Jane Eyre starts off in typical Victorian fashion (by which I mean that which is typical of Dickens, the only writer from that period with whose works I have more than a passing acquaintance) by describing the emotional and sometimes physical abuse experienced by Jane, an orphan girl, at the hands of his aunt by marriage (ABM, as I like to call such relations), who was forced by her dying husband to promise to adopt and look after Jane as one of her own children. It is to Charlotte Brontë’s credit that she doesn’t let herself drift into bathos, as Dickens was wont to do. (If such a concept had existed, Dickens would doubtless have sued anyone who dared to tread on his bathos.)
Jane Eyre is rather a likeable character because of her intelligence, her convictions, and her strength of resolve. The story is narrated by her, and she constantly reminds the reader through it that she is ugly and plain.
After spending eight years at a boarding school as both a student and a teacher, Jane finds a job at Thornfield Hall. Her life there as the governess of a French girl, and the master Mr. Rochester’s grandiloquent protestations of his love for her may strike one as farcical. The romantic exchanges between him and Jane are flowery almost to the point of absurdity. When she leaves Mr. Rochester on vague pretexts (something about him already being married to a lunatic woman who is kept locked up at all times lest she kill everyone) just when it seemed that she would marry him and settle down, the stifling sappiness of the narrative becomes something fresh and cool, even though inspiring pity.
For Jane spends three days in utter destitution, starving but for the generosity of a few in a strange town with mostly unhelpful people, spending the nights in beds of moss under rocks, and the days in begging and searching for a job. Eventually she happens upon a family of three siblings that is willing to let her rest till she is recovered. (She was nearly passed out on their doorstep on a rainy evening.) The brother is a priest named St. John Rivers, a stalwart character who is described as handsome in the Grecian sense, but hard as marble, and with clear eyes that are meant to pierce rather than be read. The sisters Diana and Mary are intelligent and well-read girls who are governesses in rich families. They are like Jane, only more educated because older.
Probably out of the Christian sense of charity, Jane is told by St. John (who is properly to be addressed as “Mr. St. John”) that she may stay on with them indefinitely, and offers her a job as a teacher at a school for poor girls that St. John has been desirous of establishing. This Jane accepts, even though she has a vague idea of the job being beneath her. (Governesses, apparently, are decently high on the social ladder.)
St. John visits her at the school from time to time, and speaks to her about his lofty ideals, about the virtue of toiling, and following God’s will. He is himself in love with the daughter of a rich man named Rosamond Oliver, who loves him back, but he knows that Rosamond would not make a suitable wife for a parson. (The reader is vaguely made aware of an almost schizophrenic distinction between St. John the Christian and St. John the Sinner. The sinner strives to live up to what the Christian preaches, and succeeds for the most part.)
It eventually transpires that St. John and his sisters are Jane’s cousins. The former three are willing to accept Jane as their sister, and Jane is more than delighted at finding something in the nature of a real family at last. Jane’s wealthy uncle (of whose existence she had been unaware till recently, thanks to her aunt) leaves her a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, which she divides equally among herself and her cousins.
Compared with the earlier farce of Jane’s life at Thornfield Hall, this phase of the story is refreshing. Jane comments on it, as well. Here she finds herself in the midst of likeminded people, educated and not wealthy like herself, and relishes above all her independence. It is understood at this point that the other reason why she left Mr. Rochester so suddenly was that she couldn’t bear the thought of being dependent on him, unable to contribute to his life and those of others in any meaningful way. Now things are different, not least because she is wealthy.
St. John begins to undergo frightening changes shortly, rapid enough to make this phase seem farcical and the previous real, but subtle enough to make it seem as if he had been like this all along. More appropriately, revelations are made about St. John’s character, arising out of Jane’s growing knowledge of his habits and manner.
Like any passionate Christian, St. John wants to secure for himself paradise in the next world, and save himself from the Hell to which everyone goes who fails to make it. (Why is there nothing in the middle?) To this end he is willing to do anything. St. John the Christian comes across as deranged and despotic (Jane uses the latter word, and had she been less religious, might have used the former, as well), and St. John the Sinner (whom the reader sees less than usual of) is decidedly human. He warns Jane, when she wants to indulge herself with her newly acquired wealth, or otherwise wishes to do anything other than toiling, against immanentizing the eschaton (to paraphrase) – or in other words, against seeking in this world that which is meant for the next (i.e. paradise).
St. John believes that the only purpose of man is to toil. Only then will God reward him. He wants to go to India on an Oriental missionary adventure of the sort that so many zealous Christians of that era undertook, converting everyone they found in their path, and pronouncing them Sinners. He wants to make Jane his wife, since she possesses the virtue of perseverance and the ability to toil when called to do so. Jane objects, since St. John loves someone else (namely, Rosamond Oliver), and to her romantic heart marriage without love is nothing. Besides, she would work herself to death in the Indian climate, since St. John would not grant her a moment’s respite. She might go, if she could go as his assistant; but as his wife, never.
St. John the Christian becomes agitated (the agitation itself, no doubt, being the manifestation of some mental weakness in St. John the Sinner), and adduces several nonsensical arguments as proof of why she must accompany him as his wife. Jane is adamant. But St. John pertinaciously refuses to accept her answer.
Eventually, Jane, who thinks often about the man who truly loved her, decides to go back to Thornfield Hall to see how Mr. Rochester is getting by. There she finds that the castle has been consumed in a conflagration. On inquiring, she finds out that it was the lunatic wife who was responsible for it. She was dead, and Mr. Rochester, who lost one of his eyes and vision in the other, now resides in a nondescript house in a thick wood some distance away. Jane goes thither, and her love for him is naturally rekindled when she sees him in his present, enfeebled state. Mr. Rochester, hitherto so independent and strong, is now dependent on others for the most trivial things. They get married, and Jane is happy that she is able to be of some real use to him.
The reader experiences a sense of satisfaction toward the end, since Diana and Mary are not altogether out of the picture, as Mr. Rochester was for a while. They, too, get married, and the three families are happy and close to each other. St. John has left for India, accepting only when Jane gets married to another that she would not be his missionary wife, and in a letter he writes to her at the end of the book, he says that his dream of dying is about to fulfilled. Then the story ends.
Charlotte Brontë seems to have had a keen insight into human character, and was skillful in describing her characters’ private thoughts and reactions. They were all plausible in a personal sense: the reader is almost certain to be reminded of occasions when he or she, too, experienced such thoughts, but did not register them at the time. The subtleties of human interactions have never been described as well as they are here. Such trivialities matter more than the modern writer, contemptuous of all things that do not affect thousands of people at once, cares to acknowledge.
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