From Dante to Bronte: The Story of Pilgrimage
Taking its place in the long line of literary pilgrimages, Jane Eyre depicts a particularly modern journey—one in which the destination must be discovered along the way.
By Karen Swallow Prior
There is perhaps no human activity as ancient and archetypal as the pilgrimage.
As far back as in the Old Testament, as described in Deuteronomy 16, the Israelites were commanded to take three pilgrimages each year to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate feasts commemorating the works of God among them. Early Christians followed this pattern with pilgrimages of their own to and within Jerusalem. An early work recording such a journey is The Pilgrimage of Egeria, a first-person account by a fourth-century Christian who traveled from Spain throughout the Holy Lands. The most famous part of the travelogue is Egeria’s description of her participation in the traditional Holy Week procession along Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa (the “way of suffering”) marked by the Stations of the Cross.
From its origins, the concept of the pilgrimage has been both physical (a journey from one geographical location to another) and spiritual (a movement of the soul toward growth or enlightenment). Indeed, not only did Jews and Christian participate in pilgrimages, but they identified their very existence as that of pilgrims. In the King James translation of the Bible, for example, the land of Canaan is called the place of the Israelites’ pilgrimage in Exodus 6:4, and Hebrews 11:13 refers to Christians as “pilgrims on the earth.”
Not surprisingly, pilgrimages have been a powerful, recurring theme in literature, not only in ancient works but continuing to the present day. Earlier approaches tend to center on the religious purpose of pilgrimage, while more contemporary expressions reflect the prevailing spirit of secularism. Yet even attempts to de-sacralize the idea of pilgrimage cannot completely evade its inherently spiritual nature.
This essential religious spirit of pilgrimage is shown in one of the most beloved and beautiful works in all of Western literature—Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The poem depicts the poet himself journeying down into the depths of hell, through purgatory, and ascending to the heights of heaven where he receives his beatific vision. It is exemplary of the unity of physical and spiritual in the act of pilgrimage.
Another medieval work, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, paints a more literal picture of pilgrimage by describing a merry band of strangers in England traveling together to the cathedral at Canterbury, the site of the holy shrine to the martyred Thomas à Becket. While the ostensible purpose of the journey is religious, the pilgrims luxuriate in the embodied physicality of journey and the carnal delight of their tales. Even so, the spiritual purpose of their travels always lurks.
Every pilgrimage is an implicit recognition that new life comes from death.
Perhaps the most famous pilgrimage in all of literature is the allegorical journey of Christian (who, needless to say, is meant to symbolize all Christians), who arrives, after overcoming many dangers, toils, and snares, in the Celestial City. In writing The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan in many ways marked the transition from pre-modern to modern age, and with that, the changing nature of the literary pilgrimage.
We can see this transition by noting, first, the introduction to Chaucer’s pilgrimage, which begins with April rains penetrating the drought of winter, bathing the roots of the new growth that produces flowers each spring:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour…
Then, centuries later, writing in the peak of modernism, T. S. Eliot sounded an obverse note to that start in The Canterbury Tales, writing,
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Yet even in the “secular age” of Eliot, the power of pilgrimage is that it cannot really be stripped of its spiritual nature. The Waste Land (not a pilgrimage proper, really, except in how it references and contests the opening of The Canterbury Tales) thus ends with a thunder that heralds rain, a shore that beckons fish, and a peace that passes understanding.
Such transitions occur over long periods of time. Centuries before The Waste Land, Don Quixote portrayed a kind of anti-pilgrimage in the title character’s “quixotic” quest to regain long-lost medieval ideals of chivalry and romanticism. Rather than undergoing one long journey toward a physical destination, Don Quixote undergoes a quest consisting of a series of comic misadventures which, ultimately, lead him to the recognition that all his fancies were in vain. Or not. For in at last laying down his arms, Don Quixote finds truth: chivalry is dead. Whether this is a tragic end or a comic one has been fodder for debate amongst centuries of readers. But even that ambiguity points to a coming loss of certain telos, or assumed purpose.
The fact remains, however, that every pilgrimage is an implicit recognition that new life comes from death. Even a hedonistic road trip like Jack Kerouac’s can be seen, as Michael Harold Walker III puts it in his essay “American Pilgrim: Catholic Kerouac On the Road,” as “[t]he pilgrimage of temporal existence towards eternity.” And some decades later, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, set in an utterly disenchanted dystopia, paradoxically returns the idea of pilgrimage to the truly holy.
Denied that physical walk, Jane inadvertently begins her real pilgrimage.
Clearly, as this array of works across time shows, pilgrimages fill our imaginations. Perhaps no other motif demonstrates so clearly that the line between literal and allegorical, between spiritual and secular, between bodily and imaginative, is fine—if it exists at all.
For several reasons—perhaps chiefly because it was written at that moment in modern history when Christianity was ascendent, but secularity was nipping at it heels—Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre embodies pilgrimage as a progress that is all of these.
Like the character of Everyman in the medieval morality play of that name, Jane is Everyperson. And like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, Jane is every Christian. But she is a particularly modern version of these. Despite being poor, orphaned, and female (or, in some ways, because she is these things) she has a world of choices in front of her, even in a world which, on the surface, would deny such a one as Jane any agency at all.
The drama of Everyman opens with the character of God ordering Death:
Go thou to Everyman,
And show him in my name
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bring with him a sure reckoning
Without delay or any tarrying.
And so, the play begins with the end, the end that every one of us will face: death.
But Jane Eyre begins with the journey to new life, undertaken precisely because a literal walk was prevented on a particular day. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” the novel begins. Yet, every walk (or nearly every one) that opens a work of literature surely reminds us of all archetypal journeys, like that which begins The Pilgrim’s Progress:
Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.
Denied that physical walk, Jane inadvertently begins her real pilgrimage. When, stuck inside on a dreary day with her tyrannical cousins, she finds herself oppressed and abused, she “resist[s] all the way.” Lacking anything at all save her own fierce will, Jane (although she does not yet know it) embarks on the journey of finding her own way in the world. Unlike Christian—and herein lies the crucial difference between the modern, secular pilgrimage and those that came before—Jane has no Celestial City in her sights. Hers is a journey with no given end in mind. She must figure out her destination as she makes her way. And such is the allegory for all of us modern souls.
Of course, a journey alone does not an allegory make (although it is a good start). But Jane Eyre is filled with subtle (and not so subtle) symbols that enliven the literal level of the story and evoke the spiritual truths beyond. For while Jane Eyre is a novel characterized by nascent elements of realism, its allegorical nature is undeniable. The influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress in particular is a connection that has been made since the novel’s publication in 1847. The Pilgrim’s Progress had been tremendously popular since it first appeared in 1678, but it gained even wider respect and prominence in the Victorian era in which Bronte wrote.
Its influence is easily seen in how the names of the places Jane sojourns are marvelously evocative, from the hellish Gateshead Hall where the story begins; to the institution where she and its other residents are brought so low, Lowood School; to that cursed place where she faces her greatest temptation, Thornfield Hall; to the crossroads where she almost loses her life but is revived, Whitcross; to Moor House, where she finds her bearings; and to her final home where she finds love at last, along with fertility, Ferndean.
The novel ends with an explicit and poignant allusion to The Pilgrim’s Progress in describing Jane’s missionary cousin as like the allegorical Greatheart:
As to St. John Rivers, he left England: he went to India. He entered on the path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still. A more resolute, indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks and dangers. Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. His is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but for Christ, when he says—“Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” His is the ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth—who stand without fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful.
The influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the idea of pilgrimage are clear in Jane Eyre, not only in the allusions and symbols, but even more in the essence of Jane’s struggle, which is to be a faithful and genuine Christian in a world that presents strong temptations to be neither.
In order for Jane to be a faithful and genuine Christian in her world, she has to forge an identity for herself in ways that would not have been possible—or even imaginable—in previous times.
Jane’s is a liminal world, one which claims the name “Christian” with a level of assurance that can’t help but breed hypocrisy, and that of the deadliest kinds—literally deadly, as it turns out, since the Christian charity school to which the orphaned Jane is sent is so far from being either Christian or charitable that many of its girls die of neglect. Yet it is here that Jane meets the first true Christian in her life (not counting her parents, who had left her orphaned in infancy after they contracted typhus while caring for the poor).
But what is also interesting is the way in which Jane’s pilgrimage—because it is a modern one—is as secular as it is spiritual.
In order for Jane to be a faithful and genuine Christian in her world, she has to forge an identity for herself in ways that would not have been possible—or even imaginable—in previous times. Unlike her dark-skinned, imprisoned, physically oppressed doppelganger Bertha, Jane has some agency, even as a poor, orphaned woman. The almost deadly pilgrimage she takes from Thornfield, through Whitcross, and finally to consummation at Ferndean, is a journey of modern expressive selfhood, a search for and gaining of an authentic sense of self. (The sinister underside of the whole story, of course, that such a journey is not possible for Bertha.) In Jane’s case, authenticity is moored to her Christian faith. But for others, increasingly, such would not be the case—and, increasingly, is not the case.
Even so, we are still drawn to making pilgrimage.
Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012), Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014), and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books.