Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy (review)

Jean Fernandez's new book, Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy, is an incisive and engaging study of the overlap of two emergent discourses in the Victorian period: the so-called "servant problem" (middle-class anxiety over uppity, unruly, and social-climbing domestics) and the public discussion about mass literacy (8). Fernandez argues persuasively that the figure of the literate servant was a lightning rod for more general concerns about class mobility and hierarchical breakdown in the period. The problem of educating servants was a tricky one for the bourgeois householder. On the one hand, a tractable and polite servant was a mark of prestige: "the 'good' servant came to be socially, culturally and psychologically crucial for the maintenance of an employer's class identity" (3); on the other hand, the educated servant was also a potentially threatening figure uncomfortably associated with both Chartist-style class agitation and low cultural contamination in the form of cheap sensation fiction and pornography. The problem hinged on the very practice of literacy itself: as Fernandez points out, "Pernicious literacy was, in fact, inherently pornographic and revolutionary, given its rejection of religious restraint and its embrace of the secular ego" (4). While literacy was necessary to the molding and shaping of the good servant, its exercise was associated with potentially subversive practices of all kinds. Furthermore, the story-telling—particularly the narrating—servant exacerbated the middle-class master's anxieties about his own class position: "The literate servant, 'moderately' schooled through appropriate reading, would be rendered more docile and amenable to domestic discipline, while the servant who sought to rival the novelist in her powers of tale-telling and narration carried the threat of destabilizing and traumatizing the bourgeois subject" (13).

One of the strengths of Fernandez's analysis is her attention to the ways in which the binary of "harmless versus harmful" servant literacy is blurred and broken down (13), particularly by the figure of the servant narrator. The fact that servant narrative was associated with myth and folklore (think of Jane Eyre, who was conditioned to see the supernatural everywhere by the tales of Bessie Lee at Gateshead) meant that the advent of servant literacy and the vogue for servant narrators in the novel paradoxically redoubled the subversive effect: "Servant logic resists bourgeois norms, because of the innately devious nature of domestics, who prefer to rely upon oral culture's democratic vesting of authority in personal judgment, rather than literate culture's faith in expert opinion" (18). As Fernandez notes, the destabilizing potential of servant narration is contained by the authorial practice of embedding such passages within multi-narrator novels where the domestic's tale is under contract; nevertheless, the practice becomes the "occasion for the novel to explore the contentious relationship between orality and literacy . . . while dramatizing the impact of literacy's politics upon narrative form and function" (22). In studies ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798) through Wuthering Heights (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story" (1852), The Moonstone (1868), and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Fernandez traces the effects of servant narration both on, and due to, larger cultural debates over literacy and class. The closing chapters of the study consider the ventriloquized servant voice in nonfiction and historical servants' autobiographies; as Fernandez demonstrates, these nonfictional texts rehearse the same concerns as their fictional counterparts with "generic appropriation, parody, masquerade, and improvisation as conditions upon which self-hood becomes contingent. . . . [I]n both genres, the politics of narration remain firmly linked to questions regarding the indeterminacy of value attached to literacy" (24).

Fernandez's analysis is astute and original. While the topics of literacy and the figure of the servant have been well covered by literary critics working in several different periods in recent years, the contribution of Fernandez's study is to consider the ways in which servant literacy both mobilizes class anxieties in the culture at large and...