Jane Eyre

Expressions // ‘God’s Own Lambs’: The Evangelical Child in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams that Jane Eyre ‘has no learning, no research’, and ‘discusses no subject of public interest.’[1]  Although it is true that Charlotte did not set out to write Jane Eyre with the same didactic impulses which compelled her sister to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in her representation of the evangelical institution of Lowood – a thinly disguised Cowan Bridge School as Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell later confirmed – and in the ensuing debate in the press as to the extent of its accuracy, there can be, as Heather Glen states, no doubting the ‘public interest’ of her chosen subject matter.[2]

The harsh, rigorous discipline to which children were subjected at such ‘evangelical, charitable establishments’[3] as Lowood had, at its core, a firmly-held belief in man’s inherently sinful nature, and the absolute authority of the parent and the teacher to ‘subdue the desires of the flesh’, ‘instil humility and obedience’ and, most significantly, prepare the child for salvation.[4]  To evangelical Christians like Reverend Carus Wilson, upon whom Mr Brocklehurst is purportedly based, the child, however inexperienced, is no less sinful than any adult.

We are introduced to this ideology in Jane Eyre the moment Mr Brocklehurst arrives at Gateshead Hall, as he and Jane engage in a particularly one-sided, interrogative exchange which, Glen observes, would not appear out of place in an evangelical tract.[5]  Their meeting concludes with Brocklehurst handing Jane a book entitled ‘The Child’s Guide’, no doubt a fictitious incarnation of The Children’s Friend, the monthly evangelical journal written by the aforementioned real-life Brocklehurst, Carus Wilson, which was full of similar cautionary tales to that of ‘Martha G – , a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit’ (JE, p.37).  Charlotte’s familiarity with such texts, along with her direct exposure to evangelical educational practice, clearly informed her depiction of Lowood, and the teachings of such literary works as The Children’s Friend have remarkable echoes in the voices of the teachers and pupils of Brontë’s novel.

Helen Burns, for example, tells Jane, ‘I follow as inclination guides me.  There is no merit in such goodness’ (JE, p.59).  Her assertion that human goodness is dependent on individual will surely echoes Wilson, who wrote ‘the reason why you do a thing, and not only what you do, is what God looks at’ (my emphasis).[6] As Glen points out, Helen might well be considered the ideal pupil of such harsh evangelical teaching, having utterly ‘internalised the self-suppression imposed’ by Brocklehurst and his colleagues.[7]  Showalter agrees with this assessment, describing Helen as ‘a tribute to the Lowood system: pious, intellectual, indifferent to her material surroundings, resigned to the abuse of her body.’[8]  For all her faults  (‘I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons…’), she withstands in silence the corporal punishment meted out to her by the teachers at Lowood, and when Jane marvels at her endurance of Miss Scatcherd’s apparently reasonless cruelty, she replies, ‘Cruel?  Not at all! […] She dislikes my faults’ (JE, p.58).  She has, apparently, assumed the same sense of self-deprecation taught by figures like Wilson, who, without knowing his readers or their actions, could nonetheless confidently declare, ‘even my youngest readers are sinners.’[9]

Yet, as Gilbert comments, there is in Helen ‘a vein of concealed resentment’ toward her situation at Lowood.[10]  Whilst she is willing to bend to the outward show of conformity to her school’s strict evangelicalism, she inwardly possesses her own private religion, governed by a deeper optimism in humanity and her own fate, which is at odds with Brocklehurst’s doctrine of original sin.  Helen’s own sense of resignation to her fate is due less to her successful indoctrination and the violent physical punishment to which she is subjected than it is to the strength of her own private faith, in which eternity is a ‘rest […] not a terror and an abyss’ (JE, p.61).   Helen’s own ‘creed’ which she seldom mentions, but to which she clings ‘for it extends hope to all’, stands, therefore, in direct opposition to the evangelical pedagogy to which she seems to submit so willingly (JE, p.61).  Helen tells Jane of ‘an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere’ (JE, p.71).    In spite of her own incomprehension of Helen’s ‘doctrine of endurance’ at this point, Jane suspects, nonetheless, that Helen ‘considered things by a light invisible to my eyes’ (JE, p.58).

This seldom-mentioned private faith of Helen’s is also demonstrative of the view of life that considered adulthood as an unavoidably ‘degenerate phase’.[11]  She promises Jane that, though ‘we are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world’, ‘the spark of the spirit […] the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the creator to inspire the creature […] will return’ when we die (JE, p.60-61).  Helen’s conviction that, at the point of our own creation, we all possess a purity and a ‘spark of the spirit’ comparable to that of God is clearly at odds with the evangelical notion that marks out every child for eternal damnation unless they receive and adhere to the proper religious instruction.  These sentiments are echoed strikingly in Tenant by Helen Huntingdon, who proclaims that her ‘life’s sweet labour’ should be to keep ‘that pure spark’ of her infant son ‘unsullied from the world’ (TWH, p.228).  Her belief, however, in the inevitable and universal corruption of mankind, that we ‘must’ all be ‘burdened with faults’ before we finally die, does appear to echo the emphasis which the evangelicals placed on death.  As Glen states, the purpose of educating young children ‘was to convince the child of the inevitability of death’; ‘to the evangelicals, life on earth was a mere preparation for the hereafter: death, therefore, was its climactic point – the moment of entry into bliss or perdition.’[12]  Helen Burns, though, is far less discriminating in terms of whom she imagines fit for the ‘bliss’ of Heaven.  Like Helen Huntingdon in Tenant, who remains convinced that the goodness in her husband has merely been ‘clouded’ over by poor company and a problematic childhood, Helen Burns assures Jane that although the pupils at Lowood may ‘look coldly’ on her after hearing Mr Brocklehurst’s accusations, ‘friendly feelings are concealed in their hearts’ (JE, p.71).

Unfortunately, the length of Helen’s short life curtails this sense of optimism, and unlike Helen Huntingdon who gradually loses faith in her efforts to uncover the ‘clouded’ goodness of her drunken husband, or even Anne Brontë herself, who wrote in the margin of one of her prayer books that she was ‘sick of mankind and their disgusting ways’, [13]  Helen is, importantly, not given the opportunity to become disillusioned. Instead, she is ‘carried off by her own fever for liberty’[14]: ‘by dying young, I shall escape great sufferings’ (JE, p.83).  Again, this indicates a particularly Romantic understanding of growing up as a falling away from the innocence of childhood, as Helen also tells Jane ‘I should have been continually at fault’ (JE, p.83).  Although it is rarely helpful to imagine the trajectory of a novel should major events have unfolded differently, the question might be asked as to whether Helen would have become disillusioned with mankind had she lived long enough to experience more of it.

The reason she should be ‘continually at fault’ seems not her lack of ‘qualities or talents’ but rather because she is simply not for this world.  Though she presents petty mistakes repeatedly to the pedantic eyes of her teachers, the faults with which she insists all mankind must be ‘burdened’ never seem to manifest themselves to Jane, who reveres her capacity to ‘give those who enjoyed the privilege of her converse, a taste of far higher things’ (JE, p.79).  Indeed, the notability of Helen’s ‘pure society’, and the reason her discourse is afforded quite so much reflection in Jane’s narrative, is precisely because of its singularity.  Jane’s new friend Mary Ann Wilson is ‘inferior’, and Jane, too, for choosing to indulge in her gossip.  The image of Helen as isolated and elevated in her angelic, saint-like goodness presents her as a solitary figure, as alone at Lowood as she is in her earthly life.  Thus, the romantic ideal that Helen seems to embody is, as Gilbert claims, an ‘impossible’ one, and for this reason, her death has frequently been interpreted in rather more figurative terms, as part of the assimilation of two unfeasible extremes (the piety of Helen Burns and the aggressive sexuality of Bertha Mason) into one moderate composite in Jane’s character.[15]

If, as Glen suggests, the concern of Brontë’s novel is primarily with ‘tracing the logic of the ideology that Jane confronts’,[16] then this must also involve the necessary deconstruction of the hypocrisy which often underpins that logic.  Brocklehurst’s own hypocrisy is unambiguous, and it is significant that the reader is made aware of it almost as instantly as he is introduced to the novel, since this marks it as one of his foremost characteristics.  In his efforts to assure Mrs. Reed that Jane will be ‘kept humble’ at his school, Brocklehurst relays his daughter’s first impressions of her visit to the school as supporting evidence: ‘“they are almost like poor people’s children! […] they looked at my dress and mamma’s as if they had never seen a silk gown before”’ (JE, p.36).  This particular anecdote is not accompanied by any commentary from Jane, and, indeed, it needs none.  In attempting to advertise Lowood’s success in mortifying ‘the worldly sentiment of pride’ in his pupils this way, he directly betrays his own failure to implement such discipline at home, thereby falling short of what, just moments later, he refers to as ‘the first of Christian duties’: ‘consistency’ (JE, p.36).  This inconsistency which wholly undercuts the sincerity of Brocklehurst’s doctrine is demonstrated once more with the arrival of the ‘splendidly attired’ Misses Brocklehursts on a second visit to the school.  This time, the physical illustration of his hypocrisy quite literally cuts off his instruction:

‘Each of the young persons before us has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity itself might have woven: these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the time wasted, of  –’ Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted; three other visitors, ladies, now entered the room. (JE, p.66-67)

Again, neither Jane nor anyone else need directly point out this hypocrisy, but it is certainly registered in Miss Temple’s ‘involuntary’ smile at his orders, and in the childish naivety of Jane’s suggestion that ‘the ‘female Brocklehursts’, dressed in velvet, silk, and furs, ought to have arrived earlier in order to have heard their father’s diatribe on women’s fashion.  However, there have been some suggestions that the inclusion of Brocklehurst’s hypocrisy is problematic.  Lerner, for example, writes that this hypocrisy weakens the book itself: ‘an attack on puritan strictness, only if the puritan turns out to transgress his own precepts so flagrantly, is not an attack on puritanism at all’, and ‘diverts [Brontë’s] satire from its true object.’[17]  In other words, the ‘deficiency of nourishment’ and of sufficient clothing for the children, the harshness of the rules he so stringently upholds, ought alone to condemn Brocklehurst, without the unnecessary addition of his insincerity.  It seems more likely to me, however, that Brontë’s ‘attack’ on Brocklehurst is a criticism of an institution which affords its authority figures the freedom to exercise this hypocrisy whilst punishing its more vulnerable members.

The evangelical configuration of life as ‘little more than a series of temptations’ leaves little room for childhood to be considered as a separate chapter of life to be nurtured and celebrated,[18] and it is possible to read Jane Eyre in similar terms.  The influences of Helen and her entire Lowood experience can be found throughout the text, most obviously when she is introduced to the society of Mr. Rochester, who notes that the ‘Lowood constraint still clings to you’, ‘muffling’, ‘controlling’, and ‘restricting’ her (JE, p.139).  When Jane requests leave of absence from Thornfield to visit her ailing aunt, his flat response ‘besides […] she cast you off’ as a reason not to return is reminiscent of Jane’s own interrogation of Helen, as she impatiently searches Helen for confirmation of Mrs. Reed’s ‘hard-hearted’ and ‘bad’ character (JE, p. 222, p.60).  The ‘deep impression’ Mrs. Reed’s injustice has made on Jane is therefore tempered by that made by Helen Burns; she has been taught to do good to ‘them that hate you and despitefully use you’ (JE, p.60), and as Glen puts it, ‘like the exemplary figure in an evangelical tract, she is rewarded with happiness, though in this world, rather than the next.’[19]

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Works Cited

[1] Charlotte Brontë Selected Letters, ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.89.

[2] Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.66.

[3] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; repr. Croydon: Penguin, 1994), p.66 (subsequent references given in parenthesis throughout the text).

[4] Glen, p.69, p.72.

[5] Glen, p.77.

[6] Carus Wilson, The Children’s Friend (January 1838), p.10.

[7] Glen, p.75.

[8] Elaine Showalter, ‘Charlotte Brontë: Feminine Heroine’ in Jane Eyre (New Casebooks) ed. by Heather Glen (Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997) 68-77, p.72.

[9] Carus Wilson, The Children’s Friend (January 1850), p.7.

[10] Sandra Gilbert, ‘Plain Jane’s Progress’, Signs, Volume 2 (1977), 779-804, p.786.

[11] Roberts, p.355.

[12] Glen, p.75.

[13] Anne Brontë, quoted in Beth Torgerson, Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.142.

[14] Gilbert, p.786.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Glen, p.80.

[17] Lerner, p.134.

[18] Laurence Lerner, Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, 1977), p.138.

[19] Glen, p.79.