112 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
starved bones.^34 Th at this image is wrapped in the language of class – Jane would
prefer this death to the ‘workhouse coffi n’ and the ‘pauper’s grave’ – suggests that
the economic narrative of poverty and starvation has won out over the romantic
or sublime one.
Jane’s wandering in nature and her experience in Morton show that she must
learn how to reconcile herself with what has been revealed all too clearly to be
a man’s world. Most pressingly, she needs a vocation, one that is not entirely
dependent on the goodwill of others. In the cold light of day, Jane’s imagina-
tive agency is shown to be as unreal as the scenes which she imagined as a child,
and the only agency that matters is one that she does not have: the ability to
fi nd work. Unfortunately, as Jordan and Carol Margaret Davison have both
explored, the public discourse on the possibilities of respectable middle-class
jobs for women was still in its early stages in the 1840s.^35 In the end, it is St John
Rivers who has the power to rescue her, both by admitting her to Moor House
and telling her that he will fi nd her a position ‘in [his] own time and way’.^36
(When St John eventually fi nds her a job, it is teaching again, working at a char-
ity school – a position consistent with dominant 1840s discourse that doing
charity work was respectable for middle-class women, while working for a salary
was not.) Th e process of Jane’s readmission into society is further confi rmation
of her powerlessness. If Jane is to survive, therefore, she must learn to compro-
mise – if possible – her propensities for the sublime and the individualism she
fi nds in it. Here, she fi nds a surprising potential model in St John Rivers.
‘Propensities and Principles Must be Reconciled by Some Means’:
St John Rivers and the Gendered Sublime
St John is practical, critical and cold; while Jane is described as a bird, he is
described as stone.^37 But his description of his own restlessness echoes her earlier
account of pacing Th ornfi eld’s upper galleries: he tells her that he ‘almost rave[s]
in [his] restlessness. Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by
some means’.^38 St John and Jane both yearn for something larger and sublime to
which to attach their energies, and each has an inclination to seek the sublime in
a diff erent direction: Jane in nature, and St John in Christ. Nonetheless, St John
models for Jane how this propensity might be redirected into productive work,
and his approach is consistent with her principles of service. Because of this, she
is almost persuaded to travel to India with him, reasoning that:
I must seek another interest in life to replace the one lost: is not the occupation he
now off ers me truly the most glorious man can adopt or God assign? Is it not, by its
noble cares and sublime results, the one best calculated to fi ll the void left by uptorn
aff ections and demolished hopes?^39