'I will not call her servant': Ambiguity and power in master-servant relationships in the eighteenth-century novel

This dissertation posits that domestic servants in domestic novels are primarily characterized by an ambiguous and varying identity. I argue that the servant's ambiguity and multiplicity blur, undermine, reverse, and alter the boundaries and even the hierarchy of the master-servant relationship, granting the servant an unrecognized form of power. The history of service and the family, and conduct books written for servants, reveal that servants exist on the cusp of boundaries: the master-servant relationship is intimate and yet distant and official; servants are in the family but not of the family; they are not of the master's class but exist within that social milieu. Moreover, in the long eighteenth century, changes in the family and in service were altering the cultural understanding of those already blurry boundaries. Using the historical and social background as lenses through which to begin reading servants in fiction, this dissertation explores how the necessity and availability of multiple roles gives these figures the ability to usurp the master's power.;This function of the servant is especially important in novels of the late long eighteenth century (1794-1814), during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era when the servant becomes a real, rather than an imagined threat. The family, and attacking or protecting its traditional hierarchy, becomes particularly important during this period. Pairing radical and conservative authors who portray servants similarly, my project implicitly questions the usefulness of these categories to describe works and authors. This dissertation investigates various subversive uses of servant ambiguity in William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800); Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Women: or, Maria (1798) and Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1805); and Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). Both Bruce Robbins in The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986) and Julie Nash in Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell (2007) suggest that the central servant characters seen in eighteenth-century novels disappear or become gentrified and indistinguishable from their masters in nineteenth-century novels. The trajectory of this project, which finds increasingly successful uses of the servant's social ambiguity, suggests that servants remain present and central in the novel, and that the servant position is a source of power even for a heroine of a higher class.