Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Agnes Grey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Education, Authority, and Class
Money vs. Love in Marriage
Women and Fulfillment
Power and Cruelty
Religion
Summary
Analysis
Agnes’s carriage ride, on this September day, is long and cold. Nevertheless, when she arrives at the Bloomfields’, she wishes the ride were longer: she is nervous to introduce herself due to her lack of social experience. Yet she expects to get along with the children, she hopes Mrs. Bloomfield will be nice, and she plans not to interact with Mr. Bloomfield. She enters the house and greets Mrs. Bloomfield, a tall, dark-haired, cold woman—though she focuses so hard on controlling her nerves that her responses are slow.
Agnes has learned enough from her own homeschool education that she believes she has the skills to teach young children. Yet her rather isolated, protective parents have accidentally prevented her from learning the social mores that would help her navigate employment outside the home. This gap in Agnes’s education shows the importance of parents’ choices to their children’s learning.
Themes
Mrs. Bloomfield gives Agnes a minute to compose herself in her new room, during which Agnes notices in the mirror that her clothes are muddy and her face purple with cold. She tries to neaten herself and goes to the dining room, where Mrs. Bloomfield watches her struggle to eat a tough beefsteak for lunch with hands so chilled she can barely use her cutlery. Then Mrs. Bloomfield ushers Agnes into the sitting room and summons the children, who—Mrs. Bloomfield says—are behind on their education but intelligent, especially her spirited and scrupulously honest son Tom.
Mrs. Bloomfield, watching Agnes struggle to eat with frozen hands, offers her new employee neither sympathy nor help—an omission that suggests Mrs. Bloomfield will not be the kind, welcoming employer that Agnes had hoped.
Themes
Seven-year-old Tom and his sister Mary Ann enter the room with their little sisters, almost-four-year-old Fanny and toddler Harriet. Agnes tries to talk to the children, though Mrs. Bloomfield’s presence makes her shy. The children seem lively, though Agnes notices with disapproval that Mary Ann is vain and attention-seeking. When Mrs. Bloomfield asks Tom to kiss her and then show Agnes the schoolroom, Tom refuses to kiss his mother but says he’ll show Agnes.
In the previous section, Mrs. Bloomfield praised her children’s virtues, yet immediately upon meeting Agnes, Mary Ann acts vain, and Tom disobeys his mother. The difference between Mrs. Bloomfield’s description of her children and their real behavior may foreshadow trouble for Agnes, as Agnes will be tasked with responding to bad behavior from the children that their mother refuses to recognize.
Themes
In the school room, Mary Ann shows Agnes her doll and chatters about all its clothes and accessories until Tom tells her to be quiet so he can show Agnes his rocking-horse. For 10 minutes, Tom demands that Agnes observe “how manfully” he whips and spurs his horse. In the end, Agnes praises Mary Ann’s doll and Tom’s riding but says she hopes Tom won’t whip and spur a real horse. Tom says he certainly will. Agnes, disturbed, hopes to teach him better later.
It is unclear at this point where seven-year-old Tom learned that whipping and spurring horses was “manful[],” but his behavior suggests that someone has taught him to view abusing creatures under his power as a sign of masculine strength. Agnes, who loves animals, immediately resolves to correct Tom’s cruelty toward animals—showing how central lessons in values are to her conception of her job.
Themes
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Tom orders Agnes to put on her bonnet so he can show her his garden. When Mary Ann says they should look at hers too, Tom threatens her with his fist. Agnes tells Tom she hopes she’ll never see him hit his sister, but Tom says she will—he must, to keep Mary Ann under control. Agnes points out that it isn’t Tom’s job to control his sister, but Tom just demands that Agnes follow him. Agnes decides to go along with it because she’s only just met him.
Tom has learned from somewhere that he can and should threaten animals and his younger sister with violence to control them. According to this attitude, higher-status creatures (human beings and boys) have the right to treat lower-status creatures (animals and girls) with physical cruelty. This attitude may have alarming implications for Tom’s treatment of women later in his life. Moreover, his bossy attitude toward Agnes suggests that he sees Agnes as lower status because she is an employee and a woman even though she is an adult and his teacher, which foreshadows problems for Agnes in attempting to educate him.
Themes
In Tom’s garden, Agnes notices objects in the grass and asks what they are. Tom says he uses them to catch birds, which he tortures and kills. When Agnes tells him that that’s evil behavior because birds can feel too, Tom says that he can’t feel what he does to the birds. When Agnes suggests that he might feel it in hell if he doesn’t stop torturing animals, Tom says Mr. Bloomfield used to torture birds as a boy and that his Uncle Robson has praised him for it, so it can’t be evil. Agnes says she still thinks it is—and tells herself that she’ll stop Tom from doing it in the future.
Here readers learn that Tom’s animal cruelty is not merely hypothetical, directed only toward rocking horses and other inanimate objects: he tortures captured birds to death. His father and uncle have modeled and reinforced this behavior, a revelation indicating the importance of older relatives to teaching children values. Agnes makes no headway when she tries to appeal to Tom’s empathy by explaining that the birds feel pain or when she threatens Tom with religious punishment. Her failure to get through to him suggests that Tom has been poorly educated in empathy and religion. It also suggests that Tom will feel free to disregard what Agnes says if it contradicts his father or uncle because she, a female employee, is lower status than they.
Themes
Tom shows Agnes his mole-traps and weasel-traps. Agnes indulges him, hoping to make friends and so exert a positive influence on him. But while she notices cleverness in Tom, she doesn’t find the goodness that Mrs. Bloomfield mentioned. By the time they reenter the house, it’s time to eat. After the children go to bed, Mrs. Bloomfield warns Agnes not to discuss any flaws her children have with anyone but her. Agnes interprets this to mean that she ought not mention the children’s flaws at all. After a cold supper, the women go to bed—Agnes thinking that Mrs. Bloomfield is not at all nice like she had hoped.
Tom’s traps for rodents as well as birds imply that torturing and killing animals is his major amusement—further suggesting that his father and uncle have drummed into him his right to harm supposedly inferior creatures. Meanwhile, when Agnes realizes that Mrs. Bloomfield doesn’t want to hear about her children’s flaws, it suggests that Agnes may have no allies in the Bloomfield household in attempting to improve the children’s behavior.
Themes
