“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.”

These are words spoken by Jane Eyre in the midst of a climactic moment in the novel that bears her name.

Stripped from their context, the words – written nearly two centuries ago – still resound. They are bold. Brave. Strong. Compassionating. But within the context of the narrative, the words – spoken to the man Jane loves but will give up in order to choose her own integrity over love – are even more astonishing.

In the world of Jane Eyre (published by Charlotte Bronte in 1847), the titular character is as helpless, powerless, and socially inconsequential as a person in her world could be. In this context, it is no less than revolutionary for a poor, friendless, servant – and a woman, no less – to claim for herself, as she does with the words above, her freedom, identity, and sheer sense of self. (Truth be told, such is still revolutionary in some spaces in the world today.) Orphaned, rejected by her few known relations, and utterly alone in the world, Jane rejects the man who loves her, woos her, and betrays her – despite the fact that Rochester’s power as Jane’s employer, protector, and social superior could give much of what she lacks and needs.

At this point in the narrative, we have journeyed with Jane through the physical and emotional abuse she endured as a small child living in the home of her cruel aunt and equally cruel cousins. We have witnessed the despicable hypocrisy of the Christian overseers and funders of the charity school where Jane is sent as a child, an institution run so poorly that some of its students die from illness and neglect. We have cheered Jane as she manages to survive and, even more miraculously, encounters for the first time in her life real agape love, twice, in fact, in the forms of a friend and a kind teacher.

From the start of the story – having nothing and no one – Jane has shown herself to be a person who is strong willed, deeply introspective, and profoundly spiritual. Indeed, the novel is not only an exemplary form of that emerging literary genre (the novel), but it also draws upon a more ancient genre – the spiritual journey or pilgrimage. When viewed through this lens, the novel’s otherwise ordinary opening line can be seen as hinting at the profound pilgrimage that is to come: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” This seemingly mundane sentence signifies, on the surface, a literal jaunt outdoors. Prevented by inclement weather from that otherwise insignificant activity, however, Jane and her cousins remain indoors where a pivotal event will occur that changes the course of Jane’s life. Thus, the sentence gestures toward the walk-as-pilgrimage motif that recurs throughout Christian (and non-Christian) literature, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Following closely in this tradition, Jane Eyre is not only a novel, but also an allegory of the soul, a soul on a journey to secure a fitting place in this world as well as in the next. And it is that desire, that need, to find a place in this world that makes Jane Eyre – and Jane Eyre – quintessentially modern.

The modern age is the story of the rise of the individual. From the humanism of the Renaissance to the solas of the Protestant Reformation, from the capitalistic spirit encouraged by the Puritan work ethic to the personal autonomy cultivated by mass literacy, the modern age is marked by increased significance of the individual person as an individual.

Jane Eyre was written as this seismic shift was taking place. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes a social imaginary as consisting of pre-cognitive assumptions, stories, metaphors, expectations inherited from one’s communities. While today’s modern social imaginaries would take for granted the autonomy and agency of a figure like Jane, such was yet to be the case when Bronte was writing. Jane Eyre both reflects this shift in the imagination and helps to cultivate it. Like all good art, the novel imitates life and, at the same time, encourages life to imitate the world envisioned by the novel.

Jane Eyre dared to question a social hierarchy based on class, economics, sex, and ownership of land. Jane Eyre dared to offer a picture of human equality based on human worth and dignity. Indeed, upon Jane’s leaving Rochester and staking her claim as an independent and equal person rather than a dependent servant or mistress, the novel offers a homily on these grounds for human equality:

“I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, – as we are!”

No wonder some of the novel’s first readers found the work shocking. One early, infamous review, published in the Quarterly Review in 1848, deems:

Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment – there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence – there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

Such a review helps us to see, nearly two centuries later, just how radical Jane’s sense of her basic dignity and equality as a person was. That we take such dignity and equality (mostly) for granted today is a testimony to the power of narrative art in general, and this novel in particular. And like anything else that is powerful, art like this is often feared.

In an essay titled “Fear of Fiction,” published in the July 7, 2024 edition of the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, Lyta Gold explores the perceived dangers of fiction from as far back as Plato’s time to our own. These fears ebb and flow, spiking every few decades, Gold observes. But societies that emphasize individual autonomy, freedom, and rights have a particular propensity to fear the power of fiction:

Moral panics over fiction are common in democracies, because the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience – and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe – of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.

And Jane Eyre is indeed the story of a person, a person whose voice and passion are so compelling that even the same Quarterly Review essayist quoted above was not immune to that power:

Still we say again this is a very remarkable book…. It is impossible not to be spell-bound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it “fine writing.” It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct, which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.

In other words, Jane’s character and voice are as real, instinctive, and as ungovernable by mere convention or social approval as is any real person who understands herself to be a moral agent accountable to something greater and more eternal than mere human convention.

The spiritual journey Jane undertakes in these pages is one toward loving herself enough to be who God has called her to be. All Jane has wanted all her life is love. She is denied love as an orphaned child. She loses love to death at the Lowood School. Finally, she is offered love by a man she loves and adores. But to receive that love in full will cost Jane more than she is willing to sacrifice.

First, the illicit arrangement Rochester offers would violate Jane’s Christian faith. Hers is a faith that in being unconventional is not recognized by the Pharisees of her world. Yet, her faith is real, genuine, and true – if not unwavering. Emotionally and socially cut off for so long, Jane, from the time she was a small child, was forced to adopt a Christian faith forged in freedom rather than tradition. In an early scene, she is being grilled by Rev. Brocklehurst, who oversees Lowood School, the institution where Jane’s aunt is preparing to send her.

“Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?”

Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative: my little world held a contrary opinion: I was silent. Mrs. Reed answered for me by an expressive shake of the head, adding soon, “Perhaps the less said on that subject the better, Mr. Brocklehurst.”

“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,” he began, “especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?”

“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.

“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”

“A pit full of fire.”

“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”

“No, sir.”

“What must you do to avoid it?”

I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.”

[break]

“Do you say your prayers night and morning?” continued my interrogator.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you read your Bible?”

“Sometimes.”

“With pleasure? Are you fond of it?”

“I like 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.”

“And the Psalms? I hope you like them?”

“No, sir.”

“No? oh, shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: ‘Oh! the verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;’ says he, ‘I wish to be a little angel here below;’ he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.”

“Psalms are not interesting,” I remarked.

Deemed by those in her life as hopeless, already lost, and doomed, Jane is free to define herself as she wills and to adopt a faith that is authentic, real, and chosen. Surrounded in the early part of her life by Christians-in-name-only, Jane seeks an authentic faith and an authentic life that reflects her nature and her God. Unlike the stoical Helen Burns, her dear Lowood friend whose desires are only for heaven and the spiritual realm and not for the things of earth or the material world, Jane burns with passion – passions emotional, spiritual, and physical. She permits only God to harness that passion. She does not permit the same license to Rochester, a man she loves, yet who is merely a man, one whose passion matches Jane’s but whose faith does not – not yet. By the end of the novel – spoiler alert – a chastened Rochester will confess a faith that makes him worthy of being yoked to Jane. Accepting Rochester on the terms he offers before then would be not only be a compromise of Jane’s faith, however. It would also be a compromise of her sense of self.

When Jane tells Rochester, “I am no bird,” it is in reply to his urging her, “Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.” Jane rejects Rochester’s condescending attempt to infantilize and romanticize her by identifying her as a “frantic bird.” Such a metaphor suggests that Jane is but little, is not self-determined or self-controlled, and is something to be caged, tamed, and petted by a superior being.

Therefore, she rebukes him in love. She is hurting, angry, and reeling. But she is still mistress of her soul. She is no mere bird. She is Rochester’s equal. Even in a society that would not see it that way, which would sneer at the very notion, as does Jane’s rival in love, the socialite Blanche Ingram, Jane recognizes that the soul’s freedom is the basis of human equality.

Upon looking back at the way her relationship with Rochester developed to that point, the more mature Jane realizes,

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

A few pages after Jane speaks the words quoted at the opening of this essay, she proclaims, “I am not an angel … and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.”

With Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte cast a vision for human dignity and freedom in a world that was still coming to recognize these as fitting for all people. Two centuries later, we live yet in such a world. Jane Eyre has much to show us still.