Charlotte Bronte's Religion: Faith, Feminism, And Jane Eyre‪.‬

Modern literary criticism has long recognized Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre (1847) as a pivotal text for feminists. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic locates the enduring appeal of this novel in its emancipatory narrative strategies whereby the author both conceals and reveals social and psychological truths about women's lives, for example, their anger at being treated as sexual objects in the marriage market, and, paradoxically, their overwhelming desire to love and be loved by men with whom they can never be equal. Gilbert and Gubar's thesis is that female authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have written "palimpsestic" novels "whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning" (73). Like Brontes "madwoman" these inaccessible meanings are locked up, as it were, in the "attic" of the text. Other feminist critics who dominated Bronte studies in the 1970s and 1980s include Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers, and Adrienne Rich. Rereading Jane Eyre in her twenties, thirties, and forties, Rich captures the lasting attraction of this Victorian classic for its mostly women readers: "I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator's imagination, some nourishment I needed and still need today" (142). Still widely read by women in the twenty-first century, Jane Eyre has now gone global as postcolonial feminists challenge Bronte's apparent blindness to the ways her novels seem to sanction racism and aspects of western imperialism deemed oppressive for women. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) and Susan Meyer's "Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy in Jane Eyre" (1990) are well known for this approach. While much has been written about Brontes treatment of women's issues and concerns in the novel, including women's education, the plight of the governess, and equality in marriage, what has been missing until recently is a feminist approach that takes seriously the religious dimensions of Brontes life and makes this background central to understanding women's religious experience in the novel. As we learn from many letters like this one written to her friend Ellen Nussey in 1837 when she was a teacher at Roe Head, Charlotte Bronte was deeply concerned about religious and spiritual matters.