In the late 1970’s, feminist interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hit a groundbreaking stride when critical forerunners Gilbert and Gubar thrust “The Madwoman in the Attic” into the literary arena. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” arguably the text’s centrepiece as the “Madwoman” reference to Bertha Mason suggests, lit a fire of discourse concerning Jane’s “hunger, rebellion, and rage” that still resounds today.¹ Gilbert and Gubar position Jane Eyre as an “ ‘irreligious’ redefinition, almost a parody, of John Bunyan’s vision” in Pilgrim’s Progress (370). They adjust their critical lens to refocus Jane’s pilgrimage into a series of “enclosure[s] and escape[s]” (339) that foreground the moments in text that challenge Victorian patriarchy. From this vantage point, however, we too easily lose sight of the positive elements of Christian doctrine that inform Jane Eyre. Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Brontë’s allusions to Pilgrim’s Progress privileges the feminist agenda at the expense of the carefully laid spiritual framework. It is not my intention, in this essay, to dispute the feminist agenda present in Jane Eyre, but to more accurately pinpoint where and why Jane Eyre deviates from Bunyan’s allegorical script; moreover, I wish to recognize where Brontë actually pays tribute to the spirit of Bunyan’s vision.

The fashionable, a historic approach to Jane Eyre criticism has produced invaluable Feminist and Freudian interpretations of repressed anger and sexuality, but in its righteous zeal, it often ignores the religious and social context within which Charlotte Brontë wrote. Modern critics, and readers too, tend to envision Brontë as opposing all Victorian schools of thought rather than acknowledging that she is just one voice—albeit it a very articulate voice—engaged in a multidimensional debate surrounding contemporary interpretation of Evangelical-Christian doctrine: a voice which found both support and opposition within her time. Brontë’s empowering treatment of women and children, alongside the importance she associated with nature, though progressive, should not be interpreted as rogue feminist ideology raging in the dark, nor should it be regarded as separate from Brontë’s religious ideology. As the daughter of an open-minded Evangelical cleric, Brontë was raised, along with her literary-minded brother and sisters, in the art of religious examination. Marianne Thormälen describes the small society that encompassed Brontë’s home-life at Haworth Parsonage as “microcosmic representations of religious currents in Britain from 1800 to 1850” (13). Charlotte Brontë was well versed in the nuanced theology of her time, and it is from this spiritually charged vault that she draws the vision of Christianity that unfolds in Jane Eyre. In “The Brontës and Religion,” Thormälen addresses the growing concern over the under-representation of contemporary Victorian theological debate in Brontë criticism: “[t]he Christian life is a foreign country to most people today, and … it serves some purpose to be reminded that to the Brontës it was home, with the occasional irritations as well as the manifold blessings of the domestic sphere” (9). The now stock interpretations of Jane Eyre’s “hunger, rebellion, and rage” resonate deeply with modern readers and critics; however, since the text’s issues of gender equality and spiritual equality are inseparable, it is a disservice to Charlotte Brontë’s broader spiritual agenda to position Jane Eyre as “irreligious.”

Ironically, Gilbert and Gubar’s preoccupation with Jane’s repressed rage and sexuality often manifests itself as acts of oppression of their own as they, in turn, stifle the religious importance of key female characters, most notably “the pathetic Helen Burns” (344). As Gilbert and Gubar suggest, Helen Burns does represent an “ideal” of Christian faith, which, at the time of heir friendship, Jane, whose “skepticism disallows such comforts,” is unable to fully assimilate (346), but what Gilbert and Gubar fail to acknowledge is that this scepticism stems from an immaturity that the woman, as Helen faithfully predicts, later overcomes: “ You [Jane] will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are but a little untaught girl” (Brontë 57). Gilbert and Gubar position Helen’s character as weak, interpreting her “doctrine of endurance” (56) as pathetic submission. They paraphrase Helen’s instinctive acknowledgment of Jane’s inner spiritual strength: “it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear” (56), in order to emphasize the act of submission rather than the strength of endurance, rewording it as “[o]ne’s duty … is to submit to the injustices of this life, in expectation of the ultimate justice of the next” (Gilbert and Gubar 346). Technically, the two statements correspond, but the essential power within Helen’s words, the message of the inherent strength of God’s children, is lost within Gilbert and Gubar’s. Although Helen does not share Jane’s desire to interact with this life before leaving for the next, Jane certainly does not, in turn, reject the ideal of Christian faith Helen represents; on the contrary, as she matures, Jane strives to embody Helen’s faith in God’s will.

As a martyr figure, Helen Burns recalls the figure Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress. Helen’s name, as well as the burning fever that carries her home,² evokes Faithful’s execution by judge Hate-good at Vanity Fair, his burning at the stake. Like Bunyan’s Christian, who encounters his first, and most pivotal, spiritual guide in what can be termed his spiritual adolescence, Jane encounters Helen in her impressionable youth. And just as Faithful demonstrates to Christian the power of Evangelical faith, Helen teaches Jane the comfort of unquestioning belief: “I believe [Helen says]: I have faith: I am going to God” (81). Admittedly, Jane Eyre disposes of Jane’s first teacher more kindly than Bunyan does Christian’s, but Helen’s ill treatment at the hands of the authorities at Lowood parallels the torture Faithful endures prior to his execution. Helen is denounced as a “dirty” and “disagreeable” (53), a “hardened girl” of “slatternly habits” (54), and is harshly reprimanded for her faults. Though Mrs. Scatcherd’s disapproval of Helen works on a subtler allegorical level than the scourging, buffeting, lancing, stoning, and finally burning of Faithful by the jury of Vanity Fair (Bunyan 95), the spiritual lesson of suffering at the hands of the ignorant is the same. The doctrine of endurance to which Helen subscribes, to endure patiently what is her destiny to endure, recounts Christian and Faithful’s endurance of their torment in Vanity Fair: “Christian and Faithful [behave] themselves yet more wisely, and [receive] the ignominy and shame that [is] cast upon them, with so much meekness and patience, that it [wins] to their side … several men in the fair” (90). And, just as Christian and Faithful’s conviction converts those important few at Vanity Fair, Helen’s conviction converts Jane. Helen’s own meekness then, like Christian and Faithful’s, is not representative of the effect of patriarchal oppression on the weak, but is, ironically, a sign of her spiritual muscle.

Unlike Faithful, however, Helen makes no attempt to “speak a few words in [her] own defence” (Bunyan 92); her council appears reserved for the private discussions she holds with Jane and Miss Temple alone. Helen’s refusal to try to shepherd the masses is indicative of where the religious beliefs of Jane Eyre and Pilgrim’s Progress diverge. In contrast to the element of uncertainty rooted in Bunyan ideas of salvation, where “there [is] a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven” (154), Helen holds a Universalist view, believing that salvation waits for all souls:

I hold another creed; which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling; for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last. (Brontë 59)

According to Elizabeth Imlay, Charlotte Brontë herself subscribed to the Doctrine of Universal Salvation. Imlay contends that Brontë rejected “not only the Calvinism which had dogged her youth but also any form of Christianity which admitted the eternal condemnation of any being” (102). Given Brontë’s own conviction, it is not surprising that most spiritual progress in the text corresponds to the principles of Universalism. The seeds of Helen’s Universalism, her trust in the mercy of God, root as deeply in Jane’s consciousness as uncertainty does in Christian’s, resurfacing ten years later to comfort her in her darkest hour on the moors. Jane’s desperate journey through the moors of Whitcross (White Cross) is comparable to Christian’s journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And just as Christian is comforted by the sound of Faithful’s voice up ahead in distance, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow, I will fear none ill, for thou art with me” (Bunyan 65), Jane is comforted by Helen’s Universalist creed, which, as Helen has gone before her, is also reaching back from a distance. Rising from the “deep heath” of earth to pray, Jane becomes confident of “His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced … that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured” (324). She concludes that it is not within her power to judge Rochester; God’s plan is beyond her understanding and she must rely on faith. Thormälen notes, “[t]o argue that sinners suffer everlasting torment is hence to deny God the freedom to save in ways that the human mind cannot fathom” (89). In the end, Jane trusts that the course of individual spirituality must remain a matter between those souls and God.

Helen arguably occupies the role of Jane’s most significant spiritual teacher. As such, her tolerance of Jane’s immature and heretofore unguided faith (tolerance of immaturity in contrast to Gilbert and Gubar’s praise of anger and scepticism) functions as a foil to the Calvinist “policy of mortifying the flesh to save the soul” (Thormälen 21), a policy which encourages spiritual instruction through punishment. As J. Jeffrey Franklin notes, Helen’s Universalism is the “antidote” to Brocklehurst’s Calvinism (464). The figure of Brocklehurst exhibits Brontë’s particular distaste for those who hypocritically mete out Calvinist punishment in the name of spiritual progress. Under the guise of Christian care, Brocklehurst insists that the occasional meal of burnt porridge, and shearing the Lowood girls’ ringlets fortifies their souls (63), while at home, he stages a theatre of Vanity Fair for his own family, curling his (probably plump) daughters’ hair and dressing them in fur (64). At the Reeds’, Brocklehurst’s method of instruction, his fearful catechizing of Jane, results in her seemingly blasphemous conclusion that in order to avoid the fires of hell she “must keep in good health, and not die” (32). In contrast, Helen Burns’ more tolerant instruction, her method of leading by example, combined with Jane’s interaction with nature on the school grounds, results in Jane’s eventual spiritual maturation. It is at this point, when Jane considers Helen’s illness in the midst of her awe over the natural wonders surrounding Lowood, that her mind

made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time, glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos. (79)

Nature, the greatness of life itself on earth, factors largely into Brontë’s vision of the proper spiritual education; as Thormälen notes, “Brontë heroines tend to receive Divine assistance in the open air, far away from God’s own houses” (68). The combination, therefore, of Jane’s first revelation of the sacredness of life via her communion with nature, and the revelation of the impending ascension of Helen into the arms of her Father, speaks forcibly of Brontë’s conviction that God’s gift of life is to be appreciated and studied for its glory and connection to Him. This appreciation for life cheekily echoes back to what seems now to be a grain of truth in Jane’s childish assertion that the way to avoid hell is to “stay in good health, and not die.” This conviction is further present in her compulsion to resist St John’s willingness to kill her in the name of Christian martyrdom (Brontë 412), and in the offence she takes when Rochester serenades her with a song about his wife dying alongside him: “I had no intention of dying with him—he might depend on that” (273). In this sense, Brontë suggests that the Calvinist-Evangelical practice of mortifying the flesh in order to preserve the soul actually inhibits spiritual growth. According to Thormälen, many Evangelical children “were raised by patriarchs who tempered paternal authority with unstinting devotion and frequent jocularity” (21). The Brontës, she then suggests,

were especially fortunate in enjoying this warm domesticity while being spared the dark shadow [of Calvinist punishment] that haunted many of these otherwise happy homes. Unlike a large number of Evangelical Christians, the father of the Brontës was not constantly watching his young ones for early signs of evil propensities. (21)

Charlotte Brontë’s views on childrearing were informed by both her nightmare experience at Cowan Bridge (the model for the first Lowood in Jane Eyre), and the intellectual freedom and companionship at Haworth Parsonage. In Brontë’s experience, the confused perceptions of a child unfold clearly and naturally with a combination of tolerant guidance and individual investigation. Brontë’s unique brand of Universalism requires a corporeal relationship, not corporal punishment.

There is a strong maternal element within Jane Eyre’s conflation of faith, independent communion with God, and nature. Though an orphan, Jane has abundant mother figures. The Reeds’ servant Bessie’s ability to nurture is compromised by her position in the household, but her songs and stories provide Jane with some “gleams of sunshine” and Jane is able to take some comfort in being Bessie’s favourite (40). Miss Temple’s acts of generosity and compassion, the individual attention she pays Jane, her willingness to endure Brocklehurst’s wrath for replacing burnt porridge with bread and cheese (64), and her acceptance of Jane’s defence against Brocklehurst’s charge of lying (71) provide Jane with a sense of security. Helen, though the youngest of Jane’s maternal figures, is nevertheless the most influential. The appearance of the dying Helen, cradling young Jane in her arms, might initially strike Brontë’s readers as a re-orphaning of Jane, a morbid twist of fate, but it is actually a great maternal gift of comfort. Enveloped in Helen’s arms like a child, Jane is enveloped in the arms of faith itself: “I [Jane] clasped my arms closer round Helen … lay with my face hidden on her neck” (82). Her proximity to Helen’s ascension brings Jane the closest she’s come yet to the comforts of the final home for which she is destined. Her presence on Helen’s deathbed imbues Jane with the knowledge that faith in God means she is never truly alone. The rationale (not anger) that culminates in Jane’s decision to leave Rochester testifies to the strength of Helen’s teaching. Jane’s conviction that, “[t]he more solitary, the more friendless, the unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane [on Helen’s deathbed], and not mad—as I am now” (317), echoes back to the first of Helen’s lessons: “[i]f all the world hated you [Helen tells ten-year-old Jane], and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends” (69). Like the wisdom a mother gives a child, Helen’s doctrine of endurance becomes entrenched in Jane, moulding her strength of character.

The overarching maternal figure in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly the moon. Brontë calls upon a longstanding tradition of using the moon to symbolize female power. Brontë’s frequent rising moon embodies a Godlike omnipresence that presides over the more decisive spiritual choices and events Jane encounters. It watches over the red-room incident at Gateshead; the wood where Jane first contemplates the connection between divine nature and Helen’s death; her first meeting with Rochester; the night Bertha stabs her brother Richard; Jane’s decision to flee from Rochester; and the night her calling returns her to him. The list is extensive. As Adrienne Rich points out, up until the time Rochester’s deception is discovered, “[i]ndividual women have helped Jane Eyre to the point of her severest trial; at that point she is in relation to the Great Mother herself” (152). The monthly cycle of the moon, Rich’s “Great Matriarchal Spirit,” is often related to the female menstruation cycle. The Victorian medical profession was intensely preoccupied with the effect of menstruation on female rationale and self-control. In Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, Sally Shuttleworth contends that “theories of gender division took on in the nineteenth century a near unprecedented power and importance,” with medical science presiding over this “increasingly rigid demarcation of gender roles, lending and indeed deriving prestige and authority from its involvement” (4). In this text, Shuttleworth asks the important question “why, at this specific historical period, should women have been perceived as being in possession of a disruptive [hysterical] sexuality which needed to be disciplined and controlled?” (85). The answer she then suggests is fascinating: “one strong impetus behind Victorian ideologies of womanhood springs not from the need to control women, but rather from the problems involved in assimilating men to the new conditions of the labour market” (85). The contradiction inherent in the laissez-faire economic theories of Industrialized Britain, that the industrious, self-made man is simultaneously autonomous and yet just one cog in the greater industrial wheel, culminated in feelings of insecurity and instability that were then projected onto women. Women were assigned the role of the “automaton,” subjugated to the mechanism of their bodily cycles, while men retained the sense of themselves as independent and rational: “Notions of gender differentiation fulfilled the ideological role of allowing the male sex to confirm their faith in personal autonomy and control” (86). The attention Brontë draws to the rise of the moon during scenes of great emotion, when Jane feels more “mad” than rational, carries with it contemporary connotations of female subjectivity to cycles of insanity. It is especially significant, then, that when the moon ultimately counsels Jane to flee from Rochester, Her counsel is rational, born of spiritual concern. Thus, in contrast to the Victorian norm, Brontë associates rational thought with divine female power, creating a Mother equal to the patriarchal forces usually associated with God, the Father, as well as re-conceiving woman as a part of nature rather than errant machinery susceptible to malfunction.

That Jane encounters the spiritual voice of her Mother in a dream is reminiscent of the “similitude of a dream” under which Bunyan witnesses the story of Pilgrim’s Progress. Jane’s Mother, however, embodies Brontë’s conflation of the feminine, the human, God, nature, and individual communion therewith that is nowhere to be found within Bunyan’s dream. The moon transforms into a white, womanly shape and urges Jane to act independently of Rochester’s desires:

She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds, and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed at me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—“My daughter, flee temptation!” “Mother, I will.” (319)

Similarly to Christian’s, Jane’s pilgrimage demands she leave her loved one behind in order to save her own soul: the heart belongs first to God. Lead by Her word, Jane escapes Thornfield (Thornfield, at different times, functions allegorically as The City of Destruction, Vanity Fair, and as Doubting Castle, as I later develop), leaving Rochester to grapple independently with his own faith, his own relationship to God. Rochester’s spiritual pilgrimage is as consequential to Jane Eyre as Jane’s own; and like Bunyan’s Christiana, he embarks on his own religious course, following in Jane’s spiritual wake.

If Helen Burns recalls the allegorical figure of Bunyan’s Faithful, it would logically follow that Rochester, Jane’s next significant companion, must in some way fulfill the spiritual role of Hopeful: “Thus one die[s] to make Testimony to the Truth, and another rises out of his Ashes to be a Companion with Christian” (Bunyan 97). Rochester, like Hopeful, has a sinner’s past of which he repents in the aftermath of Jane’s departure and the cleansing bonfire of Thornfield. Rochester’s encounter with Jane and the strength of her faith alter the course of his life much as Hopeful’s encounter with Christian and Faithful alters his:

there was one whose name was Hopeful, (being made so by the beholding of Christian and Faithful in their words and behaviour, in their sufferings at the fair) who joyned himself unto him, and entering into a brotherly covenant, told him that he would be his Companion. (Bunyan 97)

Rochester’s myriad of sins–his loveless marriage of financial convenience to Bertha Mason, the multiple sexual liaisons throughout Europe, his lies and continual deception of Jane and subsequent denial of the wrongness in his actions–sound very like the sins Hopeful testifies to: “I was not willing presently to know the evil of sin, nor the damnation that follows upon the commission it, but endeavoured, when my mind at first began to be shaken with the word, to shut mine eyes against the light thereof” (132). Rochester’s own shaking by God, Thornfield’s burning, leaves him blind, his sight shut, like Hopeful’s, to the light. In this darkness, he “beg[ins] to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to [his] Maker” (Brontë 446). Of course, as my previous allusions to the similarities between Rochester and Christiana, and the importance of Rochester’s own pilgrimage suggest, Brontë’s development of Bunyan’s allegorical lessons does not embody the same straightforward format as Pilgrim’s Progress; and at the heart of this divergence is, naturally, The Doctrine of Universalism. Advocating a belief in the salvation of all souls, Brontë melds together the characteristics of Bunyan’s sinners and pilgrims in Rochester, conflating rogue and pilgrim in him just as she conflates faith, independent communion with God, and nature.

The union of Jane and Rochester does indeed evince similar moral lessons to those illustrated by the union of Christian and Hopeful. Both pairs represent camaraderie, equality, and strength drawn from true friendship, but the strongest parallel can be seen in their struggle with despair and suicide. In this struggle, however, it is not Jane who embodies the spirit of Christian, but Rochester; Jane invokes Hopeful’s strength to resist. After Christian leads Hopeful astray from the path (“’Tis according to my wish, said Christian, here is the easiest going; come good Hopeful, and let us go over” [Bunyan 108]), they are found by Giant Despair and imprisoned in his Doubting Castle. During their imprisonment Despair succeeds in driving Christian to suicidal thoughts. Christian’s subsequent spiritual lament over his imprisonment, “the life that we now live is miserable: for my part, I know not whether is best, to live thus, or to die out of hand. My soul chuseth strangling rather than life; and the Grave is more easie for me than this Dungeon” (112), is strikingly like Rochester’s lament over his prison of a marriage:

[t]his life is hell! The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic’s burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one—let me break away, and go home to God! (Brontë 308)

Rochester’s sanity saves him from his pistols during his first round with despair, but like Christian, he is twice tempted to fall from Grace. Asking Jane to live with him in sin is really another form of spiritual suicide. But, as Christian’s entreaty of Hopeful is met with resistance, Rochester’s entreaty of Jane is met with Helen Burn’s strength of faith. Jane advises him to “trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there,” to “live sinless” and “die tranquil.” She argues that they are both “born to strive and endure” (316-18). W. R. Owens points out that “Giant Despair ‘walking up and down in his fields’ suggests the power of the landowning gentry.” Owens further notes, “[a]lthough Giant Despair is an externalized figure he is also, in a sense, a manifestation of the pilgrim’s own feelings of guilt and fear at having left the true path” (xxxvi). Rochester’s wealth, his role as landlord, and his “history of involvement with the slave-owning classes of the West Indies” (Shuttleworth, Jane Eyre xxiii), position him as a patriarchal figure of the “landowning gentry.” In this sense, when Rochester pleads with Jane to stay with him, he simultaneously plays the roles of Christian, who has guiltily led Hopeful off the righteous path, and Despair, a patriarch of power exerting immoral influence: externalized oppression, and internalized guilt.

Before becoming entrapped in Doubting-Castle, Jane must, of course, pass through Vanity Fair. The drawing-room scene, where Rochester entertains the lavishly dressed, aristocratic entourage of Blanche Ingram and friends, resonates with the extravagance of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, an international assortment of sins:

you have the proper Places, Rows, Streets, (viz. Countreys, and Kingdoms) where the Wares of this Fair are soonest to be found: Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the Spanish Row, the German Row, where several sorts of Vanities are to sold. But as in other fairs, so the Ware of Rome, and her Merchandize is greatly promoted in this fair. (Bunyan 86)

As Jane lists the various styles of dress “flock[ing]” to Thornfield, it becomes obvious that the internationally clad cavalcade, in their “sweeping amplitude of array,” shops at Vanity Fair (171). The figures Jane describes form a wealth of colourful display: darkhaired Lady Lynn attired in a “satin robe of changeful sheen,” “azure plume,” and “band of gems”; Mrs. Colonel Dent in her “scarf of rich foreign lace and pearl ornaments”; the Dowager Lady Ingram with her “imperial dignity” sitting “preternaturally straight” in her “crimson velvet robe” and “shawl turban of gold wrought from Indian fabric”; “dark as a Spaniard” Blanche in her “spotless white dress,” chatting fluently in French, and little Adèle, Rochester’s French bastard, fluttering in the mix (Brontë 171-72). The men in black suits are pillars of the landowning gentry: Lady Ingram’s son, Lord Ingram; Mr. Eshton, the Magistrate; Colonel Dent; Sir George Lynn; the young Lynn “sparks,” and the dark Mr. Rochester, whom Blanche refers to as “Signior Eduardo.” Jane’s careful note of this mix of foreign influence and attire has twofold implication: first, naturally, is the allusion to Bunyan’s Vanity Fair; second, is the insinuation that a foreign “otherness” is trickling in to pollute Christian Britain, a circulating Victorian concern that was also in vogue in Bunyan’s day, a concern that Thormälen suggests Brontë shared: she was “always a staunch patriot” with “interests in events in the field of ecclesiastical politics, as well as her dislike … of the Church of Rome” (Thormälen 25).³ It is not surprising then, that the wares of the Church of Rome make their cameo appearance in Thornfield’s drawing room festivities, first, briefly in the “Roman” features of the Dowager Ingram, and later in the banter that passes between Rochester and Blanche when she urges him to sing:

“Signior Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?”
“Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be.”
“Then Signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your lungs and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal service.”
“Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?”
“A fig for Rizzio!”… “it is my opinion that the fiddler David must have been an insipid sort of fellow; I like black Bothwell better: to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil. (178-79)

Brontë assembles multiple prejudices in this short dialogue. Rochester’s threatening “dark” looks are emphasized when he is addressed as an Italian. This address also alludes to foreign Catholic Italy. The reference to the affairs of Mary Queen of Scots evokes images of violence, immorality, Catholicism and corruption. That Blanche is referred to as “so divine a Mary” conflates the images of the Virgin Mary and adulteress Mary Queen of Scots, constructing Blanche as a symbol of the immoral foreign Catholics who worship false idols.

After Jane accepts Rochester’s proposal of marriage, she is inducted into Thornfield’s Vanity Fair. Against Jane’s wishes, Rochester attempts to dress her in “rich amethyst silk and pink satin,” vowing that “he would yet see [her] glittering like a parterre” (268). Gilbert and Gubar rightly assert that “Jane’s whole lift-pilgrimage has … prepared her to be angry in this way at Rochester’s and society’s concept of marriage” (357). They attribute Jane’s burning cheek and “sense of annoyance and degradation” to Rochester’s “loving tyranny,” comparing him to the domineering patriarchal figures of her past, John Reed and Brocklehurst (Gilbert, Gubar 357). In refusing to quit her “governessing slavery” (Brontë 270), refusing to be bought, Jane is indeed taking a stand against Rochester’s patriarchy, but she is also rejecting the values of Vanity Fair.

The symbolic use of fire in Jane Eyre, as it relates to emotion and sexuality, has been explored at length, but its religious significance remains critically neglected. As Gaston Bachelard puts it, “Among all phenomena, [fire] is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell” (qtd. in Carlton-Ford 375). Gilbert and Gubar reveal the destructive side of fire in Jane Eyre: Jane’s anger, Bertha’s pyromania. Cynthia Carlton-Ford, among others, reveals the more positive side: Jane’s independence. But considering the controversial religious dimensions of the text, it is surprising that the spiritual component of Jane Eyre’s fire is so under-appreciated. This religious significance becomes clearer when we consider Jane Eyre’s relation to Pilgrim’s Progress. Although the fiery pit of hell threatens throughout Bunyan’s dream, the ever-present fire of Grace counterbalances it. Near the beginning of Christian’s pilgrimage, the Interpreter leads Christian to Grace’s wall of fire fuelled by Christ. Christian questions what the fire means, and the Interpreter replies,

This fire is the work of Grace that is wrought in the heart; he that casts Water upon it, to extinguish and put it out, is the Devil: but in that though seest the fire, notwithstanding, burn higher and hotter, though shalt also see the reason that: So he had him about to the back side of the Wall, where he saw a Man with a Vessel of Oyl in his hand, of the which he did also continually cast, but secretly, into the fire ... This is Christ, who is continually with the Oyl of his Grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which, notwithstanding what the Devil can do, the souls of his people prove gracious still. (32-33).

In the light of this passage, Jane Eyre’s Grace, “mad” Bertha’s keeper, takes on new significance. In “Madness and Grace: Grace Poole’s Name and Her Role in Jane Eyre,” Kate Lawson develops the connection between insanity and religion present in the fiery episodes at Thornfield. Lawson draws attention to the Biblical allusion in Grace Poole’s name: that “pool of Grace,” Bethesda, where the diseased multitudes wash in the waters of God’s grace (48). In this sense, Bertha, diseased with madness, is cared for by the sacrificing Grace, eventually finding release by jumping from a wall of fire. The fire that burns Thornfield is necessary both for Bertha’s release from her earthly torment, and for Jane and Rochester to unite, fuelling their own fire, per se, a fire “wrought in the heart” by God. Jane is mistaken in her initial conclusion that Grace sets the fire in Rochester’s bedroom and stabs Richard Mason, but she is, in a sense, correct in attributing responsibility to Grace. As Thornfield’s gatekeeper to madness, Grace controls when the fires of insanity rein down on its inmates.⁴ Grace’s “pint of porter” that she nips at too often on occasion could even be interpreted as a special “fuel” for Grace’s fire. In “Intimacy Without Immolation: Fire in Jane Eyre,” Cynthia Carlton-Ford argues that the symbol of fire in Jane Eyre “conveys a sense of Jane’s often conflicting desires,” in particular, her “specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence” (376). Carlton-Ford sees Jane’s pilgrimage as culminating in her discovery of the “right distance to stand from the hearth – close enough for intimacy, yet far enough away for some degree of autonomy” (385). I, however, agree with Rochester’s assessment of Jane as a salamander (Brontë 262), “the mythical creature able to live in fire” (Carlton-Ford 383). Jane ultimately does choose to live in Grace’s fire. She is reunited with Rochester not because she has learned the proper distance from the hearth, but because she bravely walks into the flames of Grace, painfully opening her heart to God, who, in turn, restores her to Rochester.

Feminist critics often cite Bertha, Jane’s mad double, the image of Jane’s rage, as the impediment to Rochester and Jane’s union, but the true impediment is God. Not until both Jane and Rochester are unshakably reconciled with their faith does God intervene and allow Rochester’s call to cross the moors to facilitate a reunion. Although some argue that this supernatural event is further evidence for the “irreligious” nature of Jane Eyre Thormälen contends that progressive nineteenth century theologians were satisfied that the supernatural had its given function in the total context of Creator and creation - a function which rational understanding could not, and should not expect to, grasp. To those who thought as they did, there could be no better place to ponder such things than the human heart. (70)

That the heart belongs foremost to God is at the center of Brontë’s spiritual vision. This individual, divine relationship encourages self-reliance, self-respect, and belief in the spiritual, hence earthly, equality of all souls. The feminist agenda in Jane Eyre arises out of respect for God’s creation, its ultimate aim much higher than the folly of worldly patriarchy. Bronte’s religious vision “express[es] the heroism of the pilgrim rather than the wrath of the rebel” (Thormälen 8).

Notes

1. Gilbert and Gubar take this quote, which was originally condescending in tone, from Matthew Arnold, contemporary critic of Charlotte Brontë, and infuse it with a sense of feminist power.
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2. According to Charlotte Younge, Helen means ‘light’ or bright’ (qtd. in Imlay 131). Imlay associates this light with Helen’s intellect, but I believe it also serves to reference her bright light of faith.
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3.Thormälen also cites a letter from Victorian Prime Minister Lord John Russell to the Bishop of Durham “fan[ning] popular disgust with the Pope by talking about … ‘[an] attempt to impose a foreign yoke’ on free-born Englishmen … that the Tractarians, as a sort of ‘enemy within’ were more to be feared than the Roman Catholics.” Brontë, Thormälen claims, “read the letter with very great zest and relish” (25).
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4. I am indebted to the Pilgrims and Rogues class discussion of Jane Eyre for triggering this line of thinking.
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Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Margaret Smith. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. 1968. Ed. W.R. Owens. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Carlton-Ford, Cynthia. “Intimacy Without Immolation: Fire in Jane Eyre.” Women’s Studies 15.4 (1988): 375-387. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. University of New Brunswick Lib., Fredericton NB. 23 December 2004.
http://web26.epnet.com

Franklin, J. Jeffrey. “The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love.” Nineteenth Century Literature 49.4 Berkeley: California UP, 1995.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress.” The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.

Imlay, Elizabeth. Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love. New York: Harvester, 1989.

Lawson, Kate. “Madness and Grace: Grace Poole’s Name and Her Role in Jane Eyre.” English Language Notes 30.1 (1992): 45-51. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. University of New Brunswick Lib., Fredericton NB. 23 December 2004.
http://web26.epnet.com

Owens, W.R. ed. Introduction. Pilgrim’s Progress. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Rich, Adrienne. “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Barbara Timm Gates. Boston: Hall, 1990.

Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Shuttleworth, Sally. Introduction. Jane Eyre. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Thormälen, Marianne. The Brontës and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.