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c h a p t e r o n e ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The ‘‘Servant Problem’’ and the Family aaff This book began as a cultural study of power relations between eighteenthcentury British servants and their masters and mistresses. How did a wide array of popular print and theatrical texts envision these relations? Second, how were those imaginings responsive to and formative of changing economic and social conditions in the institution of domestic servitude? Third, how did those representations take hold of individual thoughts and feelings? Finally, did they come to form what Raymond Williams called ‘‘structures of feeling,’’ which is still a powerful term in cultural studies? Much of the research and analysis in this book is driven by these questions about ideology, power, and the role popular texts and performances have in the shaping of social relations. But the material on servants and their relationships with their masters and mistresses is even richer, more complicated, and more interesting than the tales of economic and social struggle and of the institutional and ideological management of people’s minds and bodies that were produced by my initial inquiries. While these questions remain motives for this study, the following narrative is as much about love as about class conflict, as much about the need for one another as about the need to exploit the other for profit, and as much about a desire for connection as about the creation of modern class differences. In polemical and imaginative literature on domestic service, servants and their employers often oppose, exploit, and even do violence to each other, but these stories also portray people who live, work with, and often care a great deal about each other. These are not necessarily opposing views, but interlocking and mutually sustaining discourses in writing about domestic relationships. 2 d o m e s t i c a f fa i r s Such tensions in the relations between servants and masters emerge from a long history of love and hate that crosses historical periods and geographic locations . What is specific to eighteenth-century England is the emergence of a social consciousness of those tensions, expressed in a literature that tries to make sense of, and even to resolve them, as part of a larger, shared ‘‘social’’ problem. This chapter and the next introduce some of the most important terms and assumptions about domestic workers, which emerge from instructions to servants and masters, ‘‘how-to’’ writings on domestic service, and the large quantity of polemical literature satirizing or just plain complaining about servants. Instructions to maids, footmen, grooms, and butlers included a range of advice from the ethical to the practical, from their daily religious practice to how to remove stains from lace. Their employers, in turn, received directions on how to manage their domestics ’ work, education, religious practice, and even their leisure. This literature portrays ideal servants and masters as well as their negative counterparts, offering elaborate strictures on domestics, their employers, and the relations between the two. It constitutes evidence of an acute consciousness about the relationships between servants and their employers, their importance to the family and to society as a whole, and the many ways in which they could go wrong. Domestic affairs between masters and employees are represented in this literature about and for servants as either for the good or the detriment of society. They are, by turns, loving, distant, affectionate, coolly businesslike, passionate, violent, frankly sexual , and obliquely erotic. In the eighteenth century, the gendered and sexual relations that we, from our modern perspective, usually associate with privacy and the family tended to overlap with contractual agreements and labor relations that we more comfortably associate with the public sphere. Considering domestic servants as essential to a historically specific definition of the early modern family makes demands on analytic tools that are responsive to both labor and love, and to contract and affection. Integrating ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ relations evokes the grand social narratives of Marxism, as well as the familial dramas of Freud. This framing of domestic servants, not as a subaltern class in society but as an integral part of the early modern family, contributes to three strong, interrelated historical narratives about eighteenth-century Britain that emerge from recent scholarship on this period: the formation of modern theories of identity, with their concomitant terms of sexuality, gender, and class;∞ the composition and significance of the family; and the construction of distinct but interdependent domestic and public spheres.≤ All...

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