Jane Eyre by Charlotte

This is conventional enough from a religious perspective. A useful comparison can be made here – in terms of this Puritan/Evangelical thread running through the novel – with what might be called ‘God’s judgement’ on Rochester for his sins: his loss of an eye and a hand in conformity with the gospel imperative, ‘If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off…And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out (Mk 9:43,47).

Charlotte Brontë, however, is not making a simple allusion to Bunyan’s popular spiritual classic; she is using the genre of his Puritan allegory to subtly circumvent the very doctrines he was trying to promote. In her own way, by employing Bunyan so prominently in her novel, she was being quite as radical a Romantic as a Blake or a Shelley from the previous generation.

To understand this point, it helps to focus on the very end of the novel, and to consider, first of all, how much of a surprise it is – even a shock – to read the final sentences of Jane Eyre . Of all possible conclusions, Brontë chooses to end her book with a pious eulogy of St John Rivers! There are admittedly more odious characters in the novel than he, but the fact remains that the author has spent a considerable number of pages establishing that Rivers is an ego-centric monster, ‘cold as an iceberg.’ And yet, these are the sentiments with which, through Jane, Charlotte Brontë ends the novel:

St John is unmarried: he will never marry now…his glorious sun hastens to its setting. The last letter I received from him drew from my eyes human tears and yet filled my heart with divine joy: he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible crown.

The reason this is the end of Jane Eyre is that this, too, is the end of Pilgrim’s Progress . Bunyan’s final pages see Christian ford the River of Death to reach the Celestial City that is his aim, and so Brontë’s novel – which has followed a pilgrim’s progress from ‘Gateshead’ down into ‘Lowood’ then across ‘Thornfield’ to finally reach ‘Marsh End’ – with perfect logic, concludes with a death and an acquisition of an ‘incorruptible crown.’ Incidentally, this is imagery that strongly evokes the description of the martyrs in the final book of the Bible, the Revelation to St John, which, of course, echoes this character’s name.