Jan Eyre :: essays research papers

Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between object lesson duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body. She encounters tether main religious figures Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each represents a model of trust that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her have ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Bront perceive in the nineteenth-century evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, yet his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly tomentum of one of Janes classmates be cut so as to pillow straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of course, Brocklehursts proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his own luxurious ly wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Bronts wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen Burnss meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the some other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for it.Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another(prenominal) model of Christian behavior. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her stirred deeds for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of living that would require her to be disloyal to her own self.Although Jane ends up rejecting all tierce models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her selection in the hands of God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochesters lustful immorality, and sh e refuses to contemplate living with him while church and state still deem him espouse to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only(prenominal) love she has ever known.