Yet, the worst aspects of the governess’s situation were not financial but social. As critic Katharine West wrote in
Chapter of Governesses: A Study of the Governess in English Fiction, 1800-1949
(1949):
... the core of the problem of a governess’s happiness or the reverse [was] that she was thwarted of her natural woman’s life. The fonder a girl was of children, the more she must long for children of her own. The more she wished to be mistress of a house with her own things in it, the more she was oppressed by the splendour of other people’s possessions. The more she loved society, the more lonely she felt. The fonder she let herself grow of charges and their parents, the more she hated leaving them. The greater her love for books and music, the more her girls’ stupidity or coarseness galled her (pp. 84-85).
And, finally, the most telling problem of all: Governesses were unlikely to marry.
This, then, is where we can begin to understand Anne’s novel: Governesses occupied a social position that was both intensely marginal (in their own families, in society at large) and intensely central (in that they were concerned with the care of children). We see this from the start of Agnes Grey’s career. She begins in the center of her loving (if economically unstable) middle-class family, the beloved younger child of loving parents. Once she leaves to take up her first position with the Bloomfields, she is cast adrift in a family that hardly seems to be aware of her existence, except to plague and abuse her. On the evening of her arrival, she is greeted with excessive formality by Mrs. Bloomfield and served a tough, cold dinner that seems but a symbolic foretaste of her service in general. Mrs. Bloomfield is “cold, grave, and forbidding” (p. 21), far from the warm, motherly presence Agnes has in her naivete envisioned; the servants ignore her as if she were an inferior member of the staff (as in truth she is); and Mr. Bloomfield is as ill-tempered and abrupt with her as he is with his own wife. Time does not lead to any improvement, and Agnes’s pain is deepened when she is summarily dismissed.
The Murrays are a family somewhat less “dysfunctional” (to use contemporary jargon), and with them Agnes is not as completely excluded from family life, but the children are no less in need of discipline and direction. The elder daughter, Rosalie, is ignorant, self-centered, and vain; the next, Matilda, is a thorough “hoyden” (p. 56), or tomboy, interested only in horses and hunting, who “had learnt to swear like a trooper” (p. 65) to boot. Even more serious is that the two lack any moral sense whatsoever. Though Agnes sees their faults, she has learned from her first post that a governess who criticizes her charges to their mother (in this novel fathers take no interest in their children’s education) will find herself out of a job posthaste.
Here, then, we have a hint of what Anne Brontë sees with clear and unerring vision as a gaping void at the center of middle-class family life. Children, she suggests, receive from their parents unconditional love, but beyond that they require moral training, exercise in self-discipline, and a genuine education (not rote learning). Yet none of the mothers and fathers we see are fit to provide this genuine education. The former indulge one kind of moral laxness (vanity, lethargy), the latter another (thoughtless violence, selfishness). Neither parent in either family is capable of serving as a model of anything except what is to be avoided at all costs. Girls are trained to grow into witless ornaments, boys into heartless brutes.
It is these moral monsters who then must form their own families. They are brought together in marriage hardly knowing one another and doomed at best to loveless coexistence in unions of family convenience. It is no wonder that the families we encounter through Agnes are wholly devoid of marital affection. (Even Agnes’s parents’ marriage, though one of enduring love, is far from faultless: As Agnes herself observes, her father’s original economic improvidence is compounded by his inability to rouse himself to any action to repair his fortune, thus dooming Agnes herself to this life of genteel penury. Only after his death can she return home.)
There are two particular incidents that reinforce this message with chilling force. The first is when Agnes finds Master Tom Bloomfield in possession of some fledglings he has taken from their nest; with the encouragement of his uncle, he is determined to torture and torment them. Unable to persuade the boy to return the birds to the nest, she kills them herself so that at least they will not suffer long. This is bad enough, but she is immediately rebuked by Mrs. Bloomfield for interfering with the boy’s fun.
If this suggests that men socialize boys to repeat all the errors of their own upbringing, women do no less damage to girls. Mrs. Murray’s relentless pressure on Rosalie to marry an aristocratic libertine solely for his social position is fully as blameworthy. Again, Agnes is the only one to see anything amiss, and the only one who speaks her mind:
I made no pretension to “a mother’s watchful, anxious care,” but I was amazed and horrified at Mrs. Murray’s heartlessness, or want of thought for the real good of her child; and, by my unheeded warnings and exhortations, I vainly strove to remedy the evil (p. 136).
It goes without saying that neither Rosalie nor anyone else listens to her warnings or cares about the impropriety of an innocent girl marrying a thoroughly immoral rake. Needless to say as well, we later learn that the marriage is a complete disaster for Rosalie. As if to insist that readers see the full horror of the way that failed families perpetuate themselves, Rosalie is later seen as a careless and unloving parent to her own child. Thus, we see as in a series of facing mirrors each generation molding its successor in its own degraded image.
We might sum up, then, by saying that Anne Brontë creates in the figure of her governess one whose very presence marks the failure of the nuclear family, the institution that ought to be the foundation and mainstay of all social life. On the one hand, it is the financial failure of the governess’s own family that has made it necessary for her to enter the world of work as a wage slave (let us remember Jane Fairfax in Jane Austen’s
Emma,
who without irony compares her impending fate as a governess to that of victims of the African slave trade). This is bad enough, but worse still is that the families that employ governesses do so because their own female heads are unable or unwilling to accept their domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers. The governess stands in for the mother, providing the moral training for the children of that failed or incompetent mother when no one else can or will do so.
In short, Brontë effectively uses Agnes’s travails to expose both the fragility and the hypocrisy of the Victorian family. But what does she oppose to this horrifying analysis? What basis is there in the world of the novel for individual goodness and, by extension, for a foundation that might redeem the sacred institutions of marriage and family life? In other words, is there any way that a single individual, like Agnes, can lead a decent life and perhaps begin to change the world for the better?
The key word in the preceding paragraph—and one that is difficult for contemporary readers to accept as it was intended—is “sacred”: for to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, marriage was a sacrament. Marriage was, in effect, an institution that marked the intersection of the divine and the human; like the Church, it served to bind man, woman, and God together. A successful marriage, then, was a human contract modeled on the divine order, creating a foundation for the moral redemption of man and woman and the beginning of a moral life for their children. A failed marriage was a sacrilege, an utterly wasted and blighted opportunity to bring man into harmony with the divine will. Here, then, is the crux of the problem as well as its solution, for all of the marriages we see in Agnes
Grey
are travesties.
Yet in all this moral chaos, Anne stands apart. We must recall that as a deeply religious
evangelical
Christian (and we must not forget how freighted with significance this distinction was for Victorians), Anne Brontë saw life as a gift from God, one that imposed upon the recipients (we mortals) responsibilities both to scrutinize our own conduct relentlessly at all times
and
to love our fellows as much as Christ had loved all humankind. This double imperative took form in good deeds that were to be accomplished not with a view toward laying up capital in Heaven, but rather as an act of worship. Anne’s universalist convictions led her to believe that perhaps the greatest work we could do on earth was to have as much faith in the possibility of salvation for each and every one of us as does God; through our own humble efforts, any soul might be saved.
Here, then, are the roots of Agnes’s quiet, almost stoic perseverance. Time and time again Agnes sees the essential immoral dimensions of conduct that others view as socially acceptable or even desirable; time and time again she speaks her mind, though no one will listen. But it is also this abiding faith that gives Agnes the strength to endure isolation, deprivation, and disappointment. Her disappointments are many, but none so devastating as those involved in her relationship (if it can be called that) with the somewhat elusive curate, Mr. Weston.
Mr. Weston—who is destined to be Agnes’s future husband—is, like her, modest, unobtrusive, undistinguished in appearance, and yet a figure of surprising endurance and strength. Agnes does not take long to decide that he is “a man of strong sense, firm faith, and ardent piety, but thoughtful and stern” (p. 98)—all of these in her mind strong recommendations. Then, in chapter XII, she finds that he also possesses “true benevolence, and gentle, considerate kindness” when she accidentally encounters him in the cottage of a poor elderly woman. She is there as part of her quiet efforts to help the local poor (reading to the woman and mending her son’s shirt); then he walks in holding the woman’s strayed cat. It is a quiet, domestic moment, quietly observed (even to the detail of the cottager brushing the cat hair off his coat), but Agnes learns a great deal about Mr. Weston from it. He is kind to animals (he has rescued the cat); he is kind to the humblest of his parishioners (he knows how the old woman will worry about the animal); and he is serious about his duty (not only is he out in the rain but he has risked angering Mr. Murray, who sharply reproves his concern for a mere beast). Though Agnes is hesitant to reveal to herself (and thus to readers) her true feelings for Mr. Weston, despite her claim that she will keep no secrets from them, it takes no great cleverness to see that from this moment on she is profoundly in love with him.
Many readers have found unsatisfactory the courtship that increasingly dominates the novel as it moves quickly toward its close. In fact, there is relatively little that by conventional standards can be deemed to be courtship. Here Brontë no doubt portrays what many Victorian romances must have been like: For a governess like Agnes and a poor country curate like Mr. Weston, there were few opportunities to meet and even fewer where they might be alone for more than a moment. Yet if this limited scope for interaction made it difficult to get to know one another, it was not impossible—all the more important, then, that they learn as much as possible from the chances they had. For both Agnes and Mr. Weston, skilled as they are in self-examination, each carefully scrutinizing the other and learning enough to make the right judgment, given the few moments they have together, it is a challenge they can and do meet.
The plot, then, that keeps them largely apart from one another is no accident on Brontë’s part. For if they are good readers of each other’s characters and hearts, each will persist in believing in the other’s love. The lack of any traditional expected sign of that love (trysts, letters, betrothals) is only proof of its depth. Yet there is more tested here than just the old maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Agnes must learn one more painful lesson: that Hope (as she personifies it in her musings) itself is a human failing. Only God knows our fates, and only by serving him can we lead any life worth living. Thinking, in her disappointment, that she would rather die than live without her love requited, she eventually realizes that happiness is not her right—and that her life should be devoted to promoting the welfare of those around her. Only now, properly chastised, is Agnes ready to be rewarded by union with the man she loves. We see Mr. Weston only through Agnes’s eyes, so we are unable to view his struggles as fully he might see them himself, but ultimately we are assured that Mr. Weston is also living the very same lesson.
When, after long absence, Mr. Weston at last does reappear (hardly an accident, since he has been searching for her for months) and offers his proposal of marriage (properly speaking with Mrs. Grey before he even approaches Agnes on the subject), the atmosphere is reminiscent of Mr. Knightley’s proposal to Jane Austen’s Emma—we know as he speaks that he has long been in love with her, but he must be tested by being obliged to wait until the right moment to speak. And, just as Mr. Knightley says that when he feels deeply he must speak plainly, Mr. Weston engages in no sentimental repartee with his intended: “‘You love me then?’ said he, fervently pressing my hand. ‘Yes’” (p. 192). Agnes says afterward, as she remembers this moment, that their “hearts filled with gratitude to Heaven, and happiness, and love.” The order here is significant—first, God, who should be everyone’s first concern; then happiness, available to any individual (as it was to Agnes) who serves God; and finally, the loving union of two of God’s servants.
Within a few more pages the novel is over, readers granted only a short sketch of the productive (it is that, rather than happy) life of the pair, now married and with children of their own. This established, few novels have concluded with so quiet a statement as this: “And now I think I have said sufficient.” But if the reader has been attending to the Christian message that underpins Anne’s narrative throughout the novel, this is indeed sufficient, for the rest of her story will be one of quiet dedication to her domestic circle, her husband, her family, and her parish.