The Way We Live Now: Service Work and Violence

Abstract

As we have seen, narrative engagements with service work blend questions of unproductive labor with those of domestic service, from the unproductive domestic work of the pastry cook David Faux in Eliot’s Brother Jacob and the improvisatory subject work of remaking the domestic space in Our Mutual Friend to Betteredge and Rosanna’s narrative service work in The Moonstone. Service work’s organization and discipline thus often intermingle with and come to resemble that of domestic work, in large part through discourses of respectability, femininity, and class. From this perspective, the view of finance in these novels offers a masculinized form of service work’s domestic work-discipline: nineteenth-century finance was a small but continually expanding club from the mid-century forward that claimed to discipline itself following codes of gentlemanliness, which emphasized traits such as disinterest, trustworthiness, patience, and industry.¹ Overall, then, we have traced the emergence of service work out of unproductive labor as potentially productive work via the domestic sphere, disciplined by naturalized codes of gender and conduct. Moreover, linkages of service work and gender also naturalize expectations of female servility.