“Resurgam”: How Helen Burns’ death explains Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
576 pp. Smith, Elder & Co.

Sitting by the window of the library of Gateshead Manor, her cruel aunt’s sprawling English estate, ten year old Jane Eyre sits reading Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds.

Moments later, John, her piggish brat of a cousin who considers it his personal mission to immiserate Jane, barges in and throws a book at her, prompting Jane to give him a solid punch to the face.

A squealing John causes the house servants, and the horrid Mrs. Reed, to barge in the room and, believing John’s lies as gospel to feed her preexisting loathing of Jane, instructs the servants to grab Jane and lock her in the infamous “Red Room,” where Mr. Reed, Jane’s uncle, died. 

Mrs. Reed sees this as her chance to rid herself of this meddlesome orphan by inviting the domineering Mr. Brocklehurst, headmaster of Lowood School for girls, whose pious Calvinism scorns all pleasures of the flesh, to take her to Lowood.

Jane, despite having an immediate distaste for Brocklehurst, can’t help but be thrilled at the idea of escaping her gilded prison walls at Gateshead, and agrees to go to school, even as it’s meant to serve as banishment, not an opportunity.

Early after her arrival at Lowood, Jane meets a fellow student, somewhat older, named Helen Burns. 

Helen is a sickly thing who nevertheless demonstrates a steely calmness and resolve bordering on Joan of Arc level by defying the abusive authority of Miss Scatcherd, a teacher at Lowood, who routinely beats and belittles Helen in front of the entire class.

Tragically, Helen dies not too long after that of Tuberculosis, marking the first real tragedy Jane experiences in the novel. 

And though more traumatic events follow this one, and Helen is rarely mentioned in the chapters that follow Jane’s exit from Lowood, a reasonable case could be made that she, second only to Mr. Rochester, is the most important supporting character in the book.

Before Helen, Jane is more defiant than principled. She knows what is wrong and who is bad. But she doesn’t know what is right and who is good.

Helen changes all that.

When Jane witnesses Miss Scatcherd beat Helen with a bushel of thorny twigs on her neck for no reason at all, you can feel in Jane’s voice how in awe she is of Helen:

“This ominous tool she presented to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy; then she quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns’ eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression.”

“Not a tear rose to Burns’ eye.”

Jane Eyre was made in that moment. And, arguably, she would still be Jane Eyre even if she never met Edward Rochester!

Because this is the moment when Jane sees what a person who, devoted to her faith and principle, can endure.

This is when Jane Eyre (figuratively) got religion.

And when young Helen and Jane are lying together in Helen’s bed, with the latter dying of tuberculosis and making it clear to Jane that she is happy to meet God and go to Heaven, the two fall asleep together in each other’s embrace.

The next morning Jane wakes up and Helen is dead. 

And though she is rarely mentioned afterward in the story, it’s hard not to imagine Helen’s spirit hovering above it all, watching Jane battling the other characters, the elements, and her own profound moral dilemmas.

For at the end of the chapter telling Helen’s death, writing from the future, Jane reveals:

“Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard: for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word ‘Resurgam.’”

Rise again, Helen.

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