Jane's declaration of self-respect is the novel's moral centre — she refuses to sacrifice integrity for love or security, arguing that a woman's first duty is to her own conscience and dignity.

The governess embodies Victorian class anxiety — she exposes the instability of a system that values birth over merit, and her ambiguous position allows Brontë to critique class hierarchy from within its own structures.

Gilbert and Gubar's feminist reading argues that Bertha is Jane's repressed self — the rage, sexuality, and creative fury that Victorian patriarchy forces women to deny; her imprisonment is the logical endpoint of a society that pathologises female autonomy.

Jane's challenge to Rochester demolishes the equation of class with human worth — the listing of social disadvantages ('poor, obscure, plain, and little') is systematic, proving that she has considered every way society diminishes her and rejected them all.

Brontë tests three models of Christianity and rejects all three as inadequate — Jane forges her own spiritual path, one that balances duty with feeling and faith with self-respect, arguing that authentic religion must serve human dignity.

Postcolonial readings reveal that Jane's happy ending depends on the erasure of colonial violence — Bertha's 'madness' can be read as the product of displacement, racism, and patriarchal imprisonment, and Thornfield's destruction as the revenge of the colonised.

The Gothic double exposes the arbitrary boundary between acceptable and unacceptable female behaviour — the difference between Jane and Bertha is not character but circumstance, suggesting that any woman pushed far enough could become the madwoman in the attic.

The personification of Conscience and Passion as warring physical forces dramatises the central conflict of the novel — Jane must reconcile feeling with principle, and the novel's resolution proves that neither can be sacrificed without destroying the self.

Brontë's insistence on Jane's plainness is a radical narrative choice — it refuses the convention that heroines must be beautiful, arguing instead that moral courage and intellectual honesty are more attractive than physical appearance.

The novel's final vision of marriage is revolutionary — Brontë imagines a partnership of absolute equals, where neither party dominates; Rochester's blindness and dependence are necessary to level the power imbalance that his wealth and gender had created.

Every male authority figure in the novel attempts to control Jane — Brontë constructs a systematic critique of patriarchy by showing its operation at every level of society, from the nursery to the church to the marriage altar.