65 pages • 2-hour read
Agnes Grey
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Literary Devices
Direct Address
Sometimes called authorial comment, this tactic was a frequent device in 19th-century literature. In theater, this tactic of directly addressing the audience is known as “breaking the fourth wall.” In literature, it evolved from a trope in early novels, like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, in which a narrator is a credible person relating an account of something that actually happened to them. Agnes Grey likewise assures the reader that Agnes is relating a “personal history.” Participating in the fiction of sharing a historical account, which could be educational for the reader, was a way that novelists could avoid the claim that they were writing sensational lies meant to delude or deceive an audience.
Agnes Grey uses direct address frequently. Sometimes, Agnes uses it to be coy about the depth of her emotions, for instance, when she hints that she will not relate something Mr. Weston said to her, but she will always remember it. Sometimes she uses the device to even out an emotional register, as when she concludes the novel, after relating her happy life with Mr. Weston, with “And now I think I have said sufficient” (153).
Brontë seems to make use of authorial comment, in the voice of her narrator, most particularly in her discourses on the usefulness of beauty and the bitterness that a woman can feel at having her hopes, ambitions, or efforts thwarted. She indulges in occasional philosophizing and, at times, moralizing that readers then and now may find contraindicative to their tastes. On the whole, however, Brontë makes uses direct address to establish a cordial if not intimate relationship between Agnes and the reader, engaging the reader’s sympathies and allowing moments of humor and lightness into more dour moments, as when she intervenes to say she will not bore the reader by saying more.
Point of View
The first-person point of view, which establishes Agnes as narrating her own personal history, contrasts with other popular 19th-century novels, which tended to take an omniscient point of view. Where the omniscient narrator can look into the motives and histories of every character and sometimes see backward and forward in time, the first-person point of view is restricted to conveying the thoughts, actions, and observations of the narrator. In Agnes Grey, this creates a sense of immediacy and closeness between Agnes and the reader. The reader sympathizes with Agnes’s struggles, identifies with her motivations and goals, and takes her side in arguments. This choice of perspective adds suspense to the love story because Agnes doesn’t know how Mr. Weston feels about her and can only hope that certain glances, statements, or actions mean what she would like them to mean. With first-person narration, a reader also can see no further than what the narrator sees, so Mr. Weston’s reentry into her life near the end of the novel holds more surprise and, therefore, delight. In addition, because the novel is a coming-of-age story, the closer identification with Agnes allows the reader more insight into her maturing character.
Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman is a German word meaning “novel of education or formation.” While the motif of a young character gaining experience and knowledge of the world has appeared in literary works across time and cultures, the genre as such is credited to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, published between 1795 and 1796. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield are likewise formative works in the genre, and female novelists contributed their own versions of young characters evolving into moral and spiritual maturity. Often, the evolution of female protagonists concluded with marriage.
Agnes Grey can be read as a bildungsroman in that it describes Agnes’s own education in the world once she ventures outside of her very sheltered upbringing. While she becomes a little less naïve, Agnes’s journey does not lead to any great development on her part, as her experiences serve more to clarify and confirm her moral framework than change her thinking in any real way. However, what she observes of the lives of others does reinforce her own beliefs, and this allows her to make choices that lead to her productive happiness in the end.
Syntax
The syntax of the 19th-century novel can often prove daunting to readers not familiar with such long and ornate constructions. The general style includes lengthy modifiers, frequent interjections, and the liberal use of dashes, semicolons, and colons to append clauses. The occasional dilatory sentences, when mixed with more terse declarations, can create dramatic suspense for the reader, inject an occasional note of humor, and sometimes reflect the narrator’s state of mind. This passage after Agnes says goodbye to Mr. Weston for what might be the last time is a good example:
I walked along with Miss Murray, turning aside my face, and neglecting to notice several successive remarks, till she bawled out that I was either deaf or stupid; and then (having recovered my self-possession), as one awakened from a fit of abstraction, I suddenly looked up and asked what she had been saying (129).
As with much literature from different eras, readers may find, once they become accustomed to the rhythm of the language, that the elaborate syntax has its own charm.
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