| Victorian servitude depended upon a central paradox. Employers demanded both visibility and invisibility in order to control their domestic staff. Combined, the two forces kept power away from servants and in the hands of the master. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) appears to perpetuate this system. The bourgeois narrator ignores a majority of the servants that populate her provincial town while indirectly policing them through the idealized characters of Caleb and Mary Garth. Working beneath this narrative of employer dominance, however, the fictional servants are able to exercise power through the collection and distribution of knowledge---a process facilitated by both visibility and invisibility. Eliot's novel therefore reveals a Foucaultian dispersal of power that reveals how the master's tools of oppression can become the servants' source of empowerment. |
