Religion In Jane Eyre
Everyone goes through life searching and questioning what really matters to them and what their own true beliefs are, it’s just the normal progression of life. In Jane Eyre, Jane is seen as searching, and questioning her own spiritual beliefs from an early age. Jane struggles to find the right balance between ideas of faith and her own principles. Jane meets Mr. Brocklehurst at a very young age and leads Jane to question everything about religion; this moment illustrates Mr. Brocklehurst as an embodiment of harsh evangelical religion that seeks to strip others of their “excessive” pride or of their ability to take pleasure in worldly things which represents how Jane feels toward the subject of organized religion. Jane’s first observations
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In refusing to marry Rochester after discovering the truth about his first wife, Jane gives up love for the sake of morality. When she rejects her cousin St. John Rivers’ proposal to marry and travel to India with him as a missionary, she relinquishes religion in favor of her own life. Jane believes that neither of these marriages, at least given the context in which they are offered, will allow for her independence. Jane understands that her position is inferior to that of her would-be husband and that, were she to marry him, he would quickly come to feel that he had, in a sense, bought her. There is a turning point for Jane in relation to St John where she must choose to submit to the "will of God" or maintain her autonomy. If religion had been Jane's core, would she have said, "I broke from St John, who had followed, and would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendancy." (p. 358)? Arguably, because she turns away from St John and towards a relationship where she can be held as an equal and maintain her agency to some degree, this is evidence to support that Jane sees a life as a religious missionaries life as constricting and thus she could not be happy with St.
In refusing to marry Rochester after discovering the truth about his first wife, Jane gives up love for the sake of morality. When she rejects her cousin St. John Rivers’ proposal to marry and travel to India with him as a missionary, she relinquishes religion in favor of her own life. Jane believes that neither of these marriages, at least given the context in which they are offered, will allow for her independence. Jane understands that her position is inferior to that of her would-be husband and that, were she to marry him, he would quickly come to feel that he had, in a sense, bought her. There is a turning point for Jane in relation to St John where she must choose to submit to the "will of God" or maintain her autonomy. If religion had been Jane's core, would she have said, "I broke from St John, who had followed, and would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendancy." (p. 358)? Arguably, because she turns away from St John and towards a relationship where she can be held as an equal and maintain her agency to some degree, this is evidence to support that Jane sees a life as a religious missionaries life as constricting and thus she could not be happy with St.