Exile and the Reconciling Power of the Natural Affections inJane Eyre

What is it about?

The critical resolution to Jane’s and St John’s mutual problem of exile in Morton consists in the way in which each reconciles conflicting propensities and principles by way of the natural affections. This article revisits influential eighteenth-century understandings of this concept in order to show how on the one hand St John proves himself to be very much a student of the eighteenth century in his rigid equivocation between the natural affections and public duty, but falls short of fulfilling the ‘self-affections’. Jane, on the other hand, overcomes exile by exceeding the eighteenth-century models through a superlative and compassionate form of the natural affections that is uniquely Charlotte Brontë’s own.

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