Jane Eyre Theme

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is the classic novel about a plain young woman in the early nineteenth century. She is born an orphan and outcasted by her only known living family as early as she can remember. Jane is sent to Lowood, a boarding school with rueful circumstances and lacking the bare necessities of the health of its students. Throughout Jane’s stay at Lowood its condition improves, with the help of local wealthy benefactors, and she eventually decides to leave the boundaries of Lowood. She takes a job as a governess at the Thornfield estate and falls in love with its master, Mr. Rochester, and agrees to marry him. As complications arise and the consequences of their love seeming to become increasingly apparent to Jane, if she were to marry him, she leaves. Her leaving brings her to meet her cousins, by chance. Finally, she ends up back with Mr. Rochester and spends the rest of her life with him. Throughout the novel, Bronte seems to have an indistinct, yet very significant, theme: religion. Bronte uses Jane Eyre to represent Christianity as a source of hope.

An important character in Jane Eyre is Helen Burns. Helen is the only student Jane ever mentions to have befriended while at Lowood*** . Bronte first establishes Helen’s character before she explains her piety, “I saw the girl with whom I had conversed in the verhanda dismissed and disgraced, by Miss Scatcherd from a history class and sent to stand in the middle of the large school-room. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl—she looked thirteen or upward. I expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but, my surprise, she neither wept nor blushed. Composed though grave she stood the central mark of all eyes.” (54) It was important for Bronte to establish Helen’s character before describing her relationship with God because it represented that Helen was much different from other girls her age. Jane expects that Helen “would...