Master Shakespeare, Mrs. Browning, Miss Dickinson, and the Servants

This essay reads Dickinson's relationship to domestic service from a comparative perspective, both historical and transnational. Service and the social relations of service are central themes in the work of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, two of Dickinson's most significant authorial influences; as their work underlines, service has a long history of being attached figuratively as well as literally to authorship. In the long historical view, poets were servants in the economy of patronage before they were agents in the marketplace—where even then they resembled domestic servants in virtue of performing for money the intimate addresses that might be thought to belong to love. Dickinson's class position enabled her to refuse both kinds of worldly servanthood in favor of "The Service without Hope - "—"tenderest" because tendered without "impetus of Gain" (Fr880). Her figuring of the conditions surrounding her own authorship was nevertheless marked by both of these refusals and by the characteristic antinomies of their framing: love and money, subordination and mutuality, freedom and compulsion, recognition and invisibility. In poems like "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - " (Fr764) and "Rearrange a 'Wife's' Affection!" (Fr267), Dickinson transforms to her own purposes Shakespeare's distinctive yoking of erotic desire, gender disguise, and intimate service. Barrett Browning's writings, especially Aurora Leigh and A Drama of Exile, also raise questions for the nexus of love, service, and writing near to Dickinson's own concerns: centrally, the questions of whether heterosexual marriage placed privileged women in the position of servants vis-à-vis men of their own class, and of whether women's writing was structurally positioned as a kind of service within the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.