The main topics Charlotte Brontë dealt with in Jane Eyre are still modern and belong to our everyday experience.
Morality: Jane expresses her morality with love, independence, and forgiveness (= perdono), but she never surrenders (= arrende) her independence to him, even after they are married. For he is blind, more dependent on her than she on him.
Religion: Throughout the novel (= per tutto il romanzo) Jane tries to establish an equilibrium between moral duty and earthly (= terrena) happiness. She despises (= disprezza) puritanism – Mr. Brocklehurst – and rejects cold devotion (St. John Rivers) and she does not emulate Helen Burns’s turning the other cheek (= che porge l’altra guancia). Her way of looking at religion serves to control immoderate passions without repressing her true self (= il proprio io)
Social Class: Jane’s social position is ambiguous: she is a penniless, but learned (= colta) orphan from a good family. She criticizes discrimination based on class. She is educated, well-mannered (= di buone maniere) , and relatively sophisticated, but she is a governess, a paid servant of low social standing, and therefore powerless (= senza potere). This is why she hesitates to marry Rochester; it is not a marriage of equals but of master and servant. Nevertheless, Charlotte Brontë possesses certain class prejudices herself, as is made clear when Jane has to remind herself that her unsophisticated village pupils at Morton “are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy.”
Gender Relations: Jane makes her best to assert (= asserire) her own identity within a male-dominated society. The three main male characters, Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St. John, try to keep Jane in a subordinate position and prevent her from expressing her own thoughts and feelings. Through Jane, Brontë refutes Victorian stereotypes about women, articulating what was for her time a radical feminist philosophy.