Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
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).
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.
