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.