Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Kristina Straub

Overview

From Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor to William Godwin’s political novel Caleb Williams, literature written for and about servants tells a hitherto untold story about the development of sexual and gender ideologies in the early modern period. This original study explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of such literary and nonliterary eighteenth-century texts.

The early modern family was not biologically defined. It included domestic servants who often had strong emotional and intimate ties to their masters and mistresses. Kristina Straub argues that many modern assumptions about sexuality and gender identity have their roots in these affective relationships of the eighteenth-century family. By analyzing a range of popular and literary works—from plays and novels to newspapers and conduct manuals—Straub uncovers the economic, social, and erotic dynamics that influenced the development of these modern identities and ideologies.

Highlighting themes important in eighteenth-century studies—gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence—Straub explores how the common aspects of human experience often intersected within the domestic sphere of master and servant. In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801895111
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/02/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kristina Straub is a professor of literary and cultural studies and associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology and Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. The ''Servant Problem'' and the Family
2. ''In the Posture of Children'': Servants, Family Pedagogy, and Sexuality
3. Interpreting the Woman Servant: Pamela and Elizabeth Canning, 1740 to 1760
4. Dangerous Intimacies: Roxana, Amy, and the Crimes of Elizabeth Brownrigg, 1724 to 1767
5. Performing the Manservant, 1730 to 1760
6. Men Servants' Sexuality in the Novel, 1740 to 1794
Conclusion: Notes of a Footman on the ''Servant Problem,'' 1790
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jill Campbell

Straub’s study is unprecedented in its particular focus; it treats sexuality and gender... and attends to relations of class and labor in ways very few studies do.

— Jill Campbell, Yale University

From the Publisher

Straub’s study is unprecedented in its particular focus; it treats sexuality and gender . . . and attends to relations of class and labor in ways very few studies do.
—Jill Campbell, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

Straub succeeds in providing valuable insights into how understandings of the servant-master relationship inflected and even drove her examples and were also involved in shaping understandings of gender, clas, and the family more broadly.
—Catherine Keohane, Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

It is no longer possible to undertake scholarship on the non-elite in eighteenth-century England without seriously engaging with Straub's methodologies.
—MElissa M. Mowry, Eighteenth-Century Studies

From the Publisher

Straub succeeds in providing valuable insights into how understandings of the servant-master relationship inflected and even drove her examples and were also involved in shaping understandings of gender, clas, and the family more broadly.

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer - Catherine Keohane

It is no longer possible to undertake scholarship on the non-elite in eighteenth-century England without seriously engaging with Straub's methodologies.

Eighteenth-Century Studies - MElissa M. Mowry

It is no longer possible to undertake scholarship on the non-elite in eighteenth-century England without seriously engaging with Straub's methodologies.

— MElissa M. Mowry

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Straub succeeds in providing valuable insights into how understandings of the servant-master relationship inflected and even drove her examples and were also involved in shaping understandings of gender, clas, and the family more broadly.

— Catherine Keohane

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer