The Semiotics of Service: Theorizing the Servant-Master Relationship in Eighteenth-Century London

With Domestic Affairs, Kristina Straub offers a compelling study of the relationship of class, gender, and sexuality to the practice and ideology surrounding domestic service in London during the eighteenth century. Straub weaves together historical case studies with textual analyses of canonical works and of conduct books in order to suggest how much eighteenth-century culture depended on the proper relationship between servants and masters while this relationship was relentlessly being vexed, questioned, and revised. She fleshes out the historical context and examines the roles servants played within the family during this period, focusing on the ways in which family structures were based on discourses of exploitation and love, categories that were not as mutually exclusive as modern readers tend to think.

The six chapters of Domestic Affairs hinge on three major concerns: the creation of servants by pedagogy, discourse, and practices; the specific issues surrounding female servants and their sexuality; and the less-examined ways in which male servants’ identities extended but remained subordinate to their male masters’ sexuality. In order to suggest the range and complexity of Straub’s book, I will provide a brief overview of each of these thematic areas before suggesting some potential problems and the book’s larger implications.

Chapters 1 and 2 look at the “servant problem” in relation to family structure and the “family pedagogy” that shapes servants’ sexuality, making them perpetually childlike. Here Straub identifies how her study connects to work on the family by Nancy Armstrong, J. Jean Hecht, Bridget Hill, Michael McKeon, Ruth Perry, Lawrence Stone, and Naomi Tadmor. She also sets up the theoretical background that informs much of Domestic Affairs. The “semiotics of servants’ sexuality,” which she views as being “grounded in both their social and economic mobility in an emerging culture and their affective role within family relations,” play a crucial role in her interpretation of servants’ bodies, their actions, and their interactions. This semiotic system valuably allows Straub to engage with servants’ sexuality across genres, even though there are a few points where Straub’s theoretical methodology flattens literary texts while layering too much significance on historical events. At its best, however, Straub’s use of theory is historically situated and compelling. Her discussion of the ways in which household pedagogy constructed servants “in the posture of children” provocatively exposes how the texts the masters read to their servants made them docile.

The third and fourth chapters address female servants’ sexuality. Straub distinguishes her arguments from many previous studies of the canonical texts she examines (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana) by pairing them with historical accounts of female servants whose actual stories exaggerate the concerns of the fictions. She compares Pamela with Elizabeth Canning, and Roxana and Amy with Elizabeth Brownrigg. In both of her chapters on female servants, Straub shows how creatively literary texts engage with and subvert the expectations placed on good servants while these texts simultaneously create standards for evaluating servants’ conduct, their agency, and their desires. Looking at female servants’ sexuality in literary texts as an “interpretive problem” fits into Straub’s larger interest in the “semiotics of servants’ sexuality,” and reconciling Pamela and Roxana with real-world equivalencies helps draw attention to how sexuality is always visceral, personal, and problematic.

Elizabeth Brownrigg’s crimes against her servants occurred between 1765 and 1767, more than forty years after Defoe published Roxana. Although an absolute historical parity is not essential for any of Straub’s claims, the temporal gap makes juxtaposing the crimes thematic rather than historical, and the comparison seems somewhat arbitrary, which is not in keeping with the rigorous historical scholarship Straub has set up in her first two chapters. A similar historical gap separates Elizabeth Canning’s abduction from Richardson’s Pamela. Additionally, I found it striking that Straub mentioned Henry Fielding’s response to Canning’s case but neglected to mention his pamphlet on Mary Hamilton, the so...