette as well as academics, were expected to possess the “culture” of the
aristocracy. Yet, as paid employees, they were more or less treated as
servants; thus, Jane remains penniless and powerless while at Thornfield.
Jane’s understanding of the double standard crystallizes when she becomes aware
of her feelings for Rochester; she is his intellectual, but not his social,
equal. Even before the crisis surrounding Bertha Mason, Jane is hesitant to
marry Rochester because she senses that she would feel indebted to him for
“condescending” to marry her. Jane’s distress, which appears most strongly in
Chapter 17, seems to be Brontë’s critique of Victorian class attitudes.
Jane herself speaks out against class prejudice at certain
moments in the book. For example, in Chapter 23 she chastises Rochester: “Do
you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and
heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!
And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made
it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.” However, it
is also important to note that nowhere in Jane Eyre are
society’s boundaries bent. Ultimately, Jane is only able to marry Rochester as
his equal because she has almost magically come into her own inheritance from
her uncle.
Ø Gender Relations
Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome
oppression. In addition to class hierarchy, she must fight against patriarchal
domination—against those who believe women to be inferior to men and try to
treat them as such. Three central male figures threaten her desire for equality
and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester, and St. John Rivers. All three
are misogynistic on some level. Each tries to keep Jane in a submissive
position, where she is unable to express her own thoughts and feelings. In her
quest for independence and self-knowledge, Jane must escape Brocklehurst,
reject St. John, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry
as equals. This last condition is met once Jane proves herself able to
function, through the time she spends at Moor House, in a community and in a
family. She will not depend solely on Rochester for love and she can be
financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel’s end and
thus dependent upon Jane to be his “prop and guide.” In Chapter 12, Jane
articulates what was for her time a radically feminist philosophy:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel
just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their
efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint,
too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is
narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought
to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on
the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at
them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced
necessary for their sex.
Ø Fire and Ice
Fire
and ice appear throughout Jane
Eyre. The former represents Jane’s passions, anger, and spirit, while the
latter symbolizes the oppressive forces trying to extinguish Jane’s vitality.
Fire is also a metaphor for Jane, as the narrative repeatedly associates her
with images of fire, brightness, and warmth. In Chapter 4, she likens her mind
to “a ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring.” We can recognize
Jane’s kindred spirits by their similar links to fire; thus we read of
Rochester’s “flaming and flashing” eyes (Chapter 26). After he has been
blinded, his face is compared to “a lamp quenched, waiting to be relit”
(Chapter 37).
Images
of ice and cold, often appearing in association with barren landscapes or
seascapes, symbolize emotional desolation, loneliness, or even death. The
“death-white realms” of the arctic that Bewick describes in his History of British Birds parallel Jane’s physical and spiritual
isolation at Gateshead (Chapter 1). Lowood’s freezing temperatures—for example,
the frozen pitchers of water that greet the girls each morning—mirror Jane’s
sense of psychological exile. After the interrupted wedding to Rochester, Jane
describes her state of mind: “A Christmas frost had come at mid-summer: a white
December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts
crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud . .
. and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves
between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in
wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead. . . .” (Chapter 26). Finally, at Moor
House, St. John’s frigidity and stiffness are established through comparisons
with ice and cold rock. Jane writes: “By degrees, he acquired a certain
influence over me that took away my liberty of mind. . . . I fell under a
freezing spell” (Chapter 34). When St. John proposes marriage to Jane, she
concludes that “[a]s his curate, his comrade, all would be right. . . . But as
his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced
to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly
and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after
vital—this would be unendurable” (Chapter 34).
