Jane Eyre Theme Reflection (Part 2)

Religion is also an aspect mentioned often throughout the story. Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between the 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 ideas about faith and principles 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 to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Helen Burns’ 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 needs for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to herself.

Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. She ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst’s, nor does it require a 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 onto worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.

(To be continued…)