scholarly journals The Servant Heroine: Unravelling the Life of a Victorian Governess in Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-335
Author(s):  
Jwan Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Faria Menezes

Este artigo propõe investigar as diferentes infâncias figuradas nas obras Agnes Grey (1847), de Anne Brontë (1820-1849), Jane Eyre (1847), de Charlotte Brontë e Wuthering Heights (1847), de Emily Brontë (1818-1848). Dado que as irmãs de Haworth viram de perto as opressões trazidas pela Revolução Industrial e, antes disso, as complicações da agricultura capitalista (EAGLETON, 2005a; WILLIAMS, 2011), os entrelaçamentos entre o contexto histórico no qual viveram e a criação ficcional de suas personagens infantis contribui para uma percepção mais refinada das respectivas precariedades (BUTLER, 2019) em jogo. Proponho, assim, que o ato de narrar tais infâncias, marcando-as materialmente quanto às suas distintas precariedades (BUTLER, 2019) expõe um sistema que precisa explorar os vulneráveis para que possa crescer.


Author(s):  
Anne Brontë ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth

‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ‘myself at their age’ to win her pupils’ love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ‘unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures’. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.


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