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Charlotte Bronte<-novels<-chapter 7<-contents<-position

    The theme of religion also shows its importance in Jane Eyre. 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 has three main religious figures: Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each of them represents a type of religion that Jane ultimately rejects. She forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences. Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies in the nineteenth-century 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. 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 and offers her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to her own self. Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in God. When Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only love she has ever known, for example, she credits God with helping her to escape what she knows would have been an immoral life "do as I do: trust in God and yourself. Believe in Heaven. Hope to meet again there" (Chapter 27). Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. 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.
    Jane Eyre is a young woman wholly unprotected by social position, family, or independent wealth; she is powerless; just as Charlotte Bronte judged herself, "small and plain and Quaker-like". She lacks the most superficial yet seemingly necessary qualities of femininity. However, Jane possesses the qualities that are precious to women, that is, independent, self-respected and faithful and persistent in love. Charlotte shapes this perfect woman figure in her mind, who is not beautiful or wealthy, yet full of revolting spirit. Evidently, through the heroine of the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte claims women’s independent position and the equal rights between men and women.
    Although this novel has sparkles of romantic imagination, Charlotte mainly wrote through realistic approach and presented us a realistic picture of the social life of the 19th century. Like Dickens, Charlotte exposes and criticizes the charity schools of her day that were established and operated under the mask of philanthropy. She attacks the inhumane bourgeois system of education and shows her sympathy for the poor girls in such kind of charity schools. This novel also raises the question of women’s position in society in the author’s age. Jane Eyre, as Charlotte’s masterpiece, still keeps its vigor and favor among nowadays readers.

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