Love, Wages, Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States (review)

Barbara Ryan's impressive study charts shifting conceptions of "free," co-residential, non-kin labor in the antebellum and postbellum United States. By placing "existing scholarship on the 'servant problem' into conversation with studies of slavery and post-emancipation African American labor to create a more complex account than has previously been rendered," Ryan remedies what she considers a major omission in analyses of US servitude (6). Drawing on and expanding the work of historians such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Tera W. Hunter, Jacqueline Jones, and Marli F. Weiner, Ryan's book "delineat[es] post-emancipation attempts to revise ideals that lay at the root of many people's sense of self-worth and personal identity." She argues that although these revisionist ideals have not "intrigued historians of sentimental culture . . . they are a matter of considerable interest insofar as advisors with national readerships responded in different ways to the news that freedpersons were leaving their erstwhile homes in droves" (12).

To chart the shifting dynamics of chattel, bound, and "free" servitude in the nineteenth-century United States, Ryan analyzes a variety of primary sources, including letters, diaries, household manuals, pro- and antislavery propaganda, popular magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book and Harper's Bazaar, and a range of sentimental fictions and advice literature. She also offers compelling insights on obscure literary texts, such as The Greatest Blessing in Life, even as she provides striking new readings of emergent texts, including Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.

Chapter one of Ryan's study, aptly titled "The Family Work," explores the ideal and affective "family-like" relations between the serving and the served that sentimentalists such as Catherine Maria Sedgwick strongly advocated as the solution to the "servant problem" (17). In the study's introduction, Ryan declares that Sedgwick's approach to household and domestic management was so revolutionary that it "redrew the contours of household government and thus in-home labor as a whole" (11). Ryan ultimately concludes, "[I]t is not too much to say that this one writer contributed so powerfully to the literature of nineteenth-century U. S. service that all subsequent advisors had to negotiate her legacy" (11). One of the many strengths of this book is the attention it pays to how other nineteenth-century writers, domestic advisors, and activists dealt with that legacy. In chapters two and three, Ryan explores how certain New Englanders "tested affective ideals" in non-kin service relationships by devising "alternative domesticities" (13). More specifically, these chapters examine the changing dynamics of US service as delineated in Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings, as well as in the "Bush" and Brook Farm experiments.

Chapter four, "Kitchen Testimony and Servants' Tales," is particularly illuminating because it initiates, most emphatically, the dialogue between slaves' narratives and representations of post-emancipation African American labor that Ryan considers absent from scholarly discussions of the literature of US servitude. Here, she demonstrates how "ex-slaves' narratives challenged sentimental conceptualizations of servitude" through what she calls "kitchen testimony" (105), hinging on the experiences of "waged, 'bound,' and chattel servants' voices," although she observes that some of these voices were "ventriloquized" by editors and publishers (13). These narratives overtly condemn homemakers who refused to embrace their non-kin attendants as family even as they reflect homemakers' "dis-ease" with non-kin co-residential servants who witnessed the most intimate aspects of their lives (111). One of the most compelling aspects of this chapter is Ryan's insistence that we situate Harriet E. Wilson's fictionalized autobiography, Our Nig, not simply in the field of labor studies, but more specifically within the category of "kitchen testimony" and ultimately the contexts of "bound" servitude.

Finally, Love, Wages, and the Literature of Servitude in the United...