The first impression Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre made on me when I read it as a preteen was the intense, intellectual romance. Coming back to the book in my teens, I was deeply moved by the power of Jane’s faith and personal integrity amid prolonged personal suffering. It wasn’t until a third or fourth reading, in adulthood, that I noticed the spookiness everywhere, part of what makes Jane Eyre a fixture of 19th-century gothic literature. I have since read the book twice with my husband, who says it’s so good we should read it every year. While I don’t know that we will do that, Jane Eyre can surely reward more than six readings. During this fall’s traverse, I have considered what its standout features—the romance, the religion, and the gothic ghoulishness—have to do with each other.
The story takes place across four settings. The orphan Jane spends her early life in the inhospitable home of her Aunt Reed, where she is bullied and resolutely misunderstood. From the age of 10 to 18, she lives at Lowood Institution, a charity school where she endures physical hardships but meets kindness for the first time, along with the opportunity to flourish intellectually. As a young adult, she accepts a place as a governess at Thornfield Hall, teaching the young French ward of the formidable but alluring Mr. Rochester.
With Rochester she finds the excitement of intellectual compatibility and personal attraction. After patiently enduring a series of his grueling tests, she is stunned but elated to receive a proposal of marriage. Though she has an uncanny foreboding that something is not right, it takes an interrupted wedding ceremony before Jane finds out the truth: Rochester has married before, and his wife is now a madwoman, living on Thornfield’s mysterious third floor.
As Jane absorbs the shock of this revelation, Rochester attempts to persuade her that the existing marriage is now nothing but a legal fiction; he begs her to live with him as a married couple, far from Thornfield. Jane recognizes that to give in would be both immoral and degrading; she summons all her willpower and runs from Thornfield. Destitute, she wanders for days, spending nights on the moors, until she is reduced to begging for bread in a remote village.
Jane collapses at the point of death on the doorstep of the book’s fourth major setting, Moor House. She is brought inside by St. John Rivers, a “Calvinistical” parson who saves her life out of disinterested Christian principle. His sisters Mary and Diana, by contrast, welcome her with friendship and affection. Jane recuperates from her devastation surrounded by the warmth of this household, where she eventually learns she has inherited a fortune from an uncle she never met, and the three Rivers siblings are in fact her cousins.
Her final trial comes when St. John, having observed Jane’s diligence and sense of duty, “claims” her as his wife and partner in missionary service to India. Jane resists this impersonal marriage, knowing she would wither if forced to endure St. John’s cold idea of love. But St. John increases the intensity of his spiritual manipulation, and it is only because of a miraculous sign that Jane finds release from St. John and is freed to go seek Mr. Rochester. His circumstances have changed dramatically, and they marry.
What draws the parts of the story together is Jane’s persistent struggle for personal wholeness. Alienated from herself in childhood by relatives who see her as alien, she begins to flourish at Lowood when she is given opportunities to grow into and be recognized for her capabilities. She begins to heal when she receives decisive vindication against her aunt’s slanders, is nudged to forgive those who have wronged her, and witnesses her friend Helen’s confidence, in the face of death, that God is fundamentally kind. The spiritual stability and sense of personal dignity she develops as a result become the foundation upon which she can later stand when, denied an honest marriage to Mr. Rochester, she must choose between degradation as his mistress or the devastation of running away.
Having learned to rely on God to survive all this, she is tried even further when St. John appeals to divine calling to press her into marriage with him. She resists him firmly, drawing on her intuitive understanding of what she needs to flourish as she has been made, but St. John continues his badgering. Could it be that her personal thriving is truly at odds with God’s will? In the end, the one thing she cannot do is accept St. John’s voice as proxy for God’s. At her wits’ end and ready to sacrifice herself if truly called, she cries out in a desperate prayer to God to show her the way.
The answer she receives restores her to her first love, Mr. Rochester, but without the compromises of dignity and morality that would have attended his original offer. Mr. Rochester has now been humbled: rather than returning to the dissipation in which he drowned his sorrows in earlier years, he has taken up the solitary—perhaps even repentant—life of a hermit. In a great fire, he has honorably risked his life for his dependents, even the mad wife who has stood so long between him and happiness. Despite his efforts to save her, this first wife has died. Rochester is blinded and maimed. He pines in grief, but not bitterness and anger.
Meanwhile, Jane has come into wealth, friendship, and family connections. She is no longer desperate for a stable home, provision, companionship, recognition, or intellectual stimulation. She has all these things independently, along with the knowledge that she has virtuously conquered many trials—including the offers of the powerful men who presumed to stand in the place of God to her.
When Jane goes back to Mr. Rochester, it is with her dignity intact and self-knowledge expanded. Both Jane and Rochester can offer and receive love freely. Jane finds that God has indeed been for her. While a life of honor may require suffering and loss, it does not demand self-immolation. If marriage is to be honorable, it must be honest—denying neither the claims of objective rightness nor the irreducible integrity of the person.
We have addressed the connection between romantic love and religious piety. But what about the spooks? Are all the eerie parts just decorative parts of the genre—an essential part of the form, but not the substance, of the work?
Awareness of the supernatural is at the heart of gothic literature; in Jane Eyre, “the supernatural” includes both spooks and Christian spirituality. It would be cheating to treat Christian spiritual wisdom as at the heart of the book, while dismissing the eerie signs and portents, the imagined monsters, and the fear of ghosts.
In appreciating Jane Eyre—along with, perhaps, the October mood—I think we ought to remember that it is the Romantic period’s openness to mystery that made this rich Christian work possible in the first place. Brontë’s readers were not interested in dispassionate sermonizing, but they were interested in facing the questions of what lies beyond the grave, and what lies below the surface in the human heart. If we insist upon believing that spiritual mysteries do exist, we should be honest about their complexity, their obscurity, even their darkness. To be sensitive to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit may require being attentive to the depths of the human spirit, and sympathetic to our friends’ and neighbors’ interest in the “spirit world.” I don’t think we meet Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans as Christians without being willing to tremble in the face of mystery.
Finally, we should notice that whether Jane experiences the mysteries of the universe as fundamentally hostile and ghoulish or friendly and heaven-lit depends to no small degree on how she is treated by other people. In a childhood “home” surrounded by bullying and psychological threats, ghost stories loom large. Even God is a terrorizing spirit, likely to steal her away to sudden judgment. Death leads to haunting. Only when Jane meets the support of a teacher at Lowood and attends to Helen Burns’ spiritual insights does she begin to perceive reality’s undercurrents as flowing from God’s goodness. When Jane comes face to face with her friend’s death, there is no terror: Jane is peacefully asleep, her arms wrapped around Helen at her end.
The spiritual climate of Jane’s next home, Thornfield Hall, is more ambiguous: though filled with the warmth of human connection, the mysteries there are dark and her dreams are unsettling; love is not wholesome as long as it is characterized by domination and deception. At Moor House, the friendship of Mary and Diana ministers to Jane’s soul, while St. John’s religious manipulation threatens to undo what she knows of God. Thankfully, God is not reduced to the way his servants represent him; an unexplained moment of spiritual communication frees her from St. John’s influences.
Though no one can stop God from being God, psychological safety is spiritually relevant; whether someone has experienced true support from others can affect whether she conceives of a God who is for us, or whether she sees a world populated by monsters lurking behind corners. By both our prayers and the quality of our presence with others, we may influence how others are haunted.
Abigail Woolley Cutter, Ph.D., is assistant professor of theology at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. She enjoys the music and many trails of Appalachia with her husband and two young children.
