To me the end of the book created more questions than it answered.
Did Jane ever become and a man's equal? Did the book ever find a medium, a balance between men and women or is everything just brought together by some "natural force"? Was this "natural force" the reason that Jane could finally accept Rochester's proposal, or was it simply because he was physically weakened by a god's will? Why in the last hundred pages did god's will become such and evident part of the novel? Virtually it comes down to what was Bronte actually trying to say about feminism?
These questions are obviously the openers for different essays, but each seems so broad and can float in so many direction. It hard to focus your opinion in just one aspect of a question and support it all the way through. I feel as though the end of the novel contradicted everything that Jane stood for. She finally married, but was it really for love or just because Rochester was forced to depend on someone else due to his disabilities? These questions confuse me because at the same time I feel that Jane used different settings in her life to "island" herself away from society in order to become independent. It almost would have been more beneficial if Bronte would have had Jane independently thrive into old age, creating a contentedness between the reader and Jane. I can not make a strong stand point either way. I feel that it would be so much easier for me to write an entire essay about independence if Jane had never married Rochester, then the concluding argument could be about how a woman's happiness can be achieved without a man. At the same time, in 1847 Jane accomplished much for a woman during that era.
Again I am waffling and don't know which side to choose. The entire essence of God and Nature at the end also throws me through a loop and I don't want my essay to get to broad. Why is the garden of Eden so constantly re-iterated and why does Rochester and St. John's opinion about religion suddenly seem so vital?
All in all, I truly enjoyed reading this book, but it is a challenge to make even a substantial solid opinion for me about if feminism was portrayed in a negative or positive light.
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Great, productive questions at the outset of this post. You'd be wise to keep them in mind as you continue to draft your essay (though I understand if you can't definitively answer each and every one of them, the process of exploring more deeply what is at stake in each question certainly seems a fruitful one).
As for independence, I'll propose again that maybe part of what Bronte was after in this novel (keep in mind the times in which it was written) was to seek out a way to accommodate an independent woman with in the traditional context of marriage. Today, we might consider this naive (a cave in), but back in the day, maybe this was a bit more radical?
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