| Modern literary criticism has treated domestic servants much as the Victorian middle class did: apparently beneath notice, servants labor without recognition in the corridors and recesses of nearly every Victorian novel. Yet the literary servant proves to be a volatile symbolic figure, capable of wreaking havoc upon the boundaries and categories of Victorian domestic ideology. By refusing to keep their proper place in either the household or the text, servants produce various inversions and instabilities within the bourgeois cultural order. Victorian novels, by figuring the resultant social, sexual, and ethical disorder as potentially productive rather than necessarily destructive, appropriate the power of servant transgressions for a variety of ideological ends.;The central claim of my dissertation is that the transgressive potential of the servant figure not only brings into relief the boundaries and categories of middle-class culture, but also allows the Victorian novel to remap those ideological parameters as it explores the sources and structures of middle-class authority. Victorian novels do not always seek to correct the inversions and instabilities generated by the servant figure; often, they encourage disorder in one symbolic field as a means of creating order in another, a gesture that confounds the usual critical distinction between subversion and conservation. Because the servant figure stands at the intersection of so many different fields of representation--social, economic, sexual, familial, ethical, legal--it allows the novel to displace symbolic problems from one field and remap them in another, thus resolving them more efficiently and satisfactorily. In doing so, the novel amplifies the scope of middle-class experience to include elements that apparently threaten bourgeois sensibilities--homoerotic bonds, class inversions, invasions of privacy--and to recuperate them as sources of subjective and social power. Servants therefore enable Victorian novels to explore and exploit the transgressive energies that inform both the individual autonomy of the middle-class subject and the cultural authority of the middle class as a whole. |
