Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë's<i>Agnes Grey</i>

In Anne Brontë'sAgnes Grey(1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be “to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day.” Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the “humble glow-worm” who, without a “power of giving light” (i.e., beauty), “the roving fly might pass her . . . a thousand times, and never light beside her” (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever “dry, shriveled kernel” of narrative meaning might be found by “cracking the nut” (5). As character, the budding naturalist “botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges”; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism.