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 notes to readers that she has enumerated the difficulties of educating Tom, Mary Ann, and Fanny without support from Mr. Bloomfield and Mrs. Bloomfield’s “more potent authority” specifically to enlighten parents and help other governesses.
At the novel’s outset, Agnes implied that she was telling her story to teach readers a lesson. Here, she indicates at least one lesson she was trying to teach: to be successful teachers, governesses need support from their students’ parents, because parents have “more potent authority”—that is, more power and influence—over their children’s outcomes.
Themes
Back at the Bloomfields’ after a happy Christmas at home, Agnes returns to work with resolve. One snowy day, Tom, Mary Ann, and Fanny try to throw Agnes’s work-bag into the fire and her desk out the window. As Agnes rescues her possessions, the children flee into the snow. Agnes is unsuccessfully ordering them back inside when Mr. Bloomfield comes by and yells at her. He orders the children back inside, tells her how obedient the children obviously are, and commands her to make the wet children “decent” again.
Yet again, one of the Bloomfield parents is cruel to Agnes, a low-status employee, for failing to control the Bloomfield children—even though the Bloomfield parents have also refused to let Agnes discipline. Mr. Bloomfield’s yelling at Agnes and his denial of his children’s disobedience highlight the psychological discomfort and practical difficulty of Agnes’s job.
Themes
As Agnes follows the children inside, she overhears Mr. Bloomfield’s mother—Mrs. Bloomfield Senior—asking the younger Mrs. Bloomfield whether Agnes is a “proper person.” Up to this point, Mrs. Bloomfield Senior has been talkative with Agnes, even indirectly criticizing her daughter-in-law for not supporting Agnes’s authority with the children more—criticisms Agnes has ignored, finding the way Mrs. Bloomfield Senior expresses them rather tasteless. Now Agnes realizes that Mrs. Bloomfield Senior is a back-biter.
Here readers learn that Agnes, in her attempts to educate the Bloomfield children, has to contend not only with the Bloomfield parents’ casual cruelty toward employees but also with the extended Bloomfield family’s attempts to undermine her. Mrs. Bloomfield Senior’s question about whether Agnes is a “proper person” is clearly meant to cast doubt on Agnes’s class status and thus her viability as a model for the young, middle-class Bloomfields’ behavior.
Themes
The next time Mrs. Bloomfield Senior cozies up to Agnes, Agnes is stiff and chilly. Mrs. Bloomfield Senior becomes hostile until, one day, Agnes—out of mere politeness—asks after Mrs. Bloomfield Senior’s health, at which point Mrs. Bloomfield Senior animatedly tells Agnes about all her illnesses and her “pious resignation” to them. Yet ultimately, because Agnes fails to flatter the woman, Mrs. Bloomfield Senior turns against her and begins telling Mr. Bloomfield that Agnes is a terrible governess.
Agnes are her loving family are all devoutly religious, so up to this point in the novel religion has had a positive connotation. Yet when Mrs. Bloomfield Senior praises her own “pious resignation” to her illness, the novel seems to suggest that cruel or shallow people use showy outward displays of religion to bolster their social status.
Themes
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Mr. Bloomfield starts surveilling Agnes. One day, in the spring, Tom, Mary Ann, and Fanny complete their lessons for once, and—kept indoors by rain—play with broken toys and, for some reason, eggshells. Because they aren’t fighting, Agnes lets them play their odd game while she sews a dress for Mary Ann’s doll. Then Mr. Bloomfield pops in, throws a fit about what effect the shells might have on the (plain, brown) carpet, and leaves the schoolroom slamming the door.
Though Agnes has succeeded in convincing the children to learn and not to fight, Mr. Bloomfield still explodes at her for letting the children get a plain carpet temporarily messy—an unfair, unnecessarily harsh criticism that shows both Mr. Bloomfield’s failure to understand the difficulty of Agnes’s job and his casual cruelty toward her.
Themes
One day, when Agnes tells the children they must pick up after themselves before they’ll get their next meal, Mary Ann and Fanny do it—but Tom, furious, hits his sisters, throws furniture, and scatters coal around. Agnes seizes Tom and sends Mary Ann to get Mrs. Bloomfield—only for Mrs. Bloomfield to order the maid to clean up and to give Tom his meal. Tom, while stuffing his face, gloats about his victory over Agnes. The only person who sympathizes with Agnes is the nurse, Betty, who has had to deal with similar problems—but she has been fired for corporally punishing the children.
Mrs. Bloomfield undermines Agnes’s attempt to teach Tom responsibility and cleanliness by ordering the maid to clean up Tom’s mess rather than insisting, with Agnes, that Tom clean up his own mess. This incident shows both how parents have the power to counteract teachers’ lessons and how higher-class people foist their messes and responsibilities onto lower-class people (Tom’s maid, not Tom, tidies his mess).
Themes
