Agnes is a middle class lady who is nonetheless hired, a motherly woman who is decidedly not a mother. The result is an intractable barrier between the governess and her employers: Agnes feels ashamed when the Bloomfields and Murrays do not treat her as the virtuous woman she feels she is, and who they depend on her to be.

Notably, before becoming a governess, Agnes is able to avoid shame by behaving modestly. Modesty can be defined as precisely that which "prevents shame" and "wards of disgrace”

Agnes learns from her family that modesty should be an effective affective strategy for avoiding the distressing social disruption experienced as shame. Indeed, just as a wish to avoid social stigmatization leads the family to host their tea parties, so a desire to avoid shame guides Agnes in all of her familial interactions.

While contempt is meant to keep Agnes in her "place," Agnes's consequent shame continually risks shaming in turn the Bloomfields and the Murrays. Both families are to some degree aware of this risk. Their governess, after all, takes every opportunity to remind her employers and her charges of their shameful shamelessness. For example, when Agnes take her weekly walk home from church with the Murrays and their friends, her "companions" carefully and completely ignore her presence: "If their eyes, in speaking, chanced to fall on me, it seemed as if they looked on vacancy - as if they either did not see me, or were very desirous to make it appear so”

Paradoxically, Agnes clings to her shame shamelessly. Certainly, Agnes is not modest in her claims to shame. On the contrary, shame becomes the

In Bronte's Agnes Grey, Agnes's daily shaming as a governess paradoxically leads the protagonist to seek further opportunities for feeling shame or anticipating shame, whether in herself or others. If the narrator is at times critical of both her shame and her false shame, she responds with more shame, because it is through shame that she is able to assert her humanity. The very ubiquity of Agnes's shame, then, highlights the limits of her self-reflexivity: she does not unabashedly question her tendency to respond to shame with more shame, precisely because to do so would be shameless. As such, Agnes, is not at all candid about the pleasures and agency that self-effacement affords. As a consequence, Agnes Grey clearly and directly suggests the power that can inhere to the rhetorical embrace of shame.

Despite the discomfort associated with shame, Agnes seeks out these experiences as they allow her to maintain her dignity and self-respect in a society that often undermines it. This paradoxical relationship with shame underscores the complexity of her character and the societal critique embedded in Bronte’s novel. It’s interesting to note how Agnes’s shame, rather than diminishing her, becomes a source of power and agency. This indeed suggests a profound understanding of the multifaceted nature of human emotions and their role in shaping one’s identity.