The moral dangers of Jane Eyre
Although a number of recent scholars1 have read Jane Eyre as an explicitly Christian text, contemporaries were not always so sure. The Mirror Monthly Magazine (previously the Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction), which suspected (incorrectly) that "we have undoubtedly once before met with this authoress," read it as a radical, subversive work, intended "to trample upon customs respected by our forefathers" &c. (376) Its originality--political, aesthetic, or otherwise--turns out to be nothing more than a symptom of "the example of discontent" (377) permeating mid-Victorian culture, with women especially given to displays of...well, one presumes, unchaste behavior (377). In general, the reviewer concludes, this is just a bad novel:
...There is not a single natural character throughout the work. Everybody moves on stilts—the opinions are bad—the notions absurd. Religion is stabbed in the dark—our social distinctions attempted to be levelled, and all absurdly moral notions done away with. The authoress is unacquainted with the commonest rules of society, and affects to present us with specimens of fashionable life, within whose circles it is evident she has never entered. The language she puts into the mouth of Blanche Ingram would disgrace a kitchen maid. Imagine a young lady (not in her own house, but in that of her supposed future husband) calling out at the top of her voice, before an assembled party, to the footman, "Blockhead, do this." Our authoress's experience has been more extensive than ours if such things be done. Throughout, too, she makes the heroine speak of the man she loves as her master, forgetting that love levels all such distinctions. But it would be an endless undertaking to point out every petty fault of this kind. The foundation of the story is bad, the characters are ill-drawn, and the feelings false and unnatural. If our readers be induced by our remarks to peruse the novel before us they are welcome to undertake the task, and much good may it do them. (380)
From this point of view, the novel seems to herald the coming of the Victorian social apocalypse, its very popularity a sign of nineteenth-century moral decay. In failing to properly represent the niceties of upper-class etiquette, Bronte advertises not just her ignorance, but also her impertinent transgressiveness: in presuming to satirize Blanche, she oversteps the bounds of her own proper place. And yet, the reviewer mourns, the novel is a best-seller! What, in other words, are we to do with a cultural moment in which women who openly flaunt their disregard for "moral notions" are liberally rewarded with book sales?
1 E.g., Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home; Diana Peschier, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Bronte; Marianne Thormahlen, The Brontes and Religion. Twentieth-century feminist critics like Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar would invoke reviews like this to celebrate Bronte's critique of Christianity in Jane Eyre: for them, the novel lacks Bunyan's "devout substance" and demonstrates an "'anti-Christian' refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of society..." The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1984; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 336, 338.