Education, Authority, and Class
Agnes Grey suggests that children learn their behavior and values first and foremost from their parents and families. Rich parents try to offload the responsibility of educating their children in values as well as academic subjects onto governesses, women of their genteel social class but a lower economic class. Yet because the parents treat governesses like servants, not equals, the governesses lack the authority to enforce their teachings. Thus, rich children learn to treat the…
read analysis of Education, Authority, and ClassMoney vs. Love in Marriage
In Agnes Grey, genteel women are pressured to marry for money and rank and punished socially if they don’t—yet the novel suggests that women who marry for love have at least a chance at happiness, while those who marry for money end up miserable. The novel illustrates the pressure women face to marry for money and rank through both Agnes’s mother and Agnes’s student Rosalie Murray. Agnes’s mother, the daughter of a…
read analysis of Money vs. Love in MarriageWomen and Fulfillment
In Agnes Grey, upper-class women in Victorian society have limited options for exercising their talents or fulfilling their ambitions. But the novel suggests that women with good moral educations can find happiness despite these limitations, while those without good moral educations often end up behaving destructively due to their limited agency. The limitations on women become immediately clear in Agnes Grey when Agnes’s father, Richard Grey, loses money on an investment and…
read analysis of Women and FulfillmentPower and Cruelty
Agnes Grey illustrates how hierarchies lead to cruelty unless those high in the hierarchy receive careful moral educations—which few of them do. This pattern appears both in Agnes’s employers’ treatment of her and various high-ranking characters’ treatment of animals. When Agnes is working for the Bloomfields, for instance, her young charge Tom Bloomfield is the spoiled prince of the Bloomfield family, and so he sits at the top of the domestic hierarchy. Because…
read analysis of Power and CrueltyReligion
Agnes Grey suggests that all too frequently, people practice religion in an insincere way—but when they practice it sincerely, it can be a great comfort in adversity. The novel’s main example of religious insincerity is Mr. Hatfield, the rector at the village parish in Horton, where Agnes lives with the Murray family. Mr. Hatfield uses his elevated social status as rector to socialize with his rich parishioners and terrify his poor parishioners with threats…
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