The Foundation of Jane Eyre’s Moral Education

This is part 1 of a 3-part series. You can find the others here: Part 2, "Jane Eyre's Equality of Spirit," and Part 3, "Adam Smith on Jane Eyre’s Blanche Ingram."

On June 8, an ASW Virtual Reading Group — entitled “Liberty, Equality, Jane Eyre, and Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric” — kicked off to lively discussion. Participants discussed Jane’s childhood solitude and isolation, noting that her family’s determination to shun and ostracize her prevents her from becoming a member of their small polis or engaging with the community. How, then, does the child start her moral education and begin to grasp concepts like justice and truth? The answer may lie in Jane’s reading habits.

 

In the first chapter of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jane’s cousin John Reed finds her reading a book alone and unleashes a barrage of physical abuse against the orphan girl. After he throws the book at her, Jane cries out, “You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!” The novel’s narrator, the adult Jane describing her early life, then provides a gloss on this accusation: “I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero [and] Caligula. . . [then] drawn parallels in silence.” This observation reveals that Jane’s youthful reflections on literature, particularly works of history analyzing human behavior over centuries, enable the early stages of her understanding of virtues and vices. 

 

Shortly afterwards, Jane’s discussion with Reverend Brocklehurst suggests that the historical and prophetic books of the Bible, especially within the Old Testament, also impact her developing moral sentiments. Jane appreciates “Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel, and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job and Jonah,” but has no interest in the Psalms or the majority of the New Testament. Here again, we can infer that Jane is analyzing justice and injustice within the framework of the ancient world’s brutal eye-for-eye legal system. Her sole mention of the New Testament is the book of Revelations, and its apocalyptic vision of justice and punishment before the Great White Throne hardly presents a more comforting picture. In both instances, wickedness is punished absolutely and victims of abuse receive justice at last.

 

In this light, Jane’s commitment to truth and desire to see cruelty punished are entirely logical developments of her interest in Roman histories and her preference for the Old Testament above the New. Perhaps more significantly, her confusion over the differences between justice and vengeance may also be tied to these childhood reading materials. Moments after arguing with her Aunt Reed and virulently condemning the woman for her cruelty, Jane describes vengeance as an “aromatic wine” with an “after-flavor, metallic and corroding. . . [that] gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.” Despite her emotional impulse to seek justice for the abuse she has suffered throughout her childhood, repaying a verbal attack for the verbal attacks she has received in the past brings no relief to Jane. Although vengeance does not satisfy, no alternative is apparent to the suffering, bitter orphan girl; her moral education at this stage has begun, but with no concept of forgiveness or mercy, it is hardly complete.

 

If Adam Smith is correct to argue in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that mankind’s social nature guides the development of morality, then it should come as little shock that the experiences of Jane’s childhood initially direct her towards a skewed perception of justice. Indeed, in surveying the Reeds’ years of physical and psychological abuse towards Jane, Smith might apply some of his famous observations from Book Two:

Thus, there can be no society among the Reed family, who—by shunning justice and glorying in violence towards an innocent—prove themselves antisocial in the most literal sense of the word. Both Jane’s moral education and the orphan girl herself are victims of that detrimental environment. However, by moving to a new environment where neither Reed nor Roman can limit her understanding of morality, Jane can begin to assemble a more coherent moral system.

 

Although Jane’s engagements with literature enable her to grasp concepts like justice, tyranny, virtue, and vice at the theoretical level, it is her practical experience with her cousin’s cruelty and her aunt’s inconsistency that cause her to understand the real-world impact of those concepts. Similarly, it will require lengthy practical experience with Miss Temple’s and Helen Burn’s gentleness and forgiveness at Lowood School before Jane will begin to grasp the reality of the Christian virtues she never experienced with the Reeds. True justice and a completed moral education will come for Jane later in the novel, tempered by mercy and love rather than the bloodiness of the Roman histories or the sacrifices of the Old Testament.

Want to Read More?
Theory of Moral Sentiments Reading Guide for the above quote
Shannon Chamberlain's Adam Smith Suggests You Read a Romance Novel (And Have a Laugh At Yourself)
Jonathan Jacobs' Adam Smith on Moral Education