As seen in The Governess, education prompts the development of self-awareness, a waking up to one’s own shortcomings and faulty tendencies. It is not enough that the students be shown or told of their faults; they must own them for themselves, must spill confessions and face the shame of these shortcomings. The recognition is a painful one, but a necessary step in finding happiness and in becoming part of an ordered society.
As the model student, Jenny Peace helps push her fellows into this self-recognition. After the apple-grabbing incident, Jenny determines to restore peace among the girls and enable them to “be happy” (54). In order to “persuade […] her School-fellows to be reconciled to each with Sincerity and Love” (57), Jenny must first reconcile each girl to herself. That is, rather than point out the admirable traits in other girls and simply suggest that each girl ought to adore her fellows, Jenny must locate and reveal each girl’s own faults. In each girl, some hostile habit rests deeply rooted, causing dissatisfaction with the self and others alike while distorting each girl’s view of the world and sense of how to live in it. So long as this habit of thought remains, the girls can never open up to others or see their worth. In approaching her task, then, Jenny reaches to uncover this root problem. She undertakes individual conversations in order to best guide each student, searching out their mistaken impressions of the world. It is only by helping to change each girl from within that she is able to urge an atmosphere of earnest harmony. And it is with this aim that she sets out to reform the girls “one by one” (57).
Her first quarry comes in the form of Sukey Jennett, and with this encounter, we see the basic method—the “Same manner” (57)—that Jenny will apparently use with each girl. During the course of her exchange with Sukey, Jenny constructs a careful argument of truths in which she notes that Sukey has received only pain from arguing, and rightly guesses that Sukey’s contention has led the girl to many a sleepless night. When Jenny suggests that Sukey wishes “to be revenged on” (55) her schoolmates for petty reasons, Sukey herself confesses, “if I could but hurt my Enemies, without being hurt myself, it would be the greatest Pleasure I could have in the World” (55). A startling admission, and Sukey herself soon comes to see it as such.
Indeed, when Jenny leaves Sukey to think on what has passed, the girl realizes “how much hitherto she had been in the Wrong; and that Thought st[ings] her to the Heart” (56). Sukey confesses alone and aloud,
But […] have I been always in the Wrong all my Life-time? for I always quarrelled and hated every one who had offended me.—Oh! I cannot bear that Thought! It is enough to make me mad! when I imagine myself so wise and so sensible, to find out that I have been always a Fool. (57)
The truth wavers on the verge of realization, but it is a hard admission Sukey faces. To truly confess her wrong (and there would be little good in a false admission) she must in a sense re-envision herself and tear away long-held assumptions of ways to act in the world. On her own Sukey (as is the case with so many of the girls) had been a sort of sovereign, secure in her assumptions, never truly tested and thus able to find herself in the right at all times. Yet coming into the world—or in this case, the school—she must revise her thoughts to suit a bigger picture, for what may seem beneficial to the self often clashes with the world. This recasting of the self proves a painful process, a fall of cherished sovereignty and a humbling that may seem enough to make anyone mad.
However difficult the change, Sukey comes around to an abashed, if somewhat mute, acknowledgement, meeting Jenny and “stammer[ing] out some Words, which impl[y] a Confession of her Fault” (57). If not the most assertive of admissions, it seems an earnest one, for the school is soon brought to a harmony that “surprise[s]” Miss Teachum with evidence of “their inward good Humour” (67-8). And indeed, there will be no more quarrels, and the girls will rest easy in one another’s company, creating a peace and awareness most useful for the purposes of education.
WORK CITED
Fielding, Sarah. The Governess. Ed. Candace Ward. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2005.
I found your point that "It is not enough that the students be shown or told of their faults; they must own them for themselves" interesting as well. This type of education is very different from what Dickens will later satirize in David Copperfield, Hard Times and elsewhere where knowledge must be hammered into the students. I was surprised at the wisdom of Mrs. Teachum's hands-off approach to education, letting the girls essentially teach themselves. Their education through story telling and playing in the gardens seems to anticipate Rosseau. On the other hand, the suspicion of indulging too deeply in faery tales or the theater shows that Fielding's views are not unreservedly romantic (although Rosseau was very critical of the theater).
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how the self-meets-world (the school) plays out in The Governess. Here, it is a corrective process. All the girls had some kind of moral failing in their private lives that isn't removed until the apple incident which occurs in a more public milieu. As I was reading this part of your post I instantly thought of Abraham Adams from "the other Fielding novel," Joseph Andrews. It struck me that one of the major characters in Henry Fielding's piece was very much against the public because of what he perceived to be its inherent immorality. Yet in Sarah Fielding's work it is precisely the interaction in the public sphere that produces virtue.
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