How Brontë explores religion, setting Brocklehurst's hypocrisy, Helen's faith and St John's zeal against Jane's own belief across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion', 'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you', 'Read the New Testament', 'the native of a Christian land', 'Where is God? What is God?', 'My Maker and yours', 'I am going to God', 'He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun', 'I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol', 'the servant of an infallible Master'.
Context: William Carus Wilson, the clergyman who founded the school Lowood is drawn from, and the Preface's attack on self-righteousness.
Three versions of Christianity in Brocklehurst, Helen and St John, and the faith Jane makes her own.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
