Agnes and Joan: stepmother and stepdaughter

Agnes and Joan: stepmother and stepdaughter is a relationship formed under the pressure of loss, household authority, and competing claims to belonging. Joan replaces Agnes’s first mother in the family home and disciplines her with violence; years later, when Joan discovers Agnes is pregnant, their conflict becomes an open struggle over Agnes’s place in the household. Its decisive turn comes when Joan orders her out and Bartholomew counters that the inherited house is his and Agnes may stay.

A New Mother and a Broken Household

Agnes remembers her first mother through acts of physical closeness and making. Her mother carried Bartholomew against her chest, where the children could look at one another and touch fingers over their mother’s shoulders. She also cut green reeds, dried them, and fashioned two identical dolls. Agnes and Bartholomew laid the figures together in a box, their small faces turned toward the ceiling. The memory establishes an intimacy and shared imaginative world that Joan does not preserve.

Joan appears in the first mother’s place beside the hearth, tending the fire and moving the pot while warning Agnes not to touch it. Her presence is rendered through practical work and sharply contrasting physical details: she is broader, covers her light hair with a sweat-stained cap, and smells of mutton and oil. She cuts Agnes’s hair with a knife, explaining that she has no time to arrange it every day. When she calls the reed dolls devil’s figures and throws them into the fire, Agnes burns her fingers trying to rescue them. Joan laughs and tells her she has got what she deserved. The destruction of the dolls makes the change in household care tangible: what Agnes had made and treasured is treated as a nuisance or threat.

Discipline and Agnes’s Countermeasures

Joan’s authority is enforced through routine punishment. After Agnes goes out alone without permission, Joan removes a shoe, lifts her skirts, and strikes Agnes on the legs with it. Agnes watches the rafters and the dark opening in the hole-pierced stone that her first mother had used to hang bundles of herbs, remembering the old explanation that it kept misfortune away. She tries not to cry and wonders when her first mother will return. The stone remains among the household objects Agnes associates with that earlier bond, even as Joan controls the home around her.

The shoe also becomes the recurring instrument of Joan’s discipline. Joan uses it when Agnes says she is not her mother, when Bartholomew has stepped on the dog’s tail, or when Agnes spills soup, lets the geese onto the road, or fails to lift the pigs’ bucket high enough at the trough. Agnes responds by learning to be quick and inconspicuous, moving through rooms without attracting attention. She also finds ways to exert influence indirectly: drops of water violet in someone’s cup can bring out what that person keeps inside, and a strand of oak ivy rubbed on sheets can prevent the sleeper from resting. When Joan tears out the forest plants, Agnes leads her father to the back door to see the damage; he falls silent, and Joan later says she did not mean to pull them up, believing them to be weeds. Joan’s later pinches under the table leave purple marks on Agnes’s skin. Their household relation thus combines overt physical force with Agnes’s quiet, resourceful attempts to make Joan answer for what she has done.

The Pregnancy and the Confrontation

The conflict changes when Joan discovers Agnes’s pregnancy in the warm stable. Agnes is milking a cow, her head resting against its flank, when Joan’s shouts startle the animal and make Agnes turn toward her warily. Joan pulls Agnes from the stool and pushes her against the partition between two stalls. Only then does she notice that her son James is in the adjoining stall, apparently helping Agnes with the milking. Joan searches beneath Agnes’s clothes and feels the swelling of her abdomen. The discovery turns suspicion into a physical certainty, and Joan immediately insults Agnes and demands to know who has made her pregnant.

Agnes pushes Joan against the cow and runs through the resting sheep toward the stable door. Joan catches her by a lock of hair, pulls her head back, and forces her down near the farm enclosure so that she will have to listen. She considers the men who might have sought Agnes’s hand since news spread that Agnes’s father had left her a dowry: a carter, a farmer from the other side of Shottery, and a blacksmith’s apprentice. Joan recalls that Agnes appeared to like none of them, but cannot identify the father. Agnes struggles against the hand in her hair; Joan’s questioning is not presented as calm inquiry but as a demand made while she physically restrains her stepdaughter.

Agnes gets to her feet and moves away, but Joan catches her again by the wrist near the yard and slaps her. Agnes then slaps Joan. The sudden blow is registered through Joan’s experience of an explosive sound and pain before she understands that Agnes has struck her. Joan reacts with outrage at being hit by a girl she regards as her daughter, reversing the direction of the physical violence without ending it. The confrontation makes their unequal roles unstable for an instant: Joan has controlled Agnes’s body, but Agnes has answered her directly.

Expulsion, Inheritance, and the Limits of Joan’s Authority

Joan responds by gathering Agnes’s belongings from the house: shirts, a spare shawl, an apron, a wooden comb, the stone with a hole, and a belt. She throws the bundle at Agnes’s feet and declares that Agnes is expelled for good. Bartholomew is present with Joan’s children. He steps forward and says the house belongs to him because their father left it to him, and that Agnes may remain. Joan distinguishes between his ownership of the house and her authority over its running, insisting that the decision belongs to her as a household matter rather than to him as master of the farm.

Bartholomew calmly repeats that the house is his and Agnes is staying. Joan appeals to the family’s reputation, the other children, and their position, but he maintains his decision. The scene does not resolve the deeper conflict between Joan and Agnes; it establishes a limit to Joan’s power to remove her. Agnes’s right to remain is defended not through reconciliation but through Bartholomew’s inheritance and his insistence on the distinction between the house and the farm.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship moves from a childhood structure of command and punishment to a crisis in which Agnes’s pregnancy exposes the stakes of Joan’s control. The early destruction of the dolls and the later use of the shoe belong to the same pattern: Joan imposes her practical authority on Agnes’s body and possessions, while Agnes develops evasions and forms of resistance. At the stable, that resistance becomes physical and unmistakable.

The ending also complicates the idea that Joan’s authority is absolute. She can punish Agnes, confront her, and order her out, but she cannot make the inherited house hers. Bartholomew’s intervention keeps Agnes within the household even as the relationship remains hostile. The contrast between Joan’s command and his calm repetition leaves the pair’s conflict unresolved, while showing that Agnes’s place in the family is contested rather than wholly determined by her stepmother.