Diverting Tales

"Habitual associates are known to exercise a great
influence over each other’s minds and manners" (87).

Points for Reflection

Agnes Grey (1847)

1. Agnes’ parents defy convention and family wishes in choosing to marry one another despite the disparity in the socioeconomic status of their respective families (5-6).  Does the novel implicitly commend this crossing of boundaries, or criticize it?
2. Recall the efficacy of Agnes’ mother’s efforts as a teacher in the home (6, etc.) and outside the home (139-40, 142, etc.).  Is Agnes a similarly effective teacher in the two homes she inhabits as governess?
3. Does Anne Brontë indirectly forward any particular theories concerning the relationship between mind and body in this novel?
4. Anne Brontë’s narrator occasionally identifies the reading audience as male (55, 128, 129, etc.).  Does the novel itself appear to be shaped for and directed at a particular sex?
5. The narrator opens the novel’s lines with the observation, “All true histories contain instruction,” and follows with the caveat that s/he “[is] hardly competent to judge” whether the novel in hand provides such instruction or not (5).  What didactic lessons does the novel appear to provide?
6. Does the novel implicitly recommend any type of available work for educated women over any other?
7. Agnes engages in some mildly self-deprecatory character analysis, claiming that other women have a “more womanly address” than herself, and “greater ease and self-possession” (16).  Is this self-assessment borne out by the tale: does she know herself well?
8. Why might Agnes assert that she responds to some of her caregiving challenges with “manly” self-control and repression of her emotions (28)?
9. Do Agnes’ fellow (adult) females provide her more support and sympathy than their male peers in the Bloomsfield and Murray households?
10. Does the novel suggest that awareness of morality is intrinsic, or learned?
11. Does Agnes attend and enjoy church on Sundays for the same reasons as her younger charges?
12. Does Anne Brontë provide any commentary—oblique or otherwise—concerning the working class?
13. What attributes of the new curate, Mr. Weston, distinguish him from the rector, Mr. Hatfield, and are these the same characteristics appreciated by Agnes Grey?
14. What influence over Agnes does Mr. Weston counter (87-88)?
15. Our narrator, Agnes Grey, at one point admits that her transparent narrative purposefully grows opaque at various points—that she withholds information from the reader (98).  Is this true, or does she give us enough hints for us to be able to color in the details which she believes she has barely sketched?
16. Does this novel forward a physiognomic agenda that equates physical beauty w/ strong, moral character?
17. Does the latter half of the novel appear to support Agnes’s contention that Rosalie “deserves” whatever comes her way following her marriage to Sir Thomas Ashby (124)?
18. Though the Greys encourage the eldest daughter, Mary, to try selling some of her artwork (10-12), Mr. Grey later refuses to take any of her earnings (47), and Mrs. Grey likewise refuses to live off either daughter’s wages (139, 140, 173).  Mrs. Grey also refuses to accept assistance from parents who disowned her when she married her husband (140-41).  Define the relationship between women and money which Anne Brontë is subtly constructing throughout the novel.

"Beata Beatrix" (1864-70)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu