"Feeling Right": Domestic Emotional Labor in The Wide, Wide World

BRANDY PARRIS "Feeling Right": Domestic Emotional Labor in The Wide, Wide World The room was dark and cheerless; and Ellen felt stiff and chilly. However, she made her way to the fire, and having found the poker, she applied it gently to the Liverpool coal with such good effect that a bright ruddy blaze sprang up, and lighted the whole room. Ellen smiled at the result of her experiment. "That is something like," said she to herself; "who says I can't poke the fire? Now, let us see if I can't do something else." Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World Thus, with a simple poke of the fire, little Ellen Montgomery begins her "experiment" with domestic labor. Her mother 's serious illness makes Mrs. Montgomery unfit for housework, and Ellen recognizes the unspoken arrangement that transfers housekeeping responsibilities to her. But, what kinds of duties would she be able to perform and to what ends? This initial experiment suggests her labors could bring light, warmth, and cheer to a dark, cold, and cheerless home. She could be the "light of the home." The "light of the home" or "angel in the house"—well-known metaphors ascribed to women through the nineteenth-century "cult of domesticity" and evident in The Wide, Wide World (published 1850)—figures a homemaker as an ethereal presence creating, without giving any impression of her labor, an atmosphere of love and comfort in the home.1 The visual absence of the homemaker's labor includes that which is emotional. Indeed, the creation of a particular emotional environment figured prominently, although often implicitly, in the list of a housekeeper's duties. Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 4, Winter 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 32 Brand}" Parris Scholars of The Wide, Wide World have widely addressed the issue of emotion, mainly in terms of Calvinist prescriptions for emotional self-control, the political, social, and erotic function of sympathy, and Sentimentalism's emotional appeal to the reader. Missing from this conversation is the imbrication of emotion with domestic labor. Domestic labor's deployment of emotion is twofold. First, physical labor has emotional consequences. When Ellen pokes the fire, the material effects of her labor (warmth and light) have the extra-material effect of making the room more cheery, and Ellen herself, we see through her smile, more cheerful. Second, a type of emotional labor is required while performing domestic tasks. Near the end of chapter one, Ellen is making tea for her mother. Normally a very pleasant task, this time it is marred by her knowledge that she will soon be separated from her mother. Ellen's griefdistracts her, making her unfit to perform her duties, as she lets the pot boil over and the toast fall in the ashes of the hearth. Furthermore, her grief also greatly disturbs her mother who "too exhausted to share or soothe Ellen's agitation . . . lay in suffering silence," finally saying, "Ellen, my love, I cannot bear this much longer" ( 14). In order to create a comfortable atmosphere, Ellen must control her grief. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls this "emotional labor," labor that "requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others" (7). Hochschild's study refers to people, particularly women, in the latetwentieth -century service economy such as flight attendants, who must continually gauge customers' emotional needs and respond with the appropriate emotion to maintain the comfort and ease of the customer. Likewise, in the domestic economy, the housekeeper's labor is not only physical, but also emotional. While Hochschild confines domestic labor to the service industry, I take up but alter Hochschild's definition to expand our conception of women's labor, in waged jobs as well as in the home.2 In the late eighteenth century, the American economy began a shift from subsistence to industrial capitalism, a change that created new forms of waged and domestic labor. When most forms of labor and trade were removed from the home space, women who once closely supported and assisted with their husband's or father's craft or farm work...