Jane Eyre

Themes · Jane Eyre

The ideas it keeps circling back to.

1. 01

   Independence and Self-Respect

   Jane's entire journey is built around the question of whether a woman with no social standing can insist on her own dignity. Every major decision she makes, leaving Lowood, leaving Rochester, refusing St. John, comes from the same place. She will not trade herself for security or love or purpose. This was a genuinely radical idea in 1847 and Brontë treats it not as a feminist argument but simply as the natural expression of who Jane is.

2. 02

   Class and Social Position

   The novel is deeply interested in the cruelty of class. Jane is above the servants but below the family and this in-between position causes her constant pain at Gateshead, at Lowood, at Thornfield. Blanche Ingram's treatment of her is a pointed critique of how the upper class uses social hierarchy as a weapon. Rochester's willingness to treat Jane as an equal is one of the reasons she loves him.

3. 03

   Passion vs. Principle

   Rochester represents passion. St. John represents principle. Jane is pulled between them and the novel's argument is that neither extreme is livable. Rochester without principle becomes deception. St. John without passion becomes tyranny. Jane's final choice to return to a humbled Rochester, a man who can no longer dominate her, is the novel's resolution of this tension.

4. 04

   The Madwoman and the Margins

   Bertha Mason is the most discussed character in modern criticism of this novel. Locked in the attic, called mad and animalistic, she is also a Creole woman from the Caribbean whose history Rochester tells entirely from his own perspective. The postcolonial reading of Bertha, most fully developed by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, sees her as the silenced victim of the same colonial and patriarchal systems that nearly crush Jane.

5. 05

   Religion and Conscience

   Three kinds of religion appear in the novel. Brocklehurst uses it as a weapon of control. Helen Burns uses it as a source of genuine peace. St. John uses it as armour against feeling. Jane develops her own version, a private conscience that is not aligned with any institution but that guides every important choice she makes.