What is is about clergymen in literature? They never come off well–Revered Dimsdale from The Scarlet Letter, Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, Revered Price from The Poisonwood Bible. None of them a likable. Some are sleezy, others are criminally ambitious, others are divided by their desires and inhibitions, and some are just nuts.
St. John’s problem, I think, is that he is torn between what he wants and what he thinks God wants him to do. Plus, he feels guilty about wanting something other than her perception of God’s plan. So, he tortures himself and says that that is what he really wanted in the first place. I enjoy the psychological tension. I’ve always been interested in how religion can have an affect on the mind and the personality. I makes for good books.
But what I don’t like about him is how he treats Jane. It’s one thing to torture yourself, but expect someone to leave their home and their country and be your self-torture buddy–especially after the things he said to her. At one point St. John tells Jane, “you were formed for labour, not love.” Later, when she understandably refuses to marry him, he tells her, “it is not me you deny, but God.” Ugh. I can somewhat see St. John’s point that they need to marry if they’re going to go to India–to avoid the scandal of a thirty-year-old man traveling with a nineteen-year-old–if nothing else. But I don’t see how he can push the point after they both made their positions abundantly clear to each other.
The difference I see, with what Jane and St. John do to each other, and what Jane and Rochester did to each other, is that, even though it was violent and mean at times is that Rochester and Jane loved each other, underneath it all. There was caring and respect and love there. With St. John, things were much more cruel, and there was no love between them.
I never liked St. John Rivers.