In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r f i v e ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Performing the Manservant, 1730 to 1760 aaff If the conundrum of women servants’ sexuality offers new insight into the formation of modern theories of gender and sexuality, men servants play a different but equally important role in the affective and instrumental family from which those theories draw. And as in the case of female domestics, the sexuality of British male servants in the eighteenth century has not been seriously analyzed as part of the history of emerging, modern identities of sexuality, gender, and class, and of the family as formative of those identities. Covert affairs between male retainers and mistresses are so well-worn a cliché of popular literature since the eighteenth century that they tend to disappear into the cultural woodwork, and the often close partnership imagined between master and man in dozens of novels and plays has not entered the excellent scholarship by recent theorists of queer masculinity, most notably George Haggerty and Thomas A. King, who have done much to historicize our modern understandings of gender and sexuality with cultural and literary evidence of male-male eroticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.∞ Haggerty argues that love between men is crucial for homosocial bonding, the affective ‘‘glue’’ that holds society together. King brings class difference into the analysis of homosociality, arguing for a historical shift from a normative homoerotic desire between men of different social ranks to a ‘‘phallic’’ masculinity based on male bonding and the heterosexual domination of women, a social order that displaces difference and homoeroticism onto the body of the queer man. Interjecting the manservant into these historical narratives illuminates how public-sphere homosociality is anchored in private relations between men within the household. As surely as the modern bourgeois order needs ‘‘the domestic woman,’’ it also needs a construct of domestic manhood, as Shawn p e r f o r m i n g t h e m a n s e r va n t 111 Maurer has pointed out,≤ and the male retainer is a vital part of that construct’s historical formation. Within the context of the history of the family, modern sexuality, and gender roles, the next two chapters of this study take relationships between menservants and masters as seriously as we take ‘‘the domestic woman,’’≥ ‘‘companionate marriage ’’∂ or the emergence of modern childhood.∑ Footmen, valets, and butlers play a wide variety of roles in the drama and fiction of the period, and it is not the pretension of these chapters to cover the broad topic of their depiction in literature , let alone the visual arts. This chapter instead sets a new direction for study by focusing on a relatively obscure ‘‘moment’’ in the cultural history of English servants: the London theater at a particularly critical, midcentury point of struggle over menservants’ rights to traditional prerogatives that fall outside the increasingly narrow definition of wage labor that emerges during this era. Robert Malcolmson has pointed out how the working poor’s claims to ‘‘freedom’’ were gradually stripped away during the eighteenth century, a process that left workers with only the ‘‘ ‘freedom’ to see their labor, a kind of property, on the open market for whatever price they could get.’’∏ A gendered masculinity that rationalized and supported this diminishment of social and economic agency emerges in the performative space of the theater, and ripples outward into larger discussions of servants’ prerogatives. While the present chapter privileges theatrical performance as the formal means by which this masculinity emerges, the chapter that follows analyzes the impression this public struggle had in the eighteenth-century novel’s depictions of menservants’ sexuality and their relationships with their masters. Unlike the literary conundrum of the woman servant’s desires, the literature on male servants insists on the transparency of their desire; it is not a puzzle to be solved, but a naturalized attribute of gender upon which the management of social differences between men depends. The novel’s insistence on a ‘‘natural’’ male desire shared across class lines is only one development in a long history of struggles between menservants and their masters over public space, personal property, and money in the eighteenth century. This history brings to light the violent conflict out of which a manliness shared by masters and their menservants is born. My analysis of footmen in the London theater at midcentury draws from performance theory, as developed by critics such as Joseph Roach.π It stresses the social formation...

Share