Professional Men and Domesticity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (review)

When, in "Adam's Curse" (1902), William Butler Yeats ponders the collision of artistic labor with the more aggressively manual work performed by "the noisy set / Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen / The martyrs call the world" (12–14), there is no doubt about where his sympathies lie: the labor of poetry, for him, is more arduous and ardent; the work of beauty more effortful and elusive; the travail of love, silent, unrequited, more intense, and far more profound. In many ways, Yeats offers a lyric meditation on what was, in fact, a Victorian legacy: the wide-ranging cultural debate about the definition of work and the relationship of aesthetic labor to economically and materially driven models of production. His poem might thus serve as a fit emblem for Laura Fasick's Professional Men and Domesticity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. Like Yeats, Fasick attempts to diagram the shifting classification of work in the nineteenth century, and the tensions produced when intellectual or altruistic labor meets the grubby sphere of salaries and markets; like him, too, Fasick sees the Victorian writer—and the male professional characters he or she creates—repeatedly returning to the human drama of the home for the primary model of what work should be.

Taking Thomas Carlyle's championing of "human relationships as a way to overcome the alienation and rampant individualism . . . threatening nineteenth-century society" as a starting point (7), Fasick explores the ramifications of this kind of valorization for ideas of profession and vocation in Victorian narrative. "In fiction," she argues, "these human relationships overwhelmingly take the form of romantic attachments, and the portrayals of work betray an unwillingness to envision purposeful activity separated from personal relationships as a potential good. Rather, work is best when it most resembles and most incorporates the values of an idealized domesticity" (7). The private life—most clearly represented by marriage and the home—becomes the benchmark for what is most useful, most worthwhile; in essence, one's work matters most when it mimics the sympathy and insularity of the household. Fasick traces this dynamic through three principal vocations—authorship, priesthood, and medicine—and uses the ambiguity of these callings, which are neither fully public nor wholly private, to chart this model's influence on the evolving definition of work. Larger cultural questions loom, of course: about the representation of masculinity more generally, about the blur such a model effects on the notion of separate spheres, about the viability of this vision of work and its relationship to "the anti-intellectualism that runs throughout much Victorian fiction" (12). In close readings of novels by Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charles Kingsley—as well as an opening précis of Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841)—Fasick presents the remarkably fractured world of Victorian work, at least as it came to be detailed and solidified in fiction. Novels manifest the confluence of the domestic and the professional, but never seamlessly; rather, the triumph of the "personal" in a public occupation often leads to curiously riddled constructions of gender and domesticity where the professional man's success is predicated on a kind of self-abnegation or victimization, and home's glorification of affect ends up distorting the human relationships it means to enshrine.

It is these vagaries of representation that offer Fasick her most compelling sallies, and what could have been a relatively static project—a series of examples of workers and work, a sequence of Carlylean heroes—becomes instead a portrait of conflicted labor and its ambiguous results. David Copperfield's author-hero, for example, attains his status only through his submission to feminine authority, only by casting himself not as the adored public writer but as the fulfilled homebody, becoming, ironically, the "victimized child" of Dickens's 1850 "autobiography" (47). Similarly, the often hypermasculine narratives of Kingsley at once champion the virtues of exertion and suffering...