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c h a p t e r s i x ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Men Servants’ Sexuality in the Novel, 1740 to 1794 aaff In the midcentury theater, the sexuality of men servants was important to the performance of a masculine charisma that appealed to British audiences across class lines. A half century’s worth of prose fictional menservants grew out of this stage character of the sexy footman and, beginning in 1740 with Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, developed him in the novel. In Joseph, the masculine integrity of Miss Lucy’s Thomas redeems Fielding’s satiric caricature of the liveried retainer implausibly endowed with the feminine virtue of Richardson’s Pamela. Starting with Joseph, the novelistic manservant gives imaginative life to the widespread ambivalence about menservants seen in responses to the Footman’s Gallery in Drury Lane Theatre. He expresses tensions between masculine identity and his subordinate, not to say feminized, role and helps shape the contradictions between naturalized, hetero-normative masculinity and homosocial subordination. He embodies a heterosexual virility that reaches across the social barriers between servant and employer , leveling class differences and resulting in an implicit conflict, and even violence, between master and man. At the same time, he also expresses and normalizes the social subordinate’s affection for his male ‘‘superiors.’’ Four novels from the period 1740 to 1794—Joseph Andrews, the anonymous Adventures of a Valet (1752), Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1767), and, finally, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794)—depict different resolutions to the manservant’s contradictory role of ‘‘natural’’ equal and social inferior. Fielding drew from his stage character Thomas, the virile footman and ‘‘English husband,’’ and imbued Joseph Andrews with the same mastery over ‘‘his’’ wife that levels social differences under the sanction of a universal masculinity. 142 d o m e s t i c a f fa i r s However, the fictional Joseph, unlike his theatrical brother, avoids the nightmare of ‘‘the servant problem’’ literature by declining the role of sexual poacher on the squirearchy’s women and asserting his prerogative over a woman of the same or, as it turns out, lower social rank. The traditional ideal of life-cycle service, combined with the literary and political conservatism of the novel’s romance ending, further contain the footman’s leveling sexuality, reducing it from the immediacy of performed spectacle to distanced literary convention. Nonetheless, Fielding’s recapitulation of the theater’s sexy footman depends on a naturalized ideal of masculine heterosexuality, transcendent of class difference, that allows for homosocial bonding based on men’s sexual dominance over women. The Adventures of a Valet approaches the problem of the manservant’s sexuality from a very different angle, undermining the heterosexual contract—the convention of marriage as a happy ending—upon which Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett rely. This little-noticed novel proposes a model of identity for the male domestic that steps over his stereotypical, oversexed persona and creates a utopian family that is not dependent on a man’s sexual ownership of ‘‘his’’ woman. Significantly, Valet poses an alternative model of familial love, presenting us with ideas about sexuality, masculinity, and family that do not fit the relentlessly familiar, heterosexuality -dominated, better-known literary representations of menservants. This novel’s ending of chaste love between brother and sister—closer to a serious model of male chastity than Joseph Andrews—suggests that one response to the ambiguous sexuality of menservants was to avoid presenting marriage as a fitting closure to the manservant’s story. Valet’s obscurity is symptomatic, however, of this refusal ’s lack of historical persistence. The footman’s ambiguous but attractive sexuality found a more tenacious expression in Fielding’s Joseph, whose manly identity depends on conjugal love, not the chaste bonds of brother and sister. These two different fictional imaginings of the male domestic’s sexuality within class and gender hierarchies were written and published during the decade and a half that saw the theater’s most radical portrayal of the footman’s claims to social and sexual equality as a leveling force between men of different social ranks. Humphry Clinker rewrites Fielding’s Joseph Andrews according to the representational politics of the decade after the closing of the Footman’s Gallery and the peak of anti-vails campaigning in England. In Smollett’s novel, the manservant takes a humorous turn, allowing him virility without the claims to universal manhood that are implicit in Fielding’s stage Thomas and novelistic Joseph. An amusing version of Hanway’s Thomas...

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