Jane Eyre — themes & analysis

Charlotte Brontë's narrator is, in 1847, a new kind of voice in English fiction. Earlier first-person heroines tended toward modesty, exposition, or apology. Brontë's narrator argues, accuses, judges, and contradicts the men who try to define her. She is poor, plain, small, almost entirely without social leverage, and she takes it for granted that she is the moral equal of anyone in the room. The novel is the record of her insisting on that equality, sentence by sentence, against the people who would prefer she did not.

The most famous instance is in the garden at Thornfield, where she has heard, falsely, that Rochester intends to marry Blanche Ingram. "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!... It is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!" The speech is delivered to a man twenty years her senior, her employer, with the legal and economic power to dispose of her at will. She delivers it anyway. The novel does not flinch from the asymmetry; it makes the asymmetry the point.

The voice extends, structurally, to the reader. Jane addresses us directly — "Reader," she calls us, in the way a person speaks at a kitchen table. "Reader, I married him" is the most famous instance, but the pattern runs through the book. She is not performing for the reader; she is taking the reader into confidence. We are being talked to by an adult; we are being treated as adults; the relationship the novel establishes with its reader is the same relationship it argues should exist between Jane and the men who want to define her. Almost every later first-person heroine in English fiction is downstream of this voice.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (Jane confronts Mrs. Reed), Chapter 23 (the speech in the garden), Chapter 38 ("Reader, I married him").

The novel's conclusion is unusual for its period. After the wedding is interrupted by the news that Rochester already has a wife, Jane refuses to live with him as his mistress, even though she loves him and even though he, by his own description, is going mad with despair. She walks out into a rainstorm at dawn with twenty shillings to her name. The refusal is not a piety; it is a calculation. She knows that to accept the position he is offering would be to consent to her own erasure. "I care for myself," she tells him. "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." The line is one of the hardest in nineteenth-century fiction.

She nearly dies on the moors. She is taken in by the Rivers family and offered a different marriage by St. John — not as his lover but as a tool of his missionary work in India. He frankly admits he does not love her; he wants her usefulness. He frames the refusal of his offer as a refusal of God. Jane comes within an inch of accepting. What pulls her back is not, in the first instance, her love for Rochester; it is her recognition that to marry without love would be a different but equally complete kind of erasure. The novel sets up the two refusals deliberately. They are the same refusal in two registers.

She returns to Rochester only after three things have changed. She has inherited twenty thousand pounds from a dead uncle in Madeira, which makes her financially independent. Thornfield has burned down — Bertha set the fire, leapt from the roof, and is dead. Rochester is blind in both eyes and has lost a hand. The reunion happens on terms he can no longer dictate. She has money; she has the legal freedom to marry; he has nothing left to bribe her with. "Reader, I married him," the last chapter begins. The phrase is famous for its tone, but the sentence is also a structural claim. I married him. The grammar carries the argument. The book's argument about what real partnership requires is direct: rough equality of standing, real knowledge of the other person, and the freedom to leave. Jane is not rescued. She rescues.

Where to follow it: Chapter 27 (Jane refuses Rochester), Chapter 35 (Jane refuses St. John), Chapter 38 (the marriage on equal terms).

The discovery of Bertha Mason — Rochester's first wife, kept in the third story of Thornfield for ten years under the care of a paid warden — is among the most discussed reveals in nineteenth-century fiction. She has been read as a gothic plot device, as the dark double of Jane's own buried passions, as a colonial figure whose Caribbean origin and racialized description carry their own indictment of British wealth, and as the figure who saves Jane from a bigamous marriage by setting Thornfield on fire. The novel does not let any single reading exhaust her.

She is also, simply, what Rochester chose to do with a wife he no longer wanted: lock her up and lie about her. The novel is exact about this. He does not divorce her — divorce in 1847 was virtually impossible. He does not seek her treatment. He installs her on the third floor under Grace Poole and travels Europe taking mistresses while pretending he has no wife. He proposes to Jane knowing he is committing bigamy. When the wedding is stopped at the altar, his defense is that Bertha is mad and therefore does not count. Brontë does not let him have that defense. The novel keeps Bertha visible — biting Mason, ripping Jane's wedding veil in two, finally setting the fire that kills her and blinds her husband — and refuses to let her be tidied out of the story.

She is, however, never given her own voice. She does not narrate; she does not speak in any sustained way. The novel describes her in the language of beasts — a "clothed hyena," "purple," with a "bloated" face. The descriptions are of their period, and they are also a problem the novel does not entirely escape. The figure who saves Jane from the bigamous marriage is also the figure the novel cannot bring itself to look at directly. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a century later, would attempt to give her back the voice Jane Eyre denies her. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 1979 book of feminist criticism took its title from Bertha. Jane's first-person voice exists, in part, because another woman's voice is being kept silent in the same house. The novel is the better and harder for not pretending otherwise.

Where to follow it: Chapter 15 (the fire in the bed), Chapter 25 (the figure with the veil), Chapter 26 (the wedding interrupted).

Three kinds of religious authority compete for Jane in the course of the novel, and the novel takes each of them seriously enough to test it. The first is Mr. Brocklehurst, the clergyman who runs Lowood. He preaches mortification of the flesh to the half-starved girls in his charge while his own wife and daughters arrive at the school in velvet and ostrich plumes. He humiliates Jane on a stool in front of the assembled school as a "liar." Brontë's portrait is the novel's most direct attack: institutional Christianity as a cover for vanity. He is based on the Reverend William Carus Wilson, proprietor of the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where two of Charlotte's older sisters contracted the tuberculosis that killed them.

The second is Helen Burns. Helen, dying of consumption, endures floggings for a blot in her copybook with a stoic Christian patience that bewilders Jane. She tells Jane that some injustices have to be borne rather than answered, and that resentment is itself a kind of bondage. She dies in the same bed as Jane, holding her hand. Jane loves her and does not become her. Helen's piety is real and beautiful and not one the novel asks Jane to inherit. Jane will respect injustice by naming it; Helen, by absorbing it.

The third is St. John Rivers — the most frightening religious figure in the novel because he is the most coherent. Beautiful, glacial, consumed by a missionary calling to India, he proposes to Jane on the explicit grounds that she would be useful to his work. He frames her hesitation as backsliding; he tells her, in effect, that to refuse him is to refuse God. Jane comes within an inch of yielding. What pulls her back is the realization that what St. John is offering is not God but his own ambition with God's vocabulary on it.

By the end of the novel Jane is still a believing Christian. Brontë does not satirize her into atheism; the book takes faith seriously enough to want to keep it. What it rejects is religion as a weapon — Brocklehurst's vanity, St. John's coercion. What it preserves is Helen's quiet integrity and Jane's own, harder version of the same thing. The novel ends with St. John's letter from India. Brontë lets him have that ending. She does not let him have Jane.

Where to follow it: Chapter 7 (Brocklehurst at Lowood), Chapter 9 (Helen Burns dies), Chapter 35 (the refusal of St. John).

Jane Eyre uses the gothic vocabulary of its period — locked rooms, mysterious laughter, midnight figures with veils, a house that burns down — but the gothic in the novel is never just atmosphere. Each supernatural pressure forces a moral choice. The red-room at Gateshead, where ten-year-old Jane is locked in alone and faints from terror at what she takes for a ghostly light, is the chapter that establishes her capacity for outright defiance; she emerges willing, days later, to tell Mrs. Reed the truth about her treatment. The gothic in this novel is the test that produces the character.

The middle of the book is built on a sustained gothic withholding. The strange laugh on the third floor, attributed to Grace Poole. The fire in Rochester's bed. Mason's bitten, stabbed shoulder. The figure that comes into Jane's room on the eve of the wedding, tries on her veil, and rips it in two. The reader and Jane are both being asked, chapter by chapter, to register that something is wrong in this house. When the answer arrives at the altar — the wife in the attic — it is not a twist. It is the resolution of a moral pressure the gothic atmosphere has been applying since Chapter 11. The supernatural turned out to be social all along: a woman locked away because her husband would not face what he had married.

The novel's most explicit supernatural moment comes near the end. Jane, on the verge of yielding to St. John's marriage, hears Rochester's voice calling her name across the moors — "Jane! Jane! Jane!" — at exactly the moment, she will later learn, he was crying her name aloud at Ferndean. She answers, "I am coming!" and breaks free of St. John's influence. Brontë does not explain the moment naturalistically. She lets it stand as what it is — a sympathy across distance, the kind of bond the rest of the novel has been arguing for.

The book closes the gothic frame deliberately. Thornfield burns. Bertha is dead. Rochester is blind and maimed but alive. The supernatural voice has done its work. Jane comes home not to a haunted house but to a damaged man, in a quieter house deeper in the woods, on terms the gothic atmosphere is no longer needed to enforce. The marriage at Ferndean is, by gothic standards, almost domestic.

Where to follow it: Chapter 2 (the red-room), Chapter 25 (the figure with the veil), Chapter 35 (the voice on the moors).