One of my favorite female characters

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Jane Eyre
from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
pictured: Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre from the 2006 BBC mini-series

I read Jane Eyre at 14, and it changed my life. This was a cerebral and, I suppose, abstract experience. Since then I've experienced and done many much more concrete things: I've traveled abroad, I've found a job I love in a field I never expected, I've met my best friend, I've moved across the country, I've produced and directed plays, I've been published. But for me, the single most life-changing experience still feels like it was reading Jane Eyre. I modelled myself after the title character. She changed how I thought.

The reason I love this book is directly opposed to my post about Christy. Christy is about a girl who basically runs off to teach at a missionary. She wants to make her life mean something; she wants to make a difference by helping people. Jane Eyre is about a girl who gets an offer to become a missionary. She gets an offer to make her life mean something; she gets an offer to make a difference by helping people. And then she turns it down.

Jane Eyre begins with Jane living with her aunt. Jane is wildly passionate and doesn't fit into her aunt's social mold of what a young lady should be. Then Jane goes to a boarding school, where she meets Helen Burns. Though the school is abusive, Helen preaches about acceptance. She is a God-loving character who is determined to rein in her own passion and idignance about the way she is treated, accepting it as the will of God. Jane admires Helen, but feels unable to identify; she longs to express both her love and rage, rather than subdue them.

Jane grows up and goes to Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with Rochester, whose marriage proposal she accepts. When she finds out Rochester is already married, however, her moral duty kicks in. She longs to stay with Rochester, because she loves him and he makes her happy, but she thinks it is wrong to be with someone who is married to someone else. She has trouble with this decision, because her heart is telling her one thing, while her mind is telling her another. This passage has always stuck with me:

Still indomitable was the reply--'I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart is beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.'

The part where Jane leaves Rochester has always been my favorite part of the book. One thing this passage taught me is that you don't always think straight when faced with a difficult decision. When not faced with that decision, you may think one way or believe certain things to be true, but when you are faced with that decision, the perception of self can fly right out the window.

The more important thing that this passage taught me was that it is very important, when you aren't faced with difficult decisions, to decide who you are, and what you believe, and how you perceive yourself. If you don't think about who you are or what you believe in, you'll have nothing to fall back on in a time of trial.

These ideas caused me to sit around quite a lot and try to decide who I was, and quite honestly, they gave me a pretty strong foundation of self-respect, and self-love. Thinking about these things made it so that when I was doing something difficult, I trusted myself, and believed that I could come through intact, no matter how hard things got, and that I would still be me.

I have since come to believe that sometimes, you should do what your heart is telling you, even with your 'veins running fire'. Who you are in those moments of insanity is still you, and how you feel in those moments isn't meaningless. Still, it helps me to believe I have some kind of bedrock of self to fall back on.

The life-changing part about this book for me, though, is that Jane comes back to Rochester in the end. After she leaves him, she runs away and ends up finding her cousin, St John Rivers, whom she doesn't know is her cousin at the time. St John, like Helen Burns, represses a lot of passion--though not his passion to do the will of God. And Jane, to some extent, believes that she has come to him due to the will of God. The law against adultery is something Jane believes to be a law of God, as quoted in the passage above, and it was in following that law that Jane found St John.

St John further believes that it is the will of God that he not marry the woman he loves. Instead, he believes he should marry Jane, and go do missionary work in India. Outside the context of this novel, there are so many things wrong with the missionary work they're talking about--they're planning to go "convert the heathens," basically. However, within the context of this novel, this is basically the summit of a moral existence, because at the time--and is still somewhat the case today--the noblest act is self-sacrifice.

After all, Christianity is based on self-sacrifice. Christ sacrificed Himself for our sins, and many interpretations and followers of Christianity suggest that the greatest act is giving up our wants and desires in order to serve fellow man. Helen Burns tries to suppress her wants and desires, so that she can be virtuous. And St John is giving up his wants and desires, so he can be virtuous. And Jane Eyre gave up her wants and desires when she left Rochester, because she was being virtuous. "The law given by God, sanctioned by man," to which Jane refers above, is about not doing what you want; "the more unsustained I am," Jane says, the better follower of God she is, and the better member of society.

By marrying St John and going to India, Jane would not only give up the life she's built for herself, which she moderately enjoys, and the new friends she's made, whom she truly loves. She would also give up any possibility of true love, which for her is the ultimate sacrifice. And self-sacrifice is the cornerstone of the society in which she's been raised, and her own sense of self.

And then Jane changes her mind.

She's perfectly willing to go to India, but she absolutely cannot stomach marrying St John. Her heart absolutely revolts, and it is so contrary to her every desire, that in the end she just cannot believe that it is what God would want--though, if I remember correctly, there's not actually much contemplation of what God wants or doesn't want during the passages in which Jane is making this decision. Jane doesn't even think that much about the decision; it's not a dire trial, like leaving Rochester was. All of the sudden, she knows what she wants, and what she has to do.

Brontë, however, doesn't completely drop the ball on what God may or may not want. When Jane is faced with St John's proposal, she hears Rochester calling to her. Later, Rochester says he did call to her, and the suggestion is that Jane supernaturally heard his voice, from many miles away. Because this is a mystical occurence, the suggestion is that God is sometimes alright with you following your heart.

Imo, it would be a better book without this element, because part of Jane's struggle is that we cannot know the will of God. We cannot always know what is "right". We have to rely on what we think, and sometimes it is important to consider what others think, and sometimes it is also important to incorporate what we feel, and we have no way of knowing, from situation to situation, upon which combination of things we should rely.

A major issue here is that Jane doesn't know that Rochester's wife has died, when she goes back to him. It is unclear what her intention is, going back to him; I do not think she does intend to marry him, if he is still married. I don't think she intends to become his lover, either. But the important thing is that she had initially decided staying with him--even as brother and sister, as he once suggested--was wrong. She went away, thought about it, changed her mind, and came back.

And the important thing about that is that I think Jane still thinks it would have been wrong to stay with him initially, when she first found out he was married. Her veins were running fire, then, and she wasn't thinking straight. It wasn't until she went away and thought about it that she could make an informed decision, and decide what she actually thought was right.

To me, this is just so important, because staying with him and going back to him is basically the same action, but the intentionality is entirely different. If she had stayed with him, it would have been giving in, and she would have hated herself for sacrificing what she saw as her moral duty. But going back to him isn't giving in; it's doing what she thinks is right, and that makes all the difference. It makes a difference, because Jane realizes that sometimes, what she wants can be right. She doesn't always have to sacrifice her desires to do something good.

I think Jane believes that maybe she would have "saved" more souls, if she had gone to India with St John--but she would not have saved her own, and Jane realizes that she is important, too. She's important enough to make herself happy. And Rochester is important enough, too; she believes that he deserves to be saved, too. So even though Jane's actions in the end involve no sweeping heroics, she still makes something good out of her life, and she believes that to be worthwhile. I believe it to be worthwhile, too.

The reason this impacted me so much as a teenager was that I had resolved to save the world. I wasn't that naive; I knew that one person couldn't save the world. I knew that it was a rather meaningless resolution, and yet, I had resolved to do something "big" with my life that would help lots of people, and make the world a better place.

This . . . was a pretty depressing resolution, because it wasn't actually what I wanted. I'm selfish and lazy, and don't actually want to give up my creature comforts. I don't want to dedicate my life to other people. Maybe if I tried really hard, I could be a social worker or start a school in an underprivileged area or raise money for charities that have to deal with social awareness, and yet, I have no real desire to do these things. I never did, even when I was a teenager.

I am fundamentally selfish, and fundamentally lazy. And yet, at some point, it began to occur to me that I need to find what works for me, as well. I always wanted to be a writer, and at around sixteen, I began to get this dreadful feeling that I shouldn't be a writer, because it's not enough. I wouldn't be helping people by writing; I would just be indulging myself. I would be focused on making myself happy, not making sure that other people are well-fed and have clothes on their backs.

Only after angsting about this for years did I realize that yes, you can help people by writing. I have been helped by writing; reading books (and watching movies, of all things) was what inspired me with the "save the world" in the first place. You can change the world, with writing, even if it is only your little piece. Even if you're not putting clothes on people's backs, it can help people, and touch them. Resolving to do this--something I actually wanted--is not only more realistic, it's also worthwhile, because it helps me, as well as presenting the possibility of helping other people.

And I'm important too, and that is what Jane helped me to realize.