Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Many people now would pick up a book from the 19th century and immediately scoff at the language and morals of those past times but little do they know how minute the differences are in the trials that people face today as they did then. Jane Eyre in her lifetime confronted situations that challenged her morals, her integrity and her belief in servitude to God. Men and women alike still encounter these same tests in modern times and the understanding of Jane’s struggles would be of great pertinence in their lives.
Jane Eyre is first and foremost a tale of a woman on a quest to be truly loved, not only romantically, but to be wanted and valued. Throughout her pursuit of love, though, Jane must learn a very hard lesson; how to truly love and still retain your autonomy. This life lesson is most clearly exemplified as Jane’s motivation to refuse Mr. Rochester while he remains married under church and state to Bertha Mason. Jane was given the decision to sacrifice her integrity for a life as Rochester’s admitted mistress or break her own heart and leave him. Her morals were clear in their direction but that did not make her choice any less painful. In the end her autonomy won out and she walked away from love. Alternatively, her life at Moor House stimulates her in its independence and dignity but refuses her emotional sustenance. In both circumstances Jane is looking for the satisfaction of the fulfilment of emotional needs as well as moral understanding. This same disturbance is present in people’s lives of the 21st century as everybody wants to be loved and no one wishes to sacrifice their personal beliefs in order to be valued.
Similarly, Jane undergoes the unbalance of another aspect of her life in that she is often confronted with the struggle between satiating her earthly desires and fulfilling her spiritual obligations. Jane encounters three main tests of her choice between human wants and moral duties in three different people. Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns and St John Rivers all offer Jane a religious life in order to fully express her devotion to God. Brocklehurst’s is Jane’s easiest to reject in his strict black and white view of right and wrong under the guise of religious purging. Helen Burns also recommends a dissatisfactory view of life with God as something passive and far too submissive for a character as strong as Jane. St John Rivers, however, proposes a much more difficult choice in which Jane is again met with an option of love. She must choose a dutiful life of devotion devoid of real love or uncertainty in a search for her emotional longings. This is the most strenuous challenge of her faith in that her Christian mores and mortal desires are conflicting. In opposition to her first choice, Jane in this instance chooses the hope of possible love over her religious vocations.
The conflict between spiritual duties and human wants is incredibly relevant to people now as they’re faced with the chance to reject past customs of strong religious beliefs and obligations. Science has taken a hold of the church as recent trends indicate that there is a massive loss in faith within the modern world. Jane had to choose between mortal and spiritual desires and she clearly chose her earthly life while still vowing to maintain a deep commitment to her faith. This balance that she imposed in her life is pertinent as people in the modern world are attempting to make the same choice between two lives and are seeking the balance Jane achieved.
Furthermore, Jane Eyre examines the difficulty women faced in the 19th century as the ‘fairer sex’. There was the deep-seated belief in society that women were inferior to men and, therefore, deserved less out of life. Jane best expresses her detestation of these principles in Chapter 12; “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” It is an unfortunate idea that the modern world would have had yet to progress past such cultures in which people were prejudiced against others based on gender but in such instances the discussion of a male-driven society would be of much importance, such as Jane Eyre.
The classics of the 19th century and beyond can be considered outdated and of no attraction to modern readers and, yet, upon examination, there are indeed still stalwart connections between the problems and challenges encountered by characters such as Jane Eyre and the people of modern society. In a world where everyone wants all the newest gadgets and lives with everything at their fingertips, it’s comforting to know that not all that much has changed about the humans of this planet; they still want the same things: to be loved and to have balance, just as those that may have known the Brontë Sisters, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen.

[This is the essay I wrote about Jane Eyre for my English class]