Bradley Kime and Professor Paul Kerry, Department of History
Modern readers might be surprised to learn that the 1847 publication of Jane Eyre caused an uproar. Plenty of critics praised the novel’s author, but many of the loudest voices were shocked by its content. In a satirical essay the next year, Edwin Whipple surveyed the literary scene: England and the United States, he wrote, were “not many months ago . . . visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the ‘Jane Eyre Fever,’” which produced a widespread fervor of “moral and religious indignation.”1 Among other censures, The Christian Remembrancer had declared of the novel that “every page burns with moral Jacobinism,”2 while the Mirror Monthly Magazine had warned that “religion is stabbed in the dark.”3 Readers today often find the religiosity of Jane Eyre innocuous and its morality downright inspirational. So what were the Victorians so worked up about?
Studies of the novel’s contemporary critics have been rare, but the one scholar who has examined Jane Eyre’s contemporary reviews in depth answered that question by pointing to Victorian prudery. Jane Eyre’s “coarseness,” simply upset nineteenth-century moral sensibilities.4 In literary quarters, postmodern critics have often utilized decontextualized contemporary concerns to argue that Bronte truly intended the novel as an “anti-Christian composition.”5 Neither approach sufficiently accounts for the complexity and concentration of contemporary concerns over the novel’s morality and religiosity. Though the loudest voices denounced the novel as an affront to Christian morality and an attack on Christian religion, Edwin Whipple’s sarcasm alerts historians to significant critical dissensions. In actuality, more critics defended the novel’s morality than denounced it.
The deeper concern of Victorian readers was that the novel was “merely moral.”6 In an era of religious schism, English heterodoxy was a hundred-headed Hydra—a threat lurking even in fiction, where “our very religion is not free from the attacks of innovators,” as one Bronte critic cried.7 Orthodox Christians were concerned that Jane Eyre promoted morality without a Mediator. “It is true Jane does right and exerts great moral strength,” wrote Elizabeth Rigby, “but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.”8 In Bronte’s admittedly moral work, orthodox Victorians saw “vague creeds,”9 “heathenish doctrines,”10 and “odd sorts of religions notions”11 replacing “true religion.”12
A survey of the history of Jane Eyre literary criticism, however, reveals that Victorians haven’t been the only ones exercised about the novel’s religiosity. In the last half century, the early questions of religious orthodoxy have morphed into questions of religious authenticity. Modern critics have debated whether the visible religious tropes in Jane Eyre are sincere or satirical. While a generation of scholars has argued that the novel parodies Christian paradigms in its subversive attack on patriarchal power structures, dozens of recent critics have drawn from Bronte’s historical religious context to demonstrate that Jane’s journey is in fact an authentic spiritual pilgrimage.
Hence, this study concludes with a historicized reading of the novel that fully accounts for both its religious heterodoxy and its religious authenticity. Bronte drew extensively from a widely disseminated popular nineteenth-century literary genre—Protestant conversion narratives modeled after The Pilgrim’s Progress—to frame Jane’s development and destination. By reading the novel alongside these contemporary narratives, Jane Eyre emerges as a cohesive “pilgrimage of two souls toward a common shrine.”13 At the center of Jane’s pilgrimage is a heterodox creed of universal salvation, blocking her path is the snare of relational idolatry, and awaiting the successful completion of her journey is the bliss of Edenic marriage.
ORCA has funded what would have otherwise been impossible research for this project. The grant enabled trips to the British Library in London, the Cambridge University Library, and a special trip to the Bronte Museum and Archives in Haworth. Not only the documents obtained but the learning experiences, archival training, and scholarly development facilitated by my mentor in the process have been invaluable. This study is still in the final stages of revision. We will likely submit the finished paper to Bronte Studies for publication.
References
- Edwin P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews Vol. II (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1848), 393.
- “Article IV. Jane Eyre—An Autobiography,” The Christian Remembrancer 15 (January – June 1848), 397.
- “The Last New Novel,” The Mirror Monthly Magazine 2 (July – December 1847), 380.
- Tom Winnifrith, The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (London: MacMillan Press, 1988), chapter 7.
- Sandra M. Gilbert, “Plain Jane’s Progress,” Signs 2:4 (Summer 1977), 779.
- “Notices of Books,” The Church of England Quarterly Review 23 (1848): 491-492.
- “Last New Novel,” 380.
- “Vanity Fair—And Jane Eyre,” The Quarterly Review (London) (December 1848), 175.
- “Article IV. Jane Eyre—An Autobiography,” 397.
- “Vanity Fair—And Jane Eyre,” 176.
- “Mr. Bell’s New Novel,” The Rambler 3 (1849), 65.
- “The Last New Novel,” 377.
- Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1998), 48.