Jane, the protagonist in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, is considered to be the strongest female character of her time period. However her road to becoming a strong, independent women is not smooth sailing. In the novel, male characters’ roles and interactions with Jane threaten her quest for equality throughout her life, the most prevalent being Mr. Brocklehurst, Mr. Rochester, and St. John Rivers. To begin, in Jane’s rough youth, she left her abusive household to attend school where she meets the cruel Mr. Brocklehurst, the supervisor of her new school, Lowood.
Lowood was a great influence on Jane but her time there was not always pleasant. When she attended Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst attempted to interrupt Jane’s quest for equality from a very young age. Firstly, Mr. Brocklehurst’s humility towards not only Jane, but the entire female population of Lowood, demonstrates how he himself does not wish for equality. When describing his role in the girls’ upbringing he states: “my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh; to teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel”.
This quotation is interesting because even though what he is doing sounds morally correct, later on Jane ironically describes Mr. Brocklehurst’s family as being elegantly clothed. The point is that Mr. Brocklehurst is purposefully degrading these females by forcing them into an environment where girls are lead to believe that if you are not of wealth, one is limited to a certain life. The reader can believe that Mr. Brocklehurst succeeded with this equality obstacle as the conflict of social class sticks with Jane, for it appears again later on in another stage in Jane’s life at Thornfield.
Mr. Brocklehurst’s negligence and oppression of these young girls has created a new challenge towards Jane’s equality because Brocklehurst makes it shameful to be a true individual. When a student with naturally curly hair attracts his gaze he immediately confronts Miss Temple about the problem, he says, “I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl’s hair must be cut off entirely”. Again, this can be seen as reasonable by Brocklehurst in that he wants all the girls to be uniform, but he goes to extreme lengths to ensure that no girl is special.
He goes to a radical extent to not only demonstrate to the owner of the hair that being special is unacceptable, but he forces the entire school to take notice of it as well, driving home his message about being an individual. While Mr. Brocklehurst did lose his position at Lowood, he remains a large hindrance in Jane’s path to equality. After studying and teaching at Lowood, Jane is ready to move on the next chapter in her life when she accepts the governess position at Thornfield.
Unaware of what to expect, she meets what will be her future husband, the proprietor of Thornfield, Mr. Rochester. Even though they do marry at the end of the novel, Mr. Rochester is a distraction in Jane’s quest for equality. Rochester does so in that he makes the inexperienced Jane expose feelings that make her lose the essence of a strong, independent women and become vulnerable. A major example of this occurrence is jealousy. Coming from an all-girls institution, Jane’s experience with men is minimal if not non-existent, so when a bachelor like Mr. Rochester comes onto the scene she can’t help but develop feelings.
Mr. Rochester knows of her feelings and abuses them by constantly telling her of his false intentions to marry a woman much richer and prettier than Jane. In the numerous engagement scenes viewed in class, the audience could see how Rochester’s words about his “wife-to-be” Blanche Ingram hurt Jane and only made her more emotional on the subject to a point where Jane beings to degrade herself because of how plain and poor she was in comparison to Blanche.
Jealousy only furthers Jane’s desires for Rochester and forces her to lose her independence to make smart, rational decisions about her future and personal morals. One of the reasons that Jane desires Rochester to such a large extent is because Rochester treats her as his equal, contrary to most relationships of the time. Jane questions why Rochester treats her this way based on the idea of social class. From her time at Lowood, Jane was forced to realize that she is in fact poor. With Rochester, Jane is forced into a luxurious lifestyle that rids her of how she was raised and contradicts her own ideals when it comes to class.
She does not feel right marrying a man of a higher social class than her but her desire for him has made her lose sight of her values on social status. We notice Jane’s feelings about Rochester’s wealth with the veil he buys her for their wedding. Jane is almost happy when Bertha, the unknown psychotic wife, tears the veil. The reader can understand her emotions about the veil because Jane would feel as without the veil, she and Rochester are equals again, but deep down she knows she will always be inferior to him.
In the end, even though Jane does marry Rochester in the later part of the novel, Rochester still provides an obstacle in Jane’s quest for equality. In the final stage of the novel, Jane finally finds something she has never truly had, family. After leaving Thornfield she struggled along until being taken in by what she learns are her cousins, Diana, Mary, and St. John Rivers. As the reader learns from reading this phase of Jane’s life, St. John is no saint in a literal or metaphorical manner. Even though he is Jane’s family, he inhibits Jane’s progress towards equality.
Common during the era of the novel, cousins would get married. St. John desires Jane for she is, as he puts it, “a missionary’s wife” for she is hard working and driven. Jane is opposed to this idea for she cannot marry a man she does not love, but St. John will not go on his missionary trip to India without a wife. His intensity towards Jane begins to consume her, making her feel small and inferior to him taking away her independence. This intensity towards Jane can be seen as St. John attempting to take advantage of her role as a woman in courtship.
St. John even infers that he would have sex with Jane even though he does not love her because that is what husbands and wives do. St. John is providing the opposite treatment that Rochester was providing her which is why after understanding St. John’s philosophy on marriage, Jane immediately goes running back to Rochester. Moreover, at the very end of the novel, Jane receives a letter from St. John telling her about how he is nearing death in India. One can believe that this letter is symbolic of what would have happened to Jane if she had went to India.
While her fate could have been similar to St. John’s, there is a larger element that would have died along with her physical body, that being her soul. If Jane had went to India she would essentially be imprisoned in a place where she would be unable to fulfill her passions and desires. Jane would have been married into a life of servitude, having to keep her feelings bundled up in a place where no one would not only listen but be able to take action. The reader can believe that Bronte chose to conclude the novel with this letter to truly convey how miserable and oppressed Jane would have been with
St. John. All in all, St. John being family has no effect on how he is a hindrance in Jane’s quest for equality. In conclusion, while Jane’s strong, independent character is the first real representation of an exemplary female character in literature, she still has to fend off many male obstacles on her path to equality represented by the characters of Mr. Brocklehurst, Rochester and St. John. Would Jane be as close to equality without these characters? One would think not.
