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a series of facing mirrors each generation molding its successor in its own degraded image.
     
    We might sum up, then, by saying that Anne Brontë creates in the figure of her governess one whose very presence marks the failure of the nuclear family, the institution that ought to be the foundation and mainstay of all social life. On the one hand, it is the financial failure of the governess’s own family that has made it necessary for her to enter the world of work as a wage slave (let us remember Jane Fairfax in Jane Austen’s Emma, who without irony compares her impending fate as a governess to that of victims of the African slave trade). This is bad enough, but worse still is that the families that employ governesses do so because their own female heads are unable or unwilling to accept their domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers. The governess stands in for the mother, providing the moral training for the children of that failed or incompetent mother when no one else can or will do so.
    In short, Brontë effectively uses Agnes’s travails to expose both the fragility and the hypocrisy of the Victorian family. But what does she oppose to this horrifying analysis? What basis is there in the world of the novel for individual goodness and, by extension, for a foundation that might redeem the sacred institutions of marriage and family life? In other words, is there any way that a single individual, like Agnes, can lead a decent life and perhaps begin to change the world for the better?
    The key word in the preceding paragraph—and one that is difficult for contemporary readers to accept as it was intended—is “sacred”: for to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, marriage was a sacrament. Marriage was, in effect, an institution that marked the intersection of the divine and the human; like the Church, it served to bind man, woman, and God together. A successful marriage, then, was a human contract modeled on the divine order, creating a foundation for the moral redemption of man and woman and the beginning of a moral life for their children. A failed marriage was a sacrilege, an utterly wasted and blighted opportunity to bring man into harmony with the divine will. Here, then, is the crux of the problem as well as its solution, for all of the marriages we see in Agnes Grey are travesties.
    Yet in all this moral chaos, Anne stands apart. We must recall that as a deeply religious evangelical Christian (and we must not forget how freighted with significance this distinction was for Victorians), Anne Brontë saw life as a gift from God, one that imposed upon the recipients (we mortals) responsibilities both to scrutinize our own conduct relentlessly at all times and to love our fellows as much as Christ had loved all humankind. This double imperative took form in good deeds that were to be accomplished not with a view toward laying up capital in Heaven, but rather as an act of worship. Anne’s universalist convictions led her to believe that perhaps the greatest work we could do on earth was to have as much faith in the possibility of salvation for each and every one of us as does God; through our own humble efforts, any soul might be saved.
    Here, then, are the roots of Agnes’s quiet, almost stoic perseverance. Time and time again Agnes sees the essential immoral dimensions of conduct that others view as socially acceptable or even desirable; time and time again she speaks her mind, though no one will listen. But it is also this abiding faith that gives Agnes the strength to endure isolation, deprivation, and disappointment. Her disappointments are many, but none so devastating as those involved in her relationship (if it can be called that) with the somewhat elusive curate, Mr. Weston.
    Mr. Weston—who is destined to be Agnes’s future husband—is, like her, modest, unobtrusive, undistinguished in appearance, and yet a figure of surprising endurance and strength. Agnes does not take long to decide that