The (Feminine) Virtue Ethics of Jane Eyre

For the ladies with a man’s brain and a woman’s heart

“And for the rest, though you have a man’s vigorous brain, you have a woman’s heart and—it would not do.”

“It would do,” I affirmed with some disdain, “perfectly well.” - Jane Eyre

In March 2022, I got engaged to my Norwegian (now) husband and decided to take a risk and move across the world to live in his country. As I wrote in a prior essay, immigrating to Norway atrophied my career ambitions for several reasons, but principally because it’s difficult to find work or start a business in Norway without first being fluent in Norwegian. Then in March 2024, the final nail in the coffin (of my career dreams) came when I learned that I was pregnant and had to take sick leave from full-time language school due to health complications. Now, I am doing what most Norwegian women do —staying home for the first year of my child’s life to care for him, following what most Norwegian women do not do — staying home with my child for several more years until I feel he is truly old enough to benefit from preschool. It will likely be years before I am eligible to work full-time again.

Like many millennial women who were successful students and then later became successful at accumulating advanced degrees, but who also later discovered that our career dreams were at odds with building a healthy family life, I’ve had to grieve the identity I’d constructed around being “one of the smart ones” since learning I was pregnant. While I never really embraced the girl boss identity (probably because I was never successful enough to be promoted into anything beyond an entry-level white collar position), I did derive a sense of identity from completing a rigorous education and the belief I could use it to contribute to the world meaningfully through a career. I always foresaw myself becoming an academic, and while earning a high salary or working for a prestigious institution was less important to me than perhaps it is to others, having a meaningful job felt like a requisite for living a meaningful life. However, I am now coming to understand that there exists plenty of meaningful, albeit invisible, work to be done that falls outside the purview of a career, or even a paid job.

As I’m learning to accept my new identity as just a mom and grieving the ways I’m no longer making formal use of my education, I’m also starting to embrace the possibilities of nourishing an intellectual life independent of the constraints of academia or a formal career path. As of now, I am almost exclusively nursing, so my daily routine (or lack of one) is entirely structured around my son’s feeding patterns. Whenever I finish with one nursing session, I never know whether I have one or three hours until the next one, so it’s hard to get many things that require uninterrupted focus accomplished. However, it turns out unpredictable chunks of free time are perfect for certain types of intellectual endeavors even if they are inconvenient for others.

Throughout my life I have had just as strong a propensity for voracious reading as I have for overcommitting myself to too many hobbies and side-projects; and consequently, I’ve been through just as many periods in my life where I tore through several books in a month as I have been through ones where I was unable to complete any. As I’ve discovered, life at home with a baby puts enough constraints on the latter as to incentivize the former, and I’m now finding more time to read now that I have less free time.

The first book I chose in the immediate postpartum period was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. While part of me is disappointed that I waited until now to read it (the book sat in my bookshelf throughout my childhood untouched), another part of me is glad that I did, because it offers wisdom relevant to my current circumstances that I wouldn’t have fully appreciated until now. As it turns out, Jane Eyre explores themes around feminine maturation that are relevant for women like me who find themselves in the position of sidelining status for the calling of caretaking.

I am pretty sure that the edition I owned as a child was this one from the Penguin Classics line; I remember it having a yellow cover and a picture like this.

The Heroine’s Journey

The novel begins when the protagonist is just a child. Little Jane is pitiable in every dimension — physically weak, psychologically unstable, and spiritually dark (she prays for a ghost to rise from the dead to punish her in-laws). However, despite these flaws, the reader cannot help but empathize with her; it is clear that Jane’s behavior is the consequence of mistreatment and lack of nurture by her caregiver. Although her mother had originally come from a wealthy family, she was disinherited for marrying her father, a clergyman man of lower status; so Jane had no means of supporting herself when both parents subsequently died and left her orphaned. Although her rich uncle ends up adopting her, he then dies, leaving her to be raised by his empathy bereft widow alongside their cruel children.

Now, before I dive further into an exploration of how Jane Eyre functions as a heroine’s journey — a feminine departure from the classical hero’s journey — I will offer a warning, a suggestion, and a caveat. The warning is that the rest of this essay contains spoilers. The plot has some fun and unexpected twists and turns that I’d hate to deprive anyone of who hasn’t already read the book. Of course, a great book is more than just an entertaining plot — the classics can be read again and again and become better on subsequent readings. However, for Jane Eyre, the suspense of plot is in harmony with the deeper chords of the book, and not knowing if the story will end on an up note or a down note or if the character will be rewarded or punished for her unwavering commitment to virtue, functions as one of the artistic devices. Therefore, my suggestion is to go read the book before you read anything else about the book!

Finally, my caveat: I’m not juxtaposing the Heroine’s Journey with the Hero’s Journey to make an argument in favor of gender essentialism. I don’t believe one’s sex alone determines what pathways in life are legitimate. In fact, the first time I really entertained the idea that God gives us all a duty in life (or a dharma), was after reading a biography on Joan of Arc in sixth grade. In my humble opinion, if God tells you to put on a suit of armor and kick the English out of France, it’s probably best you listen to God and not worry too much about your culture’s gender taboos.

However, I am not scared enough of being labeled a traditionalist to feel compelled to pretend that my personal dharma lies in the shattering of any glass ceilings for the sake of watching something break. I have always known in my heart, as much as I know that it’s not my place to tell other people what their dharma is, that mine has been in the work of caretaking. This is does not mean that I plan to only use my time and creative energy to be a mother, I foresee many detours and side excursions in life, but the direction always bends towards The Mother, with every path I take branching out and weaving back into the one. For many (not all) women, care work is our primary calling, and for those of us who also happen to be smart and capable of other worldly callings, our obstacle to remaining true to ourselves lies in accepting that what we are called to do is more ordinary and less romantic than the things that others, particularly those from our parent’s generation, would envision for us.

Jungian psychology uses myths and the archetypes represented by the protagonists and villains contained within them to illustrate how psycho-spiritual development occurs. The most common type of psycho-spiritual myth that most of us are acquainted with is the coming-of-age story, which imparts to the readers (or the listeners) wisdom about the trials that an adolescent must go through in order to become an adult. Well written coming-of-age-stories, or true myths, can offer wisdom that remains relevant throughout time, geography, and culture.

Joseph Campbell is probably the most famous Jungian writer concerning the coming-of-age myth, which he outlined as “The Hero’s Journey” in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. However, Joseph Campbell’s work focused mainly on male heroes, and subsequent Jungian analysts and writers inspired by Campbell’s work, have debated whether his map can be applied to women in the same way it does to men. Maureen Murdock, author of The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, regarded Campbell’s conclusions about the maturation of women to be inadequate when he told her: “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she must do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” Murdock worked as a Jungian analyst and had realized that many of her female clients were in fact making their own version of a hero’s journey, but that their paths looked slightly different than Campbell’s masculine-coded description. This is inspired her to write her own book.

Why would Campbell argue that women don’t need to make a journey to cross the threshold from childhood to adulthood? He is not the only male Jungian-inspired thinker to make this claim. In Iron John, a book that describes coming-of-age rituals for boys in traditional cultures and why they no longer exist in the modern West, the author Robert Bly asserts that “a girl changes into a woman on her own” and thus her initiation process is conducted by Mother Nature, not through rituals led by village elders. The idea here is that when a woman becomes capable of bearing children, the immense responsibility inherent in that possibility, forces her to grow up automatically.

But we all know adult women who don’t behave like adults. Some traditionalists have argued that it’s because women have been deprived of the ritual of childbirth — either because fewer women are becoming mothers at all, or because mothers are now having medicalized births in hospitals, which can cause dissociation between a mother and the spiritual forces at work when she brings a new life into the world. While I believe there is some truth to this (if you read enough personal accounts of women’s labors you will realize that many women are spiritually transformed by their childbirths), I know that there is not a 1:1 relationship between birthing children and maturing into womanhood. There are mothers who are not Mothers and Mothers who are not mothers.

Literal motherhood is not the only pathway by which a young woman (The Maiden archetype) moves into a mature woman (The Mother archetype); and even for women like me who take the literal motherhood path, we may find that we must mature into The Mother before becoming mothers. Whether it’s through a struggle to decide whether to have children in the first place, a struggle to find a good partner, or a struggle with infertility; it’s not uncommon for women in 2025 to have to overcome some inner our outer demon and transform from the experience before they are even able to have children.

Jane Eyre provides a mythic template for those of us who first must embody The Mother to become good mothers. Our protagonist overcomes hardship and the temptation to walk a lower path before she takes on the role of a mature caregiver. Jane’s growth happens by cultivating masculine virtues and integrating them with her more feminine qualities endowed to her by Mother Nature.

From Child to Maiden

In Murdock’s outline of the Heroine’s Journey, the first step a woman must take in the coming-of-age process is to leave her mother’s house, metaphorically speaking, so that she can differentiate herself from and start to create an identity apart from her primary female caregivers. This is important in all cases, but especially when the caregiver is not a mature adult herself. Jane ends up literally leaving her aunt’s house to go to a strict boarding school for orphan girls, which is essentially a philanthropy project for the local elite to manage their reputations; but nevertheless, it’s the first place where virtue is modeled to Jane. At the school, Jane’s faith is nurtured through the Christian love that she experiences through a peer named Helen, and a teacher, Miss Temple. These two inspire Jane to take up a more virtuous path in life, encouraging her to stop wasting energy on thoughts of revenge towards her wrongdoers, and to instead to find strength in the fellowship she is provided with by the other students and teachers.

It is through an educational setting that Jane first starts to build her character. In spite of the fact that the institution is lacking in many ways —for one thing it is run by a man who is Christian in name, but not in action, who periodically shows up to humiliate the young students — the message here is not that good conditions are necessary to create virtuous people, but that virtuous people can emerge out of sub-optimal conditions if they are able to connect with lights in the darkness: fellow human beings who embody spiritual love and bring it into the world through their work and being.

As Jane grows from a child to a teenager (The Maiden), she develops the virtue of prudence. She drops her childish need to impulsively rebel against the abuse of authority, and embraces the opportunities she is given by making logical and grounded decisions about what kind of work to take. She rises to the top of her class, and then stays on at the school to work as a teacher, building up work experience and references. In the second arc of the book, she elevates her position in life further, by applying for a position as a private governess. As she moves up in wages and in status, Jane sees how her hard work and diligence have paid-off in improving her life.

But this is not a masculine story, about integrating strength and ambition with responsibility and gaining a worldly reward for doing so (often a metaphor for spiritual reward in myths) — it is a feminine story, about integrating the ability to caretake, which is a primal instinct for many women, with the wisdom to channel this instinct towards the appropriate endeavors. While many people assume that maturation into general adulthood is about growing out of self-centeredness and embracing responsibility, I think that for many women (as opposed to men), it is more often than not about the correct application of, not the acquisition of, responsibility as a trait. Many women don’t struggle with the desire to be responsible, but when we are immature we are apt to waste our efforts on the wrong outlets. Likewise, most women don’t struggle with knowing how to love, but for many of us, it takes a maturity for us to learn how to love non-foolishly and select partners worthy of our love.

Jane’s new job is an upgrade. She gets paid better, has better working hours and living conditions, and feels a sense of personal reward in watching her new pupil learn and grow. As if this wasn’t enough, it seems like her boss, who is not only rich but genuinely impressed by her character, may harbor romantic feelings for her. Just as the reader thinks that Jane might finally be materially and spiritually rewarded for her hard work and perseverance in true 19th century british romance novel fashion (by both marrying up and marrying for love), she realizes that the book still contains 200 pages. Uh oh! What could go wrong?

As it turns out, a lot. Mr. Rochester is already married making Jane ineligible to marry him; and not only that, but his actual wife is a clinically insane and locked away in the third story of his mansion, Thornfield Hall, escaping periodically to try and set him and the building on fire. He finds himself at age 40 never having experienced real love. Pushed into an arranged marriage in his 20s by his father, who wanted to secure his son an inheritance, Mr. Rochester was condemned to a loveless situation with an abusive woman with early signs of psychosis that later become fully manifest. He is bitter about what happened to him and thinks he deserves the real thing with Jane, but wrongly attempts to hide the truth from her. It doesn’t work and she finds out. Upon learning that she cannot marry the love of her life and could only become his mistress if they were to be together, Jane runs away not only from love, but the only stable home she’s known at Thornfield Hall.

While Mr. Rochester begs her to stay despite his marriage, because as he points out, the only thing stopping them from living together unmarried is social taboo; Jane sees this path as inconsistent with her spiritual values, not just societal ones. Despite feeling pity for the horrible situation he has ended up in, Jane believes that Mr. Rochester still has a spiritual duty to his marriage, and feels that by accepting his offer to be his mistress, she would not only be lowering her own integrity, but his. She exercises temperance, despite her passionate love for him in ascertaining that because Mr. Rochester had fallen in love with her because of her personal integrity, that building a relationship with him upon a foundation of infidelity would mean that their relationship would not be fulfilling nor lasting.

Status and Identity Loss

I think a lot of women today can relate to the choice of having to lose things — status, income, etc., in order to step into our own integrity. And it’s not always any easy choice. For those mothers who decide that we need to prioritize integrity over other pursuits that are more socially and financially rewarded, it could mean putting our ability to economically provide for our children in jeopardy.

In Jane’s case, her commitment to temperance, in her decision to not become Mr. Rochester’s mistress, despite loving him, puts her in such a precarious position that she nearly dies. When she runs away from Mr. Rochester’s mansion, she immediately becomes destitute, and almost starves to death while sleeping outside in the Yorkshire moors. She ends up being rescued at the final hour by a local clergyman, who nurses her back to health.

While I don’t believe that Jane Eyre follows precisely the arc of the Heroine’s Journey that Maureen Murdock outlines, I do think it shares something more akin to Murdock’s version than Campbell’s — mainly that our heroine initially succeeds in the masculine domain of life through her dedication to a set virtues, but then the initial success falls apart in a way that begs her to integrate these virtues with her feminine nature in order to truly embrace who she is called to be.

Jane too finds family in her new refuge, both spiritually and literally, for it turns out, that the benevolent clergyman who rescues her is also her first cousin. He and his sisters become close with Jane, and he sets her up with a modest employment opportunity: teaching the local working-class children in the village basic reading and writing. Although, he worries, based on how educated and intelligent Jane is, that she will feel her calling is beneath her. He asks her “What will you do with your accomplishments? What, with the largest portion of your mind— sentiments—tastes?” and she replies. “Save them till they are wanted. They will keep.”

This scene in Jane Eyre prompted me investigate my own feelings about how I’ll use my education. It might seem silly to put so much stock in graduate degrees, but at the time I got them, I put everything I had and more into acquiring them. When most of my peers in public health school taking fluffy courses to get administrative masters degrees, I was toiling away in the library 50 hours a week (on top of TAing, interning, and taking extra undergrad courses in biology) working through mathematical proofs, in order to grasp theoretical as well as applied statistics, so that I could understand the methodology behind health science research. Taking graduate theoretical statistics courses was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I nearly destroyed my health in doing it. I expected to be rewarded for my hard work, and I was, but only temporarily. I got into a fully funded PhD program in the Ivy League, with the promise of studying what I loved most debt-free.

But not a year into my new PhD program, my health (and with it my life) collapsed. I was also not socially savvy enough to pick up on, let alone play, the political games that go on in elite academia, and my psychological health suffered too. I withdrew from my doctoral program hoping to gain some work experience and get my health in order, so that I could eventually return and pursue my studies when I had gathered more inner resources. That was over a decade ago now and I’ve had to accept that my dream of getting a PhD will probably never materialize. Since then, more tragedy in my life ensued — I survived a violent crime, two immediate family members died in untimely ways, and then the pandemic hit. I had to go through a spiritual journey to process all that had happened, and at the end of it I did not end up with a revitalized career, but I was blessed with something better — a husband and a baby.

I think right now we are seeing a huge wave of millennial, and now gen-Z, women questioning whether or not we can really have it all — family and a prestigious career, at least at the same time. For one, a lot of science is coming out that suggests young children benefit from having at least one parent (or other caregiver) at home for the first several years of life, and that giving our children what they need when they are young is incompatible with both parents being away for very long workdays. I have been really inspired by some of the discussions going on in Mom Substack, questioning if what we’ve been sold as modern solutions to the mothering/career tug-of-war (such as full-time daycare and formula feeding) are really in our kid’s best interests. It should go without saying that not every mom has room to make the choice, but whether moms work or not, many are choosing to work less so that we can spend more time with our kids.

In addition, there is a felt sense among both young men and women that the quality of jobs (at least in the US) is in decline — salaried jobs these days are less stable, offer fewer benefits, are more stressful, and frankly more bullshit than they were for the Baby Boomer generation. I feel like this sentiment is becoming so ubiquitous, that if you look at what “the far left” former Bernie Sanders supporters are complaining about, and if you look at what “the far right” Trump supporters are complaining about, and if you squint hard enough, the left and the right seem to be on the same side (just don’t tell them that). Of course, different ends of the political spectrum point toward different villains, but there is a growing consensus that something is deeply wrong with our economy, despite how the stock market may be performing, and that it’s causing young people to question whether they can derive any meaning from pursuing the American Dream anymore.

This past week, a fruitful discourse was sparked by a Christopher Rufo tweet, in which he encouraged young men to take well-paying but lower status (i.e. blue-collar) jobs, which he argues are available to those who want them. A lot of valid points were made by people who disagreed with his advice, but perhaps the most enlightening essay that I read amongst the discourse came from

The Library of Celaeno

, here who didn’t quite disagree.

While his essay is primarily addressed to young men, not women, it’s relevant to both. He questions why so many people look to corporate jobs to validate their sense of self-worth, and why many people seem to be waiting for for the world to stop being unfair and difficult before allowing themselves to pursue a life of meaning, defined in their own terms. In the crux of his argument he says: “I’m not telling people to abandon white-collar jobs and live in communes. I’m saying go where you can do and above all be good with minimum concern for whom you must appease to be there.” This is idea is very much in the spirit of Jane Eyre, who does not define herself by what she does but who she is. She sticks to her virtues, not knowing if they will lead her to positive or negative external things, while still maintaining hope for herself.

From Maiden to Mother

Towards the end of the novel, Jane is given the choice: to live out someone else’s vision of a respectable life or define it for herself. Her cousin, the clergymen, proposes to her and asks her to accompany him to India for missionary work. He is not romantically in love with her, nor she with him, but he believes she would be fulfilling a higher purpose in life by serving God. She rejects his offer, because while she feels it may be his calling, she realizes it is not hers. The passionate love she felt for Mr. Rochester, while not enough by itself to lead to a happy marriage, was real; and she realizes that her passions, like her virtues, should not be ignored. Sense and sensibility must be integrated for her to truly find her calling.

Not every woman’s calling is motherhood, and it’s not every mother’s duty to stay home with her kids. However, I think it’s worth considering whether one career can truly contain all the wonderful work that women are capable of doing. Women’s sentiments and the work women are capable of performing through honoring them is invaluable even if it does not produce explicit value. As Maureen Murdock writes in her book: “A woman must claim her femininity as worthwhile. She must recognize her contribution to culture and society as intrinsically valuable in whatever feminine form: greater empathic skills in relationship, a strong and reliable aesthetic orientation, and an altruistic desire to provide care.” Along with that, I believe that mothers need to trust their own intuition when it comes to how to provide care for their children. The more time we spend with our children, the more we know them and know what they need. This is why I loved

One Tired Mother

’s essay a few months back where she discusses among other things, how insights about child-parent attachment can be derived from intuition, not just research.

Jane realizes she cannot move on with her life until she learns what has happened to Mr. Rochester since her abrupt departure. Her intuition tells her he is still calling for her; she even thinks she hears his voice on the wind, despite the fact that Thornfield Hall is several days travel away. She fears that worst — that her rejection of him has led him down a dark path, away from his own virtue, so she returns to the Thornfield Hall to see what has become of him since she has left. Upon arriving, she realizes his mansion is burned to the ground.

It turns out that while Mr. Rochester is not dead, he is now permanently blinded in a fire that his wife, now dead by suicide, had started. In Jane’s absence, and the subsequent tragedy that befell him, he has had his own dialogue with God. Despite his sorrow in losing Jane, he learned to become grateful that fate did not allow him to persuade her to enter into a situation that would lower her dignity and blight his conscience in the act. Although he is permanently disfigured from the accident, and no longer as rich or as charming as he used to be, he is now ready to marry Jane, bother legally and spiritually. At the end of the story, they get married and have a child.

The risk I took to prioritize family over career also ended on an up note after many down notes. It took me almost a year to get pregnant after moving to Norway, and I feared that I had made the wrong decision in sidelining my career plans to have a family, if it turned out in the end that I couldn’t have one. The despair I experienced over wondering whether or not I could have children was for a while, torturous, and the impulse to nurture resentment rather than hope tempted me.

My husband ended up consulting a shaman who gave us mantras to repeat every day to help me work through my sadness over not getting pregnant, while the shaman performed rituals on his own to help clear any unseen blocks in the spiritual dimension. One night after repeating the mantras, while I was half-asleep and in a meditative state, I started to have visions of a life with a young boy by my side. We were playing in the woods, wading in streams, birdwatching, collecting shells... and I wasn’t working towards a new career — something I had planned to do, but was stressing out about how to do alongside raising a child in a foreign country. In the visions, I was with my son every day, exploring Norway’s beautiful natural landscape alongside him. A voice came to me and said, “if you want a baby, you can’t worry about work now, your work is to teach him to love nature.” I said “okay, I understand.”

The next morning, I took a pregnancy test and it was positive. A few weeks later I found out we were expecting a boy.