Book Review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Power of Redemptive Suffering

Jane Eyre, written almost two hundred years ago, has, by its distance in time, a kind of enchantment caused by its unfamiliarity, with the elements of country manors, social propriety, hierarchical castes and its general lack of modern technology lending to it a mystery and appeal akin to fantasy worlds. J.R.R. Tolkien similarly recognized “the enchantment of distance, especially of distant time” in the futuristic story The Time-Machine by H.G. Wells.[1] It can thus be enjoyable for this reason alone, as well as for the sheer edification of its artistic creativity and elegant prose; nevertheless, its greatest relevance to the modern world, or to any time in the future, is due ultimately to its exemplification of spiritual and moral principles which are, by their eternal truth, both universal and perennial.

The childhood of Jane Eyre focuses on the complex and often conflicted relationships between truth and humility, justice and mercy. In her strong sense of justice and love of the truth, Jane rightly hates the evil treatment she receives from her guardian Mrs. Reed and housemates at Gateshead, as well as the puritanical cruelty and hypocrisy of Mr. Brocklehurst, owner of Lowood Institution to which Jane is sent. Helen Burns, Jane’s schoolfriend, clarifies for Jane that, by responding to those who harm her in the same spirit of malice and reciprocity with which she was harmed, she is becoming like those she hates and letting their actions determine her own. For this reason, while Jane’s lack of humility and mercy leads her to say, “When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again”, Helen can respond, “It is not violence that best overcomes hate – nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury”, offering her instead the example of Christ’s love to follow.[2] While many literary critics have seen in Jane’s impetuosity and rebelliousness an anti-Christian theme, the character of Helen and the admiration Jane holds for her disputes such a view. As Jeanette Flood writes, “God cares about [Jane] and her salvation; hence obeying his laws shows not only proper love of self but also love for God. Brontë is depicting a struggle against temptation, not justifying selfishness.”[3] Helen thus counseled her, “Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement; the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you.”[4]

After her time at Lowood, first as a student and finally for two years as a teacher, Jane begins what will be the most impactful portion of her life, that which will reveal her true vocation while also affording the strongest temptations she will have to face. The center of this experience is Mr. Rochester, whose passionate, intellectual and mysterious nature ignites Jane’s affection, in whom she sees a truly complementary companion and friend and her first real chance at fulfillment in life. She thus desires above all things to be his wife, yet, by this authentically good desire, she is also given a test to determine the order of her love: Mr. Rochester as husband, or Mr. Rochester as idol? The love of God above all things, not the exclusion of lesser goods but in prioritization above them, is shown to be an overarching theme of Jane Eyre, one which was paramount for Brontë herself.[5]

In his Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas taught,

Now the good which is difficult or arduous, considered as good, is of such a nature as to produce in us a tendency to it, which tendency pertains to the passion of hope; whereas, considered as arduous or difficult, it makes us turn from it; and this pertains to the passion of despair.[6]

Mr. Rochester, explaining his melancholic condition to Jane, thus equates remorse with despair, in that, by holding to the remorse he feels for his past sins, he has withdrawn from an arduous good, namely purity and the joy that accompanies it. He thus fell into one of the consequences of despair, by which rejection of the good as too difficult to attain leads to fascination with a “mutable good” and the vices that can accompany its improper enjoyment.[7] While he spurns Jane’s attempts to correct him, counselling him that repentance was the “cure” of remorse and that persisting in sinful habits would lead him to only “degenerate further” into misery and corruption,[8] he also acknowledges his faults and desires to reform himself, admitting that he is “a trite commonplace sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty dissipations with which the rich and worthless try to put on life”.[9]

Although he recognizes his ulcerous remorse and refusal to repent of it as the source of his despair, Mr. Rochester still seeks distraction in created goods, whether sensual pleasures or even the consolation of a spouse, instead of true interior conversion. For this reason, before true conversion, he must undergo suffering, great in proportion to his sins. Contrary to “Freudian and feminist critics” who have seen his abasements and humiliations as making him into an “emasculated (and ‘symbolically castrated’) wreck”, he in fact becomes, according to Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, “fully a man,” with suffering not destroying his nature or dignity but regenerating them through a purgative “purification”.[10] G.K. Chesterton provides a brilliant and witty analysis of Mr. Rochester: “And certainly Mr. Rochester... was simply individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must merely be an ass.”[11]  

Exemplifying a truly virtuous woman and potential wife, Jane guides Mr. Rochester to virtue, expecting from him the dignity and honesty she deserves while still respecting his masculinity and privacy. It was, as she later explains, “my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority… and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.”[12] In this way, she correctly fulfills St. Paul’s command for wives to “be subject to your husbands, as it behoveth in the Lord.” (Col 3:18) Nevertheless, after discovering his secret wife, she pronounces that to obey his request for her to become his mistress would indeed be wicked.[13] Finally pronouncing that to obey his request for her to become his mistress would indeed be wicked,[14] she then offers him a powerfully Christian counsel for how to maintain interior peace and find salvation even after the lost opportunity of a happy marriage: “Do as I do: trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there… I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil.”[15]

Later, Jane remarks, quoting from Philippians 4:7, that the Christian life should confer “that peace of God which passeth all understanding”,[16] and her witness to Mr. Rochester just before their parting is one which any Christian, and especially those living in the modern world of relativism, would do well to heed:

The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?[17]

Fleeing from her newfound home and true love, clinging only to the security of a clear conscience, Jane wanders in the wilderness. During her exodus and abandonment to Providence, comforted only by the beauties of Creation and the prayerful assurance of God’s presence then finding shelter only to be turned away by the servant Hannah for appearing to be a beggar, Jane corrected her “rather severely,” saying, “I do think hardly of you… because you just now made it a species of reproach that I had no ‘brass’ and no house… if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”[18] At this house, however, she is finally led to the most miraculous “coincidence” in the story: she stumbles upon three people who just happen to be her long-lost cousins, from whom she learns that an uncle has died and left her a great inheritance which she generously shares with her cousins.[19]

Despite these newfound and unexpected joys, Jane is given another temptation, less ardent but more tenacious than that of Mr. Rochester: to become a missionary and functional wife to her puritanical parson cousin, St. John Rivers (whose name, according to James Bond, is pronounced “Sinjin”). Jane resisted for both similar and dissimilar reasons to her rejection of Mr. Rochester: she upheld the fire of conscience against the fire of Mr. Rochester’s passion, but fought the cold presumption of St. John with the fire of her passion and, ultimately, of her conscience, which saw not only the lack of real love in his marriage proposal, but also the immorality of such a marriage and the effects of a missionary life in India which, due to her physical frailty and unrequited love, would for Jane “be almost equivalent to committing suicide.”[20] In recognition that her true vocation is with Mr. Rochester regardless of its apparent impossibility, Jane admonishes St. John for desiring a marriage based on utility rather than love. As Nicholson explains, “In the end he insists upon an unnatural nature for himself, in direct conflict with itself… The marriage St. John proposes is… in accordance with the unnaturalness of the man himself.”[21]

Although St. John is admired by Jane for his kindness and high principle, his proposal is, according to his sister Diana, “unnatural”.[22] As Eleanor Bourg Nicholson explains, “In the end he insists upon an unnatural nature for himself, in direct conflict with itself… The marriage St. John proposes is… in accordance with the unnaturalness of the man himself.”[23] Jane knew that the pain of suppressing her passionate nature and enflamed conscience beneath St. John’s unsympathetic obligations, lack of marital affection and Calvinistic denigration of the body would lead only to her misery and death.

Like all great stories, Jane Eyre ends with marriage and new life. After learning of the death of Mr. Rochester’s wife and his mutilation in her burning down of Thornfield, Jane was able to harmonize her passion and conscience, returning to her true love, but only marrying him if legitimately and after his own growth in humility and piety through his redemptive sufferings.[24] Through Mr. Rochester’s repentance, Brontë reveals the true heart of the story: the conversion of sinners through suffering and the witness of heroic virtue. His prayer is thus an imitable act of contrition concluding his long spiritual journey: “I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!”[25]

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” at University of Houston, https://uh.edu.

[2] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 75-76.

[3] Jeanette Amestoy Flood, “Eyre of Rebellion?” in Jane Eyre (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 615.

[4] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 91.

[5] Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, “Anatomy of a Hero: Redeeming a ‘Catholic’ Rochester,” in Jane Eyre (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 636.

[6] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 23, a. 2, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 20, a. 1 ad 1, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.

[8] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 174.

[9] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 173.

[10] Nicholson, “Anatomy of a Hero,” 642.

[11] G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913), 27. Kindle.

[12] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 432.

[13] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 400.

[14] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 400.

[15] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 400.

[16] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 442.

[17] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 401.

[18] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 430.

[19] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 484.

[20] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 518.

[21] Nicholson, “Anatomy of a Hero,” 639.

[22] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520.

[23] Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, “Anatomy of a Hero: Redeeming a ‘Catholic’ Rochester,” in Jane Eyre (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 639.

[24] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 557.

[25] Brontë, Jane Eyre, 559-560.