Kindness, Eros and Agnes Grey

Abstract

Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is about many things: chief among them is kindness. In this short novel, the words ‘kind’ and ‘kindness’ appear over 50 times. In the course of the work, we are brought to see that kindness is not a weak flame over which the downtrodden can warm their hands a little but rather a bonfire of a life force, the source of social good, and between Agnes Grey and Edward Weston, mutual kindness—specifically the shared valuing of kindness itself—ignites eros. As Marianne Thormӓhlen rightly observed, ‘Agnes Grey’s falling in love with Mr Weston is erotically charged in ways which present-day readers easily overlook’. I want to argue that this erotic charge is an intensification of currents of feeling that characterise Agnes’s whole narrative. The way Agnes describes, late in the novel, the pressure of her lover’s hand could also describe her experiences of kindness, both given and received, throughout her life: ‘emphatic, yet gentle’.

Keywords:

• kindness
• eros
• Agnes Grey
• Mr Weston
• Anne Brontë
• Edward Weston

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I include in this count the word ‘kind’, as well as ‘kindly’, ‘kindness’ and ‘unkind’, as they identify or modify affective states or dispositions; I do not include the term ‘kind’ in its sense of ‘type’ or ‘species’ (although it does spark reflection that these types of ‘kind’ are etymologically related). Note that there are places in Agnes’s narrative in which ‘kind’ is used sarcastically, a use that underlines Brontë’s interest in the presence or absence of true kindness.

2 Eagleton’s work on Anne Brontë exhibits an odd combination of insight and boredom. He should be more interested in what he has said in the quoted passage about Brontë’s ‘remarkable’ lack of smugness, in terms of his own genuine question about the extent to which, for Brontë, ‘morality is class morality’ (2005, 128); instead, he lapses into a general comment about the novel’s implicit commitment to the petty-bourgeois values of ‘piety, plainness, duty, and sobriety’ (128). In at least the case of ‘plainness’, it is as if Eagleton has lost interest and drifted away from the text. One of the most fascinating (and under discussed) passages in Agnes Grey is Agnes’s meditation on beauty in Chapter 17, in which she argues against the commonplace of her time and religion that ‘it is foolish to wish for beauty’ and for the truths that ‘[w]e are naturally disposed to love what gives pleasure, and what more pleasing than a beautiful face?’ (Brontë [1847] 2010, 122), that beauty is ‘a gift of God, and not to be despised’ (123), and that in love, beauty is a ‘power to make [one’s] presence known’ (123).

3 See, for example, Jennifer Stolpa (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janina Hornosty

Janina Hornosty is a retired member of the English and Liberal Studies departments at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.