Themes (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë weaves together several interconnected themes that explore Victorian society, personal identity, and the struggle for independence and love.
The novel's major themes include the tension between love and autonomy, the search for a balanced religious faith, critiques of social class hierarchy, gender inequality, the quest for home and belonging, and the use of Gothic imagery to express anxiety and uncertainty. These themes interconnect throughout Jane's journey.
Love versus autonomy
One of the central tensions in the novel is Jane's desire for love whilst maintaining her independence and self-respect. Jane's journey is very much about finding a balance between these two needs.
Jane's quest for love and belonging
Jane searches throughout the novel not just for romantic love, but for a sense of being valued and of belonging. She expresses this desire powerfully when she tells Helen Burns that she would willingly endure extreme physical suffering to gain genuine affection from someone she truly loves, whether that be Miss Temple or another person she values (Chapter 8). This demonstrates how desperately Jane craves emotional connection and validation.
Jane must learn an important lesson: she can gain love without sacrificing herself or compromising her integrity in the process. True love should not require self-destruction or the abandonment of one's principles.
The marriage dilemma
Jane's fear of losing her autonomy becomes particularly clear when she refuses Rochester's marriage proposal whilst he remains legally married to Bertha. Jane believes that marrying Rochester under these circumstances would reduce her to a mistress, sacrificing her own integrity for emotional gratification. She would be rendering herself dependent and morally compromised.
Interestingly, her time at Moor House presents the opposite problem. There, Jane enjoys economic independence and engages in worthwhile, useful work teaching the poor. Yet despite this financial and practical self-sufficiency, she lacks emotional sustenance. Although St. John proposes marriage and offers her a partnership built around a common religious purpose, Jane knows their marriage would be loveless and unfulfilling.
Tests of autonomy at Moor House
The events at Moor House serve as necessary tests of Jane's autonomy and self-sufficiency. Only after proving to herself that she can function independently can she marry Rochester without becoming asymmetrically dependent upon him as her 'master'. The marriage must be one between equals.
Jane's Vision of Marriage as Partnership
Jane articulates this perfectly when she 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).
This vision of marriage as a partnership between equals who maintain their individual freedom was radical for the Victorian period.
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 who each represent different models of faith: 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.
Mr. Brocklehurst and evangelical hypocrisy
Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism, claiming to be purging his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations (like ordering that a girl's naturally curly hair be cut straight) is entirely un-Christian.
His hypocrisy is particularly evident when we consider that Brocklehurst's proscriptions are difficult to follow, whilst 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 and passive Christianity
Helen Burns's meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own. Whilst Jane loves and admires Helen, she cannot accept Helen's complete submission to suffering and injustice. Helen's faith teaches patience and acceptance, but Jane's spirited nature requires a more active engagement with the world.
St. John Rivers and ambitious Christianity
Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of Christian behaviour. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her emotional needs for the fulfilment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to her own self. His form of religion demands complete self-denial without emotional reward.
Jane's middle ground
Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her survival in the hands of God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochester's lustful immorality, and she refuses to consider living with him whilst he is married to another woman.
Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what she knows would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27). Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst's, nor does it require 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 on to worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.
Social class
Jane Eyre is highly critical of Victorian England's strict social hierarchy. Brontë's exploration of the complicated social position of governesses is perhaps the novel's most important treatment of this theme.
The governess's ambiguous position
Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure of ambiguous class standing and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for the characters around her. Jane's manners, sophistication, and education are those of an aristocrat, because Victorian governesses, who tutored children in etiquette as well as academics, were expected to possess the 'culture' of the aristocracy.
However, as paid employees, governesses were more or less treated as servants. Thus, Jane remains penniless and powerless whilst at Thornfield. Jane's understanding of the double standard crystallises when she becomes aware of her feelings for Rochester. She is his intellectual equal, but not his social equal. Even before the crisis surrounding Bertha Mason, Jane is hesitant to marry Rochester because she senses that she would feel indebted to him for 'condescending' to marry her.
Jane's Powerful Challenge to Class Prejudice
Jane's distress, which appears most strongly in Chapter 17, seems to be Brontë's critique of Victorian class attitudes. Jane herself speaks out against class prejudice at certain moments in the book. For example, in Chapter 23 she chastises Rochester:
"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! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you."
This passage demonstrates Jane's refusal to accept her supposed inferiority based on social class.
The role of inheritance
However, it is also important to note that nowhere in Jane Eyre are society's boundaries bent. Ultimately, Jane is only able to marry Rochester as his equal because she has almost magically come into her own inheritance from her uncle. The inheritance removes the financial and social barriers between them, allowing Jane to approach the marriage without the fear of being seen as socially inferior.
Gender relations
Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome oppression. In addition to class hierarchy, she must fight against patriarchal domination—against those who believe women to be inferior to men and try to treat them as such.
Three male figures
Three central male figures threaten her desire for equality and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester, and St. John Rivers. All three are misogynistic on some level. Each tries to keep Jane in a submissive position, one in which she is unable to express her own feelings and opinions. Each character expects Jane to conform to an impossibly restrictive model of femininity.
Jane must escape Brocklehurst's control, reject St. John's proposal, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry as equals. This last condition is met once Jane proves herself able to function independently through the time she spends at Moor House, in a community and in a family.
Financial independence and equality
Critically, Jane will not depend solely on Rochester for love, and she can be financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel's end and thus dependent upon Jane to be his 'prop and guide'. In Chapter 12, Jane articulates what was for her time a radically feminist philosophy:
Jane's Feminist Declaration (Chapter 12)
Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
This passage demonstrates Jane's awareness of gender inequality and her resistance to restrictive social expectations for women—a remarkably progressive stance for the Victorian era.
Home and belonging
Throughout the novel, Jane defines her idea of home as a place where she both belongs and can be useful. This theme is closely connected to her desire to be valued by another person.
The search for home
When the Reeds' apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, questions whether Jane is happy to live at Gateshead, Jane emphasises that it is not her house because she has no right to be there. Jane describes herself as a 'discord' at Gateshead because the temperament doesn't match that of the Reeds, and as 'useless' because the fact that she doesn't fit in with the family keeps her from adding to the happiness of the household.
Jane's sense of alienation is compounded because no one loves Jane at Gateshead, and she has no one to love in return. At Lowood, Jane seeks to find work elsewhere after Miss Temple's departure, mainly because she believes it was Miss Temple that made Lowood homey. Without the person she loves most, Jane's usefulness is no longer enough to constitute Lowood as home.
Thornfield and belonging
Later, at Thornfield, Jane shares such a deep emotional connection with Rochester that she declares him to be her 'only home', but she leaves Rochester because living with him would contribute to his sin and damage her soul. After learning about Bertha Mason, Jane feels morally useless around him.
Return to Rochester
By the novel's end, when Jane finally returns to Rochester, she can at last be useful to him, in part because he now must depend on Jane for his eyesight. Jane's desire to belong is fundamentally connected to her desire to be valuable to another person, and these interconnected desires drive her decisions throughout the entire novel.
Anxiety and uncertainty
Brontë draws on frightening Gothic imagery to highlight anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Jane's place in the world, especially by describing the supernatural.
The red-room
The reader's first encounter with the Gothic and supernatural is the terrifying red-room. Uncle Reed may not literally haunt the room, but his connection to the room haunts Jane as a reminder of the unfulfilled promise that she would have a home at Gateshead and a place in the Reed family. Uncle Reed's presence cannot ensure this stability for her, and she will have to find her own way.
The chestnut tree
The splitting of the chestnut tree where Rochester and Jane kiss creates a sense of foreboding, as if nature itself objects to their marriage. This occurrence serves to warn Jane that despite appearances, her happiness with Rochester is not truly secure.
Bertha as Gothic double
Furthermore, many scholars have identified Bertha as a Gothic double of Jane, or a physical manifestation of the violent passions and anger that Jane possessed in her younger years. This connection between Bertha and Jane highlights anxieties around Jane becoming Rochester's bride. Even without knowledge of Bertha's existence, Jane worries that Rochester will tire of her, and their marriage would upend rigid Victorian social class structure by having a governess marry her master.
In this way, Bertha's looming presence expresses Jane's fear about their impending marriage and the ambiguity of Jane's social position. The Gothic elements throughout the novel serve to emphasise Jane's vulnerability and uncertain future in Victorian society.
Key Themes to Remember:
- Jane's central struggle is balancing her desire for love with her need for autonomy and self-respect
- The novel presents three models of Christianity (Brocklehurst's hypocrisy, Helen's passivity, St. John's self-sacrifice) which Jane ultimately rejects in favour of her own balanced faith
- Jane's ambiguous position as a governess highlights Victorian class tensions—she has the education of the aristocracy but the status of a servant
- Gender equality is a key concern; Jane must prove her independence before marrying Rochester as an equal, and she articulates a feminist philosophy about women's capabilities
- Gothic imagery (the red-room, the split chestnut tree, Bertha as Jane's double) emphasises Jane's anxieties about her place in society and her uncertain future