How are ideas about religion examined through the characters of Mr Brocklehurst, Eliza Reed and St John Rivers

Religion is a strong theme throughout Jane Eyre, with Jane meeting religion in different forms through different characters in the novel. Bronte used the characters to represent how religion is often used in people’s lives. One of the first strong religious characters that Jane encounters is Mr Brocklehurst, a fearsome and tyrannical man who uses religion as a justification for cruelty and neglect at his school Lowood where Jane spent many years. To Mr Brocklehurst his strong religious beliefs are a tool to control others.

Jane meets her cousin Eliza again when they are both adults after Jane returns to the Reeds home to visit her dying aunt Reed, Eliza’s mother. Eliza however uses her religion differently to Mr Brocklehurst. Jane’s cold and earnest cousin decides to devout her life to God and becomes a nun because she is scared of living a wasted life, like her brother John. One of the main characters in the novel St John Rivers also leaves a very religious life. St John Rivers only admitted passion is his religion and that is why he devotes his life to God and urges Jane to do the same, although she is never convinced to.

Mr Brocklehurst, the fearsome headmaster of Lowood School, uses his religious beliefs to control others. He lets people think that everything he says is true, and that if they are bad they will go to hell. By enforcing this fear, he gains control. Mr Brocklehurst tried to do this with Jane when he said to her on their first meeting “do you know where the wicked go after death? ” to try and enforce that fear in her. However Mr Brocklehurst himself is hypocritical with his religion.

He says to his pupils at Lowood that vanity is a sin, and he demonstrates this by cutting off a girl’s naturally curly hair, saying the pupils at Lowood have hair ‘… which vanity itself might have woven’. Although this hypocrisy is never discussed by Jane – in fact she calls herself hypocritical because she believes that she is wicked, and that everyone at Lowood will think she is too when Mr Brocklehurst tells them this – it is clear to the reader that he is a hypocrite from the descriptions of his wife and daughters.

His family is described as ‘splendidly dressed’ and it is said that his wife ‘wore a false front of French curls’, this is clearly accepted by him, and therefore he has set a different standard for his pupils to his family. Jane may have respected the man, if he had not publicly humiliated her in front of all at Lowood by telling them that Jane was a servant of the devil. It is for this reason, I believe, that he never earns Jane’s respect. With Mr Brocklehurst, as with Eliza Reed and St John Rivers, Jane is never persuaded to lead a religious life, as they all try to make her do.

Eliza Reed, Jane’s cousin, takes a different religious role to both Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers. Eliza’s life is more private – she does not preach about her life as much as Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers. However, she does tell Jane that she hopes she will see some sense – meaning that Eliza sees Jane’s much less-religious life as senseless. Eliza’s use of religion is not to control people like Mr Brocklehurst, but rather to control herself. She lives by religious ways and rules so that she will not lead the same life her brother John led, which their mother described as ‘sunk and degraded’, and indeed John died very young.

Eliza said to Jane ‘that John’s conduct… has been a source of profound affliction to her: but she had… now formed her resolution’, i. e. to be a nun. Jane, however, is unimpressed by this view of religion – as an escape – and she tells Eliza that it is she who is being senseless: ‘You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have I suppose in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent’ Therefore, Jane thinks that Eliza is being foolish to devote her life to religion to protect herself from being like John, and she does not respect Eliza or her views.

Both Eliza and Mr Brocklehurst are described as if they are cold, with Eliza actually called ‘cold’ and Mr Brocklehurst being described as ‘black marble’ which connotes the idea of coldness. St John Rivers is also described as ‘marble’, and as ‘cold’. I think this means that Jane views religion as a cold thing that attracts cold people who are satisfied spending their lives serving God, without the passion, except perhaps for Mr Brocklehurst, of the love for another person. Jane therefore sees religion as a useless thing because she is always looking for love, and she finds it with Rochester.

The ‘cold’ St John Rivers is a major character in the novel and he is an intensely religious man. He uses religion in a way to control Jane because he wants her to go to India with him, but in a way religion is more his ‘vocation’, his calling. He makes Jane learn Hindustani, the language of the place where he will go to spend the rest of his life, preaching God’s word. St Jane does manage to control Jane to a certain extent, as she explains ‘when he said ‘go’, I went; ‘come’, I came; ‘do this’, I did it’, but she does not love him as a husband, she loves him as a cousin, and she calls him her ‘adopted brother’.

However St John Rivers fails to impress Jane with his idea of going to India, even when he tries to make her believe that she was ‘formed for labour and not for love’. This may be a good description of St John Rivers, but not of Jane. Jane is passionate and needs love, so she refuses his offer, and again this character, like the others, fails to make her devote her life to religion. In conclusion, all three characters are fiercely religious people, who have devoted their lives to God, for various reasons, but all three use religion as a form of control.

Mr Brocklehurst uses it too control pupils at Lowood, by getting them to fear him. Eliza Reed uses it to control herself, believing that if she lives by religious rules, she will not be tempted to waste her life, like her disgraced brother John. Finally St John Rivers Rivers, although he is not a vindictive man, uses religion to control Jane, by trying to make her spend her life with him as a missionary in India. All three are also described as cold and this may be to do with their religion because Jane regards religion as a passionless existence.