[The following discussion comes from the conclusion to the author’s The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Thackeray created the decorative initial depicting a butler for Vanity Fair — George P. Landow]
he Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy traces multiple perceptions of service work — work that did not produce things — from its moral and political valuations in eighteenth-century political economy and moving to its political economic, social, and aesthetic transvaluations through the nineteenth century. From the first, such work associated not only with finance but also with dependence, servility, and fraud, became fraught with problems of gender construction. In the eighteenth century, writers figured financial instability as a particularly ambivalent mode of femininity caught between promiscuous and virtuous sexuality, as Sandra Sherman demonstrates in her study of Daniel Defoe and his Lady Credit, who seamlessly transitions between virgin and whore, always ready to begin anew (see Sherman 40-54). By the mid-nineteenth century, the emergence of a service sector that extended not only beyond the confines of eighteenth-century political and financial elites but also, and more importantly, beyond the confines of the upper-middle class professions irreversibly altered the construction of this literary figuration of financial instability (see Hoppit). As a result, the qualities that once marked finance as destabilizing relations of dependence —its fungibility, instability, and anonymity—begin to accrue to work that occurs outside organized spaces of production, both in the world of business and in the home. Accordingly, the eighteenth century’s gendered figuration of finance becomes a larger reconstitution of gender roles and norms, constructing masculinity around forms of gentlemanliness and femininity around class-defined notions of respectability.
The Victorian novel’s formal uses of repetition and difference play a key role in this discursive rearticulation of immaterial work as service work. The vagaries of finance and credit appear in these novels as repetitions that map and parody the baselessness of their signifying multiplications; however, the layering of these parallels creates resonances that allow these repetitions to escape the immediate confines of their satirical targets and connect with work’s altered historical situation. Indeed, when these inversions of finance and credit interact with the work of writing, they come to generate images of service work in Victorian culture as performances of skilled work that produce knowledge, affects, and emotions. Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend offers the model for such formal displacement with Boffin’s exemplary inversion of falseness as the performance of financial virtue. Such performances create the appearance of internalization and interiority as a bodying forth of the true—even if such embodiments are the result of falsity. A text like Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone tries to anchor this performativity in the wage-relation itself, even though—if not because—such performances mean to thwart the explicit economics of personal relations seen in Our Mutual Friend. Collins attaches these performances to the wage in order to remove anonymity and falseness from immaterial work. Why? Because the increasing proximity of work-discipline to social life not only reveals the economic saturation of everyday life as the sheer instrumentalization of social relations, it also conjures potential resistances to such forms of social discipline. Hence the multiplicity of discourses that discipline deploys for such work, most especially those of gender, social deference, and unproductive labor. Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder claim their privileged places in society by demonstrating their intellectual powers alongside qualities of respectability, loyalty, and trustworthiness. By contrast, the novel’s functionaries locate the possibility for such work according to class and gender, whether in Betteredge’s softened misogyny of stewardship or Miss Clack’s hypocritical Christian femininity. Moreover, when these roles break down, as Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now displays, discipline supplements discourse with violence. In Trollope’s novel, the threat of violence institutes social discipline. Without it, his resistant characters would use their falsifying powers to assert their interests and subvert expressions of trust.
Last modified 4 January 2020