Textual_Analysis_of_Agnes_Grey_by_Anne_Bronte

Extract taken from Chapter XXII, p172-173 from “Whether from the influence of fashionable dissipation” to “the proposal was a considerable relief to her.” Anne Brontё’s Buildungsroman Agnes Grey concerns a young heroine struggling to make her way in an environment antagonistic to the economic and intellectual development of women. It is a novel of education, about education. It comprises the education and development of the narrator in a diversity of ways, dealing with her learning about the world and love as a character, woman and teacher. The somewhat turgid plot is calculated to keep the reader’s concentration on the life of a mind. The specific extract is placed towards the conclusion of the novel and involves her visit to her former pupil Rosalie Murray, now Lady Ashby. The extract considers the change in both Rosalie and Agnes and represents societies placing of women, and Agnes’ rebelling of this straightjacket idea of women. Anne Brontё uses language and form to portray several of her ideas on women, society and relationships in her novel and in the extract above. Brontё uses her protagonist Agnes Grey to narrate her own story with authority, talking from first person; Agnes’s narration often appears on the page as a stream of her own thoughts, debating openly in front of the reader on situations and decisions at hand: “I might endeavour to win her confidence; but, if she chose to conceal her matrimonial cares from me, I would trouble her with no obtrusive questions.”# This method of sharing the Agnes’s thoughts with the reader serves to defy the idea of the submissive Victorian woman by providing a vent for Brontё to express herself - and also to the many people whose social roles prevented them from expressing themselves - through Agnes Grey. Brontё attaches the form of Realism to Agnes Grey: the novel is formed of a linear narrative and an omniscient narrator. Brontё’s use of language is carefully matched to the subject and form of the novel; Agnes narrates in plain words, expressing ideas and opinions that were natural and realistic. The extract swiftly yet accurately portrays the characters of Rosalie Ashby and Agnes Grey, illustrating the changes in both of them from the start of the novel and their developed relationship. The conflicts of the novel develop through the extract by Brontё’s use of language, which is indicative of the relationship between the two women. Though Agnes is no longer an employee of Mrs. Murray, Rosalie’s language still hold’s an air of authority and is slightly patronising: “‘that will save you from having to dine with Lady Ashby and Sir Thomas: which would be rather awkward… especially as we may have other ladies and gentlemen to dine with us occasionally.’”# Here Rosalie is making a clear distinction between the social rank of Agnes and herself by suggesting that Agnes may feel uncomfortable dining with those above her station. This occurrence also highlights Agnes’s relationship to Rosalie as former governess. The presence of a governess in a household disrupted the confines of a family home and she became an atypical adjunct to the family. A mutual feeling of awkwardness often arose causing a need to “mark social distance between the governess and the ‘ladies’ of the house”#, and this frequently resulted in the governess’s physical and psychological seclusion. During the Victorian Era, the role of women did not have much leeway. They were seen as an “ornament of society”# and their role was to have children and take care of the house. Rosalie is effectively passed over to a man she does not love, so as to please her standards, moulded by her family, of a man of high society. Brontё’s language cleverly reveals a sense of what Victorian female leisured life was like: “…reducing the plumpness of her form, the freshness of her complexion, the vivacity of her movements, and the exuberance of her spirits.”# The novel reveals the unfortunate corollaries of the morals conveyed by her family, and propositions, “in the example of Rosalie, that marriage to the wrong partner might condemn one to a life of unhappiness.”# The lacklustre vocabulary used to describe the change in Rosalie Murray, now that she had become Lady Ashby, starkly contrasts the vivacity with which Anne wrote about her in the earlier chapters, and communicates the apathy, the emptiness, the monotony of her new life and indicate the effects of the restraints imposed on society and the desire for individual freedom. The difference between the two women and the effects of upbringing are displayed brilliantly through Rosalie’s ideas of maternal responsibility, which are as barren as her own mother’s. Being quite aware of Mrs. Murray’s distinctively poor parenting, Agnes is not surprised that Rosalie looks upon her child “with no remarkable degree of interest or affection”.# Bronte’s use of imagery contributes further to depicting the character of the narrator, particularly in contrast to that of the now Lady Ashby. Brontё describes Agnes’s room as “a small, unpretending, but sufficiently comfortable apartment.”# This description immediately strikes the reader as appropriate for the intensely practical, plain heroine#, by this point in the novel, quite established. The extract contrasts the earlier narration of the novel in it’s lack of rhetorical devices. A situation in the novel during Agnes’s first governess job depicts the use of rhetorical questions: “What must I do'…how was I to get them in'”# This technique denotes her feelings of inadequacy in comparison to the Bloomfields and illustrates how she has grown in confidence through her development and education. In the extract Anne depicts “Lady Ashby of Ashby Park [as] ‘poor’ in contrast to Agnes, who enjoys the riches of the good life in the quiet vicarage that Rosalie once scorned.”# It is through this theme of quality of life, of lack thereof, that Anne Brontë condemns mothers who impel their daughters to subject themselves to the authority of men and she promotes the desire to be taught through upbringing to support oneself. Agnes Grey’s strength lies in its quiet realism and the powerful focus on the development of the characters. The extract illustrates this radiantly, depicting the vastly contradicting characters of Rosalie and Agnes, the changes the two women have endured and their resulting circumstances. The extract highlights some of the key intentions of the novel and centralises the novel in the heart of Victorian women’s struggles with society’s expectations of them in an androcentric world. What differentiates Anne’s novels from her sisters’ is her vibrant ethical energy and moralistic intentions, “aligning her more with eighteenth-century neoclassicism”.# Nevertheless, the novels of all three Brontë sisters contain a rebellion against the stereotypical view of women. They do not, however, demean marital commitments and obligations, or refute the opportunity for contentment and even self-respect within marriage; they longed for the merging of these two opposite ideas, to find a strong sense of self within a loving relationship. Bibliography [Bronte, Anne: “Agnes Grey”, Modern Library, 2003] [Showalter, Elaine: “Daughters of Decadence”, ] [Lamonica, Drew: “We Are Three Sisters : Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontes”, University of Missouri Press, 2003] Copyright © 1993 Tim Whittome http://www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/an-novls.html