Anti-Hierarchical Development in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey

Abstract

This article offers an allegorical interpretation of the ostensibly realist elements of Anne Brontë’s 1847 novel Agnes Grey. Read non-allegorically, Agnes Grey appears to depict the triumph of the governess Agnes’s moral will over her desires that conflict with her duties, as occurs in the Bildungsroman. But the novel can also be seen as using Agnes’s evolving relationship with her pupils to consider the ideal way to prioritise and respond to the various impulses of the self and various members of a social community. The plot can then be seen as progressing towards the anti-hierarchical model of self and community that Brontë deems most ethical. This community largely corresponds to Talia Schaffer’s community of care.

Keywords:

• Anne Brontë
• novel studies
• allegory
• Bildungsroman
• community of care
• liberal self

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This idea of the carer using the cared-for person as a ‘prop’ to establish their own moral reputation comes from Schaffer (2021, 31).

2 Berg articulates how the novel relates cruelty to animals and cruelty to women in the context of Agnes’s uncomfortable meals with the Bloomfield family: ‘Agnes’s intense shame at having to share the meal is aroused not simply by the quarrel over the meat, but by what it represents: the violence behind the hierarchy in which meat is the right of a white middle-class man, while the women are expected to minister to such desires’ (2002, 184).

3 Although I focus on the ‘brutality of the moral will’, those who take a biographical approach have pointed out the connection between Mr Bloomfield and Joshua Ingham.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Auerbach

Amanda Auerbach is an Assistant Professor of English at Catholic University in Washington DC where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and European Romantic Review.