Agnes Grey illustrates how hierarchies lead to cruelty unless those high in the hierarchy receive careful moral educations—which few of them do. This pattern appears both in Agnes’s employers’ treatment of her and various high-ranking characters’ treatment of animals. When Agnes is working for the Bloomfields, for instance, her young charge Tom Bloomfield is the spoiled prince of the Bloomfield family, and so he sits at the top of the domestic hierarchy. Because no one except Agnes (who has almost no power or standing due to being a governess) has ever tried to teach him consideration for others, he regularly hits Agnes and his sisters and tortures helpless birds. When Agnes is working for the Murrays, meanwhile, her charges Rosalie and Matilda rarely consider her comfort, often thoughtlessly wound her, and exclude her whenever they socialize with their richer friends. Tellingly, Matilda also fails to show adequate kindness to Snap, the terrier puppy she attempts to raise. After Agnes—who loves animals—accepts responsibility for Snap and raises him herself, the Murrays spitefully sell Snap to a rat-catcher for the supposed crime of preferring Agnes to Matilda. Through high-status characters’ cruel or careless treatment of poor Agnes and helpless animals, the novel repeatedly suggests that whenever a hierarchy of power exists, those at the top will tend to treat those at the bottom badly.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power and Cruelty ThemeTracker
Power and Cruelty Quotes in Agnes Grey
“Surely, Tom, you would not strike your sister! I hope I shall never see you do that.”
“You will sometimes: I’m obliged to do it now and then to keep her in order.”
“But it is not your business to keep her in order, you know, that is for—”
“Well, now go and put on your bonnet.”
“Papa knows how I treat them, and he never blames me for it: he says it is just what he used to do when he was a boy.”
The habitual fear of their father’s peevish temper, and the dread of the punishments he was wont to inflict when irritated, kept them generally within bounds in his immediate presence. The girls, too, had some fear of their mother’s anger; and the boy might occasionally be bribed to do as she bid him by the hope of reward: but I had no rewards to offer, and as for punishments, I was given to understand, the parents reserved that privilege for themselves; and yet they expected me to keep my pupils in order.
“Curse me, if I ever saw a nobler little scoundrel than that. He’s beyond petticoat government already: by God! He defies mother, granny, governess, and all! Ha, ha, ha!”
I really liked her—when she did not rouse my indignation, or ruffle my temper by too great a display of her faults. These, however, I would fain persuade myself, were rather the effect of her education than her disposition: she had never been perfectly taught the distinction between right and wrong; she had, like her brothers and sisters, been suffered, from infancy, to tyrannise over nurses, governesses, and servants[.]
“But if I could always be young, I would always be single. I should like to enjoy myself thoroughly, and coquet with all the world, till I am on the verge of being called an old maid; and then, to escape the infamy of that, after having made ten thousand conquests, to break all their hearts save one, by marrying some high-born, rich, indulgent husband, whom, on the other hand, fifty ladies were dying to have.”
But now and then he gave us a sermon of a different order—what some would call a very good one; but sunless and severe: representing the Deity as a terrible taskmaster, rather than a benevolent father. Yet, as I listened, I felt inclined to think the man was sincere in all he said: he must have changed his views, and become decidedly religious; gloomy and austere, yet still devout. But such illusions were usually dissipated, on coming out of church, by hearing his voice in jocund colloquy with some of the Melthams or Greens, or, perhaps, the Murrays themselves[.]
I thought of the poor man and his one lamb, and the rich man with his thousand flocks; and I dreaded I knew not what for Mr Weston, independently of my own blighted hopes.
“It seems unnatural: but some people think rank and wealth the chief good; and, if they can secure that for their children, they think they have done their duty.”
“True: but is it not strange that persons of experience, who have been married themselves, should judge so falsely?”
“[I]f he married a richer wife, misfortunes and trials would no doubt have come upon him still; while I am egotist enough to imagine that no other woman could have cheered him through that so well: not that I am superior to the rest, but I was made for him, and he for me[.]”
