Another interesting facet to Jane Eyre is its comment on spirituality and Christianity. Like many contemporary writers of hers, the salvation of the soul is one of the preoccupations of Bronte’s works. Her views on the subject varied from that of novelists like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, in that, she was not overtly critical of religious faith in general and the Christian doctrine in particular. During the Victorian era, evangelical Christianity was becoming an accepted form of religious propaganda. Based on what we can glean from Jane Eyre, it is clear that she was swayed by the evangelical movement to an extent. The Victorian era was a time when complex tensions existed
“between Evangelical, Calvinist, and Methodist theologies that swept through and ultimately divided the established Church of England which Bronte loved…Gallagher is the first to identify Jane Eyre as a “Christian feminist bildungsroman”. Published in 1847 when Bronte was thirty-one, Jane Eyre is at least partly autobiographical, which opens the possibility for considering how Jane’s spiritual bildung, especially in the early sections of the novel, may reflect that of Charlotte Bronte. The influence of religion on Bronte is both obvious and obscure. It is obvious that much of what she saw, heard and read was concerned with religion. It is not obvious how she originally reacted to the variety of religious beliefs she encountered.” (Griesinger, 2008, p.31)
Another factor that adds complexity to Jane Eyre is Bronte’s mixing of genres in the work. This lends the novel to sociological study from various disciplinary perspectives. One can witness an overwhelming ideological dialectic that seems to close down toward the novel’s end to an “apparently thin monological stream. Bronte’ tremendous displacement of the domestic values toward the tragic and mythical, though it falls short of ultimate achievement, gives her work a margin of superiority over that of other Victorian novelists.” (Peters, 1996, p.59) This assessment is best exemplified in the final passages of the work, where the independent and bold Jane Eyre settles down to a life in dedication of Mr. Rochester. Is this a resignation to entrenched social norms or irrational dictates of romantic love? Further,
“Has Bronte failed to extricate her vision from the apparently downward-tending “domestic” to achieve the “tragic and mythical” and therefore failed to fulfil the vision she seemed to offer women? Or is it perhaps that Bronte is raising the domestic to the level of the mythical? An examination of Bronte’s use of the Cinderella tale in Jane Eyre points to the latter conclusion: Jane Eyre fuses the domestic to the mythical.” (Clarke, 2000, p. 695)