Help with Jane Eyre book....?

Question

What are Jane’s ideas of religion? What does she learn about Christianity from the various characters, mainly Helen Burns, Mr. Brocklehurst, and St. John Rivers? How are they different from hers?

Answer 1

Christianity can be unfamiliar ground for some of us and that would indeed make this a difficult assignment. I can assist you with that part. When you think about Helen Burns and her actions toward Jane and others, what commonalities does it have with being a true Christian? Helen readily admits her faults, even though to the rest of us they may be minor, is humble, long-suffering, patient, submissive, child-like and kind.(Many of the attributes spoken about by Jesus as necessary to enter heaven, so in other words, a true Christian). Mr. Brocklehurst, in contrast professes to be a Christian but is self-righteous, arrogant, immoral and unjust in his treatment of the girls at the school. St. John Rivers claims Christianity to be so important that in his zealousness to be a missionary for the cause, he desires to marry Jane, not because of a genuine love for her, but for the need to have a wife or co-missionary to accompany him.  

I will leave you to decide Jane's own view on religion.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Do you need "help" or do you want people to answer these questions for you????

Answer 3

Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body. She encounters three main religious figures: Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each represents a model of religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.



Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly hair of one of Jane's classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of course, Brocklehurst's proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Brontë's wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen Burns's meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for it.



Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of Christian behavior. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her emotional deeds for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to her own self.



Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her survival in the hands of God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochester's lustful immorality, and she refuses to consider living with him while church and state still deem him married to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what she knows would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27).



Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst's, nor does it require retreat from the everyday world as Helen's and St. John's religions do. For Jane, religion helps curb immoderate passions, and it spurs one on to worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.