"Be a Governess! Better Be a Slave at Once!" - the Governess in the Victorian Age. a Comparative Analysis of a Passage of Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (1847) and No Name by William Collins (1862), the Governess by Rebecca Solomon (1854) and the Po...

Charlotte Brontë's outcry might seem exaggerated
to us, but Victorian novels and paintings mostly do not picture the position of a governess in a positive way. Even if it might seem unusual, as the governess is a servant, a mere shade in the house of a family, she has yet caught the attention of artists. Maybe it is precisely her inconspicuous but obstinate presence that attracts the attention. Although she has an acknowledged status, she does not completely fit in her environment. She is different from other servants concerning social rank and education, and though belonging to the same social class (sometimes even belonging to a higher social level, being an aristocrat working in the house of a "bourgeois") as the family, she has to work out of economic reasons.

Thus, as in reality, the governesses in Agnes Grey and No Name have to work because their fathers respectively got ruined or died. Yet for one of them – Agnes Grey – there is another reason: "To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself, to exercice my unused facilities; to try my unknown powers." This is because Agnes does not respond to the situation of her family with the disheartenment of her father, mother and sister. She has the eagerness of youth to make the best of the situation, to dare to tackle a new challenge. But her father displays in his reaction the negative perception his contemporaries have of a governess' situation: "And a tear glistened in his eye as he added—‘No, no! afflicted as we are, surely we are not brought to that pass yet.'" And Agnes will lose her romantically distorted vision ("To train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day!") when she takes office at the house of the Bloomfield family. Her vision of a second home, with a "kind, warm-hearted matron" is soon shattered. The parents are impolite and behave condescendingly towards her, the children resemble little devils who – having soon discovered the weak sides of their... [continues]

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