Heroines of Missionary Adventure: The Portrayal of Victorian Women Missionaries in Popular Fiction and Biography

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the best-known anti-heroine of the Victorian missionary movement. Yet her refusal to marry the zealous St John Rivers and to be his fellow-missionary to India stems not from any serious questioning of missionary aims and methods, but rather from a deep unease about the demands placed upon women by patriarchal Christianity in one of its most imperious nineteenth-century manifestations. 1 For the cold, stern and self-possessed Rivers, modelled it is said upon the real-life missionary hero to India Henry Martyn, Jane has all the feminine qualities required of the exemplary Christian helpmeet. As he tells her, he has studied her character carefully and found her to be ‘docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous; very gentle and very heroic’. 2 Above all, she is endowed in abundance with that most prized of female Christian virtues: self-sacrifice. In his plans for Jane’s future this capacity for self-immolation is to be tested to the full, as he urges her to simplify her ‘complicated interests, feelings, thoughts, wishes, aims’ and to pursue only one goal: that of fulfilling ‘the mission of your great Master’. 3 The ambivalence of just who is the master whom Jane is called upon to obey is evident from River’s androcentric identification of his own ambitions for the future with the will of God himself, and it was a feature of many Victorian Christian appeals to women. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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