I read Jane Eyre when I was thirteen years old. My mother had recently bought a copy of the book, as far as I recall. It was such a 'rattling good yarn' that I finished it in one sitting, past 1 a.m. although it was a 'school night,' as far as I remember. (Although we have other copies, I was sad that this paperback vanished. It was tasteful, and I am so fastidious about books' covers that every niceish book leaves a long-lasting impression.) Brontë's novel did strike me as a polar opposite to Jane Austen's works, although I do think that they are not so different in their subjects and plots — subjects like the roles self-analysis and logic can play in affecting one's relationships with other people.
A main and glaringly evident parallel is that they were daughters of clergymen; and yet religion plays a divergent role in their works. Not being a good pupil of religion, I haven't read the Bible much. But because so much phraseology from the Bible (King James, even!) appears in Jane Eyre and Shirley, whenever I do read the Beatitudes or bits of Revelations or Psalms it turns out that I am familiar with a lot of passages. It's beyond my capabilities at present, but I was planning to look for a kind of narrative arc patterned on the Bible in Jane Eyre, and maybe write an essay about it. Certainly it's made easier by the fact that I believe that it ends with a quotation from Revelations — although a question is also what order the chapters of the Bible are really, ideally in.
It is a far subtler task to trace religion in Jane Austen's works. In my view, whatever religion there is, is so interwoven with propriety and contemporary social standards that it's difficult to see where one stops and the other starts. The worst misdeeds of her female protagonists are identified by what now can seem like artificial criteria: extramarital affairs that are seen as an expression of sinfulness in themselves rather than as mean deeds particularly where they give pain to others. (I do think that morality does have the double facet, though. It concerns the effect of one's own actions on the one hand, but also integrity and truthfulness to one's self on the other hand. And I obviously do believe that promises, like wedding vows, should only be made with free will and if one has every belief that one will keep them; and that they should then be kept — so long as they do not interfere with someone else's good.) Although 'spotted' characters like Lydia Bennett and Maria Bertram are recognizably selfish from the outset, not merely shocking.(!) There is at least an equality of the sexes — Elizabeth Bennett is no more admiring of George Wickham for being a disreputable man than she is admiring of her sister's impulse to run off with him.
(Whereas Jane Eyre is badly unequal in its moral codes for men and women. Pretty much all of Mr. Rochester's behaviour would be in fact unpardonably louche if Jane Eyre had committed it.)
I wonder whether the cause of the religious difference is the state of the church in Jane Austen's time and location in England, if perhaps outward observances like regular churchgoing were considered more important there and then in her surroundings, than the emotional outpourings and proclamations of faith in Charlotte Brontë's. Or, at a time when agnosticism may have been more popular in the circles for whom Jane Austen wrote or in which she lived, if it would have been considered gushing, inapposite or tactless to speak of religion; or if ladies were 'not permitted to speak' of theology in their capacity as ladies.
As for the religious principles enshrined in Jane Austen's works, John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" comes to mind — 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' I wonder if Jane Austen's religion presupposed a moral, emotional and intellectual harmony as the highest good. By that I mean, like Elizabeth Bennett's life at the end of Pride and Prejudice — the moral harmony of having married for love after snubbing money and the entire social structure of England; the intellectual harmony of living with a man who shares her ideals and her interests; and the emotional harmony of having married a man who also wants to coexist generously, happily and usefully. Not all beauty must be truth, and not all truth beauty, depending on how one interprets this phrase. But even this formula seems too reductive; and although I think my ideals are still partly Austenian, I agree with Charlotte Brontë that the greatest good does not lie in harmoniousness per se.
Maybe harmony, as an ideal, is not a demand of what reality should be like — although Leibniz apparently tried to say it is. Perhaps it is a Platonic ideal (I mean, as a helpful but unattainable aim) or a prospect to expect in the afterlife. The harmony when fine deeds express a moral belief in practical terms is, I think, beautiful to behold, perhaps, when they are perfectly in tune. But I'm inclined to agree with Oscar Wilde's witticism that the truth 'is rarely pure and never simple'; I don't know how perfectly motivations and ends ever align with deeds, or vice versa.
In Jane Austen's realm, I think it's hardly as labyrinthine an idea as what I describe above. Harmony can be established in reality and in the present. It is achieved when one has arrived at an understanding of self and when an arrangement of outer circumstances erases vulgar, ignoble elements and replaces them with congenial elements. Elizabeth Darcy, Fanny Bertram, and Anne Elliot all escape their home environment for one where they feel more comfortable and fulfilled; only Catherine Tilney, I think, shifts from one happy state to another. It's tempting to pigeonhole Jane Austen as deist (also, snobby) for practical purposes. But I think that Persuasion, at least when you read it in a glum frame of mind, reinforces the impression that some wounds in life are never erased by a future good. Literal wounds, too, like the knock on the head of Louisa Musgrave. So that's not very deist, and certainly not a declaration of faith in the 'best of all possible worlds.'
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| "A Drawing Keats rendered of an engraving of the Sosibios Vase" John Keats, ca. 1819 In the Louvre Museum Via Wikimedia Commons |
Postscript:
I was wondering regarding Jane Eyre if St. John Rivers is a prearranged response to readers who objected to the irreligion of Mr. Rochester, and that St. John is an embodiment of strict virtue in contrast to Byronic passion — although the Byronic passion seems rather better in her comparison. That seems risqué. But at least in Paradise Lost, Charlotte Brontë has a respectable literary forerunner — also written by an author who was obsessed with religious questions — that humanizes and therefore almost beautifies 'Evil.'
That might explain why, despite even the low threshold for realism that is set by all the picturesque fantasy in the book, I thought of him as the least real, most abstract character.* I never think that I'll meet a St. John Rivers. I thought that as a character he was a 'well groomed'-looking marble bust of an eminent missionary, theologian, or seminary student; or like a Galatea before she was transformed. He was manipulated to speak and move, much like a child waves a doll in the air and 'makes it talk,' but he is not like a breathing human being.
* (Rosamund Oliver also felt unreal, like a few of the other characters; more like a paper doll that represents the kind of outwardly privileged life that the heroine will never know, than like a breathing organism. And still I think — or thought when I had read the book more freshly — that the character of Gwendolyn Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda shows that this kind of character can be done properly.)
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