Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (review)

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home, by Monica F. Cohen; pp. xi + 216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £40.00, $54.95.

When histories of Victorian literary studies in the twentieth century come to be written, how will they represent the rise of domesticity as the boom topic of the late 1980s and early 1990s? This was the period of strong feminist consolidation in the humanities academy, and the accompanying resurgence of historicism in English studies. The two groundbreaking studies of Victorian domestic ideology--Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), and Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments (1988)--both placed women's domestic experience at the very centre of Victorian culture and politics, and at the very centre of a set of ambitious new interpretive procedures in which literary criticism appropriated history, viewing novels and other literary works as privileged points of entry into past cultures. In this new critical practice, domesticity was able to perform a powerful double function: it offered readers radical insights into the Victorian age; and it helped to legitimize its own methods, offering an implicit parallel between the private domestic realm and the literary work, on the one hand, and the public political realm and conventional "public" historical sources on the other. This can be seen in Armstrong's influential arguments: that domestic fiction was crucial to the regulation of social behaviour because it formulated the home as a disciplinary space where private life was distinct from social life and sexuality divorced from political history; and that the controlling idea of the separate spheres functioned principally as a way of displacing divisions of class into divisions of gender.

These issues also inform Monica Cohen's marvelous Professional Domesticity. Cohen reconceives Victorian domesticity as a series of tropes formulated alongside, not in opposition to, an emergent professional culture. This culture (fully entrenched only after the period Cohen deals with here) came to privilege "trained expertise, institutional affiliation and an ethic of social good" over other criteria of value, so that professional service commanded "a high price in the national marketplace" (18). The exact nature of this "professional" work and its value was far from straightforward or stable in the mid-Victorian period, however, allowing Cohen to develop fascinating correspondences between professional culture and contested ideas of domestic culture. Thus, she traces the origin of the domestic ethic in the men of the Navy and their "paid unpaid work" during the post- Napoleonic lull, extends Armstrong's earlier observation that the modern household was the prototype of the modern institution, and, most compellingly for me, shows how the ideal of self-sacrifice was tied to the new professionalism and its ethic of service. Underpinning these correspondences, moreover, is the really revisionary informing idea of this book: that on the evidence of these novels, the home is "a trope for expressing hostility towards [. . .] the psychological language of individualistic subjectivity that Poovey and Armstrong identify as characteristic of domestic ideology" (8). For Cohen, the domestic space is a space of "nonpersonal sociability" (101), a collectivity both like and unlike the social institutions around which the home is constituted (such as the clergy, the law, the prison system, and the military). Like them, the household takes up the new commitment to the ethos of professionalism; but, unlike them, it is also defined as communitarian and therefore involved in the feminist expansion of the private sphere.

The place of the novelist in these complicated relationships between the household and the professions cannot be underestimated. The writer is the embodiment of professional domesticity. (The 1851 census records that, of the seven percent of middle-class women who worked, most were governesses, writers, and artists.) In this regard, Cohen inverts Regenia Gagnier's argument in Subjectivities (1991) concerning the male author's appropriation of the domestic space as a working space, beginning with Margaret Oliphant's description of the working home of a woman writer...