Servants and the Gothic, 1764-1831: A half-told tale

By Kathleen Hudson

This volume provides readers with a comprehensive literary and historical basis for understanding servant characters and servant narratives in the early Gothic mode. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, servants were ‘othered’ figures whose voices had the potential to undermine socio-political and personal identity. This study recasts servant characters within the early Gothic mode as ‘narrators’ who verbally or non-verbally perform dialogue, moral insights and folkloric or gossip-based stories. Examining the development of servant narrative within the early Gothic mode, Servants and the Gothic outlines the socio-historical and literary influences which defined the servant voice during the eighteenth century, as well as identifying and expanding upon the ways in which servant narratives contributed to each author’s unique goals. It redefines servant narratives as a Gothic ‘performance’, a self-conscious self-examination of the ways in which a Gothic narrative impacts literary, social and personal identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786833419

Kathleen Hudson

Kathleen Hudson is Adjunct Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College, and has published on a broad range of topics in early Gothic studies.

Book preview

Introduction

Domestic Invasion: A Portrait of the Gothic Servant Narrator

Was Ever such a Blockhead seen!

To choose a servant for his Heroine!

Henry and Anna Giffard, Pamela. A comedy (1741)¹

Today, servants who go from house to house, indifferent to the masters whom they serve, can meet an employer they just left without feeling any sort of emotion. They assemble only to exchange the secrets they have unearthed: they are spies, and being well paid, well dressed, and well fed, but despised, they resent us, and have become our greatest enemies.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris (1781)²

Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, ‘Waverley, a Tale of other Days’, must not every novel reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts?

Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)³

George Colman the Younger, in his satirical poem ‘My Night-gown and Slippers’ (1797), was suggestively accurate in his assertion that ‘A novel, now … is nothing more / Than an old castle and a creaking door.’⁴ Early Gothic texts are in many ways the literary equivalent of the quintessential haunted castle found in such works. Characters and readers alike explore the abandoned hallways and winding staircases of the tale’s emotional, psychological and material machinery, raising forgotten spectres and exposing hidden crimes before finally escaping from, or succumbing to, the landscape in which they find themselves. Manfred and Isabella’s wanderings through Otranto castle or Emily St Aubert’s explorations of Udolpho parallel the reader’s own negotiations of recurring Gothic devices, ultimately illuminating the characters’ secret selves and the broader impact of a complex historical and spiritual inheritance. The popular conception of the Gothic as a mode which brings the ‘other’ into the home and which makes the home itself something terribly other remains a deeply ingrained element of not only specific stories but also of the Gothic’s broader narrative strategies. Yet how is one to navigate such an unstable domestic space? Who, to echo Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, is ‘doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts’?⁵ And, perhaps most crucially, how is such a journey to end – are the ‘trembling steps’ merely a physical progress, or does some even more profound internal development take place within this engagement?⁶

Personal and social narratives moderate processes of self-fashioning and the ‘performance’ of both public and private versions of the self. As Barbara Hardy and other theorists have established: ‘we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.’⁷ Self-creation via narrative is in turn expressed in performative acts, an ongoing process of self-interpretation through which, as Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990), ‘reality is fabricated as an interior essence’ which is itself ‘an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body’.⁸ Within this attempt to formulate and negotiate both personal and sociopolitical identity through verbal and nonverbal performance, no figure redefines the strategies of Gothic narrative quite like the servant character in early Gothic novels, chapbooks and theatrical adaptations. Even in the contested Gothic space, heroines, villains, lovers and parental figures respond in predictable ways to a variety of situational realities. Servants do as well, yet unlike other characters their role is determined as much by their violations of hegemonic identity as their functionality within established cultural and political structures. Anyone who has read an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Gothic text will likely recall the presence of peripheral working-class figures whose verbal interjections interrupt or otherwise impact upon the larger plot. Typically, these characters participate in an exchange of dialogue with their employers, suggest a significant moral viewpoint, or perform a gossip-heavy anecdote or folkloric fireside tale, illuminating important plot points and providing insight into the emotional and moral states of other characters. Such interjections initially frustrate the protagonists and usually the reader as well, expanding simple explanations into tedious, and often bathetic, narratives.

The speaking and acting servant’s jarring presence arguably suggests a lack of sophistication in the earliest works of a literary mode that was still developing into what Horace Walpole described as ‘a new species of romance’.⁹ After all, the servant’s practical function within eighteenth-century social and economic structures immediately encloses them within a highly specific and ostensibly marginal role, one which arguably defines and limits the scope of their narratives. Occupying one of the lowest rungs on the social ladder, servants maintained the domestic spaces of others without inhabiting such spaces fully as individuals. Rather, they were widely considered a highly problematic part of everyday life, an ‘othered’ entity whose personal knowledge could potentially compromise the entire household. Jenny Davidson points to the prevalence of the so-called ‘servant problem’ in literary and moral criticism during the eighteenth century, a social issue more accurately described as ‘the problems masters perceived with regard to their servants’.¹⁰ John Locke articulated a few of these suggestively gothicised concerns in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). While visualising an ideal household where hierarchical authority is exercised by the father-master over his dependants, Locke identifies the ‘clownish or vicious servant’ as an ‘infection’ capable of undermining not only the structure of the household but also the personal development of individual family members and, specifically, children.¹¹

Most notably, Locke expressed concern that ‘tender Minds should receive early Impressions of Goblins, Spectres, and Apparitions, wherewith their maids and those about them are apt to frighten them … subjecting their Minds to Frights, fearful Apprehensions, Weakness and Superstition.’¹² His characterisations of servants are echoed and adapted throughout the following century. Jonathan Swift, among others, similarly identified servants as romantic storytellers and purveyors of ghost stories and superstition, satirically suggesting in his parodic Directions to Servants (1745) that the Children’s Maid ‘Tell the Children Stories of spirits, when they offer to cry’, and implying that doing so was a widespread technique for bullying the young masters and perpetuating an uninformed worldview.¹³ Such assumptions about servants and their narrative creativity was not limited to satire, but rather also reflected a larger cultural understanding of so-called ‘old wives’ tales’ and oral storytelling as a function of class identity. Denied the educational opportunities of the learned classes and more attuned to the oral vernacular, working-class storytellers maintained a specific kind of cultural self-expression, and servant storytellers in fiction specifically suggest an attempted integration of that form within a middle-class or aristocratic space. This form overlapped significantly with gossip, another subversive narrative concept that challenged social and domestic structures. Locke and Swift identify servant narratives as, at best, a humorously disruptive aspect of domestic life and, at worst, as a serious impediment for developing rational minds, a kind of anti-Enlightenment invasion force, and in doing so reflect a larger eighteenth-century engagement with servants as a social class and with the literary traditions which identified servants as peddlers of the folkloric and fantastic.

Why would middle-class or aristocratic authors bother to develop such characters significantly, and perhaps in opposition to representatives of their own social demographic? And what impact did speaking servant characters have upon eighteenth-century ‘romance’ and the works that make up the early Gothic canon? Such figures are culturally linked to tales of the other-worldly, but the tendency to imbue fictional servant characters with comic or rustic idioms and to position servant speech as a delay or interruption appears contrary to the terror-inspiring impulse of the Gothic. Ladies’ maids shriek in fear at the flickering of a candle, manservants mutter wry comments that undermine their employers’ anxieties, and aged housekeepers wax philosophical on the nature of ghosts and the restorative powers of coffee in nearly the same breath. They rarely discourse on grand philosophical themes or Enlightenment principles, and when they do, they illustrate the limits of such arguments within particular social and domestic spaces. Servant speech is rather characterised by a range of clichés ostensibly meant to suggest the superiority of their employers, a stubborn and sometimes illogical working-class sense of self. Many servant characters even border on parody, a standing argument that early Gothic authors were not taking Walpole’s ‘new species of romance’ seriously.

These are significant issues, acknowledged by both contemporary cultural commentators and the very authors who employed servant characters within their Gothic works. However, servant narratives are so prevalent in the earliest examples of the Gothic mode that Sir Walter Scott characterised the tale ‘produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the heroine’s fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant’s hall’ as a critical aspect of Gothic romance.¹⁴ By the time of Waverley’s publication in 1814, the servant character’s verbal and nonverbal discourses had become a significant part of the Gothic narrative strategy, and would continue to be so for a long time to come. The butler, housekeeper, valet and lady’s maid have not only walked up and down the stairs of the haunted castle throughout the Gothic mode’s development but have done so while loudly trumpeting ‘stories of blood and horror’ to anyone who might listen.

On further consideration, it is perhaps not surprising that a mode so preoccupied with the making and unmaking of domestic spaces should refer frequently to a social subgroup essentially defined through their relationship with the home. Servants were already omnipresent figures within the eighteenth-century household, and that area itself was under increased pressure as notions of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves came to reflect new bourgeois economic and political ideologies.¹⁵ Moreover, instances when servants speak, question and perform narrative in these novels contribute significantly to the construction of a specifically Gothic narrative. Louis-Sébastien Mercier is not the first or the last writer to characterise servants as ‘our greatest enemies’, despite their crucial role within the home, and this anxiety informs depictions of servants as liminal figures in many genres, including the Gothic.¹⁶ As Jenny Davidson notes, the very term ‘livery’ suggests a kind of masquerade deception, a way to ‘mask insolence beneath subservience’ and amorality and ‘otherness’ beneath a superficial, second-hand respectability.¹⁷ The modus operandi of the servant within early Gothic texts clearly requires the accidental or intentional destabilisation of the status quo. The servant throws the emotional, mental and material states of the characters off balance, as well as reflecting and shaping the composition of the work’s larger structure. She tells ghost stories, shares gossip and exposes the sociomoral fault-lines of her surroundings. She becomes a critical voice in a mode defined, as David Punter and Glennis Byron argue, through discursive ‘excess and exaggeration’ as ‘the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world that constantly tended to overflow cultural boundaries’.¹⁸

In interjecting their verbal and physical performances into a broader narrative, servant characters have been instrumental to Gothic literature’s evolution as an amalgamation of different literary forms and liminal perspectives, as the popular genre of otherness. They champion the counternarratives of the social outsider while also possessing the ability to move relatively freely between various sociopolitical groups and thus process and critique a range of different viewpoints. To trace the Gothic back to its earliest forms is to gaze into a kaleidoscope image of the middle and learned classes’ social, moral and personal boundaries. Within a Gothic narrative such boundaries are often transgressed or blurred when they do not in fact collapse upon themselves altogether. In this context servant characters emerge as a specific narrative engagement. They articulate anxieties about identity in social and domestic spaces. They also, in many instances, develop into authorial metonyms with unique insight into the literary sources and narrative patterns of the Gothic. Their insistence on their own narrative autonomy and validity further suggests a political, literary and individual self-consciousness that, in turn, reflects Gothic authorship. Such engagements, while frequently misunderstood by both characters within the text and by the reader, offer a complex examination of Gothic characters, readers and authors, as well as the goals and strategies that define Gothic narrative as a whole.

Narrating domestic liminality

The impulse of servant narrative, and particularly Gothic servant narrative, is one of resistance. The servant’s insistence and consistency throughout her various literary manifestations suggests that a figure subject to another’s will does in fact possess an individual voice that can be offered in opposition to the narratives of socially dominant characters. This subversive concept reflects a larger debate concerning the many influences that inform stories and storytelling, as well as specific sociopolitical and literary developments. The epilogue of Henry and Anna Giffard’s co-written adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s enormously popular conduct novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (published in 1740, adapted and performed in 1741) highlights one of the profound socioliterary paradoxes of the eighteenth century and a larger anxiety surrounding liminal narratives. As the comedy suggests, critical approval of a text such as Pamela means asking what kind of authorial ‘Blockhead’ would ever willingly ‘choose a servant for his Heroine’.¹⁹ The implicit irony in the Giffard epilogue is that in spite of (or because of) her servant role, Pamela Andrews was the archetypal heroine throughout most of the early novel’s development, a virtuous character of humble origins forced to defend an individualistic narrative identity within a range of social and private spaces. One’s social identity, apparently, does not affect one’s heroine status or, by extension, one’s ability to express a personal narrative within a fictional framework. Sharing and justifying an individual narrative despite social restraints rather suggests a profound personal power, a more critical and crucial narrative identity. The attractive qualities of a character such as Pamela were not negated by her role as a servant, and in fact her unique position with the text allowed her to vocalise underlying anxieties.

The servant narrator in early Gothic texts is a liminal figure who reflects both specific social realities and the broader nature of the mode, and her narrative is defined by the flexibility that her position provides. In the Gothic, this liminality becomes a source of anxiety and destabilisation, problematising dominant narratives in favour of narratives of otherness, of gossip, of the intuitive and the emotional. To understand fully this narrator character in terms of the Gothic one must appreciate the parallel developments that defined servant characters within eighteenth-century social and domestic spaces and in relation to the rise of the novel. The Gothic mode adapts and reworks an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment perception of a ‘romantic’ past while incorporating it into the highly fluid and still relatively new novel form. The construction of the servant character is no exception in this negotiation – like all Gothic machinery, the servant has social, political and literary sources that position her as participant and as narrator within the text.

Bruce Robbins argues in The Servants Hand: English Fiction from Below (1983) that the servant’s place in literature was established in Homer’s Odyssey and has remained a source of invisible pressure ever since. However, anxieties about the role of the speaking servant in eighteenth-century Gothic novels may be traced to more recent discourses. While service by its very definition suggests the suspension of an individual’s will for the purposes of fulfilling another’s desires, the Protestant and proto-Whig ethics that developed in England during the early modern period, and which solidified their hold after the Restoration, redefined ‘servant’ identity within moral and social boundaries. Cultural discourses in Britain increasingly positioned service and submission as a personal choice. David Evett, in Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England (2005), identifies such moments in early modern literature as instances of ‘volitional primacy’, the process in which ‘one treats as self-imposed various conditions and actions that are in fact imposed from outside’.²⁰ In this the servant serves ‘not because God’s providence has placed him in that role, or because the vagaries of fortune have brought him there, but because he chooses to’.²¹ The servant thus maintains moral responsibility and personal agency even when ‘submitting’ to another. Increased focus on social and political individuality and autonomy was tentatively vocalised during the Protestant Reformation and suggestively coded through descriptions of servant-master identities: Martin Luther himself suggested that a Christian is both ‘a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none’ and ‘a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all’.²² Luther’s theological arguments significantly predate the republican discourses of the Civil War and Interregnum periods, but his assertion that ‘you are in a slavery of the body, but you are equals in spirit’, together with his claim that ‘When a servant thinks this way he serves gladly’, suggests egalitarian overtones within an emerging Protestant-Christian moral code.²³

Concepts of individual narrative autonomy were incorporated into British literary works throughout the early modern period and were articulated and interrogated further in the proto-Whig discourses of the seventeenth century. Eventually, shifting attitudes towards individualism and republicanism and the rise of Hobbesian materialism came to reinforce literary and religious developments. This then shaped British political and social identity during the Interregnum and Restoration periods, influencing works such as the English Bill of Rights. A King, or indeed the head of any social body, no longer occupies his position purely because God wills it, but rather because his subjects choose to sacrifice a measure of their liberty to preserve the social whole. John Hobbes’s concept of the social contract, developed further by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, continued to redefine and contextualise notions of social individualism and service within the national discourse through the master-servant/king-subject relationship. This domestic exchange took on significance as a literary metaphor for political identities even as it suggested, in and of itself, a fundamental narrative negotiation, a reconceptualisation of the sociopolitical other as a speaking and performing individual.

The act of denying one’s own free will is thus paradoxically also viewed within this context as an assertion of free will that ultimately ensures the servant’s right and/or ability to speak. Service-as-choice, even when determined by external social, political and economic elements, is a concept that greatly impacted upon the national political identity and, Evett argues, is ultimately vindicated in the works of literary figures such as William Shakespeare, among others. ‘Old wife’ Madge in George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wives’ Tale demands that she be allowed to finish her story despite interruptions; Caliban and Ariel offer two sides of servant resistance in their relationship with Prospero; Iago performs ‘false’ service in order to destroy Othello; DeFlores uses his secret knowledge of Beatrice Joanna’s amorality to subvert her identity; Satan chooses to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven; and Sancho Panza quests alongside Don Quixote as a psychological and moral foil, if not a social equal. Many of the most foundational literary works, including the early novels and plays that influenced Gothic romance, not only incorporate servant narratives, but do so while acknowledging the independence of the servant-subject and the validity of her voice.

However, notions of free will and ‘volitional primacy’ in discourses of service were translated differently in the eighteenth century as the domestic or private self (as opposed to the political or public self) came under scrutiny. Eighteenth-century British consciousness was partially shaped by increased materialism and commercialism, and by the relationship between individual economic identities and emerging national discourses. The highly structured aristocratic country house still dominated literature and life to a certain extent, but the middle classes also increasingly defined themselves by the material performance of domestic life. Husbands, wives and children constructed identity through their relationships within and to the home, yet the stability of domestic spaces and the individual’s place therein was hardly assured. Conduct literature and guides to household management at this time comprehensively identify a range of possible domestic pitfalls, from laxity in the children’s education to the misuse of the housekeeping allowance to more complex and serious moral violations.

Perhaps the most immediate concern in terms of the security of personal identity and domestic life, however, was the potential misconduct of the nonfamilial other, the servant. The rise of the middle class and the drive for conspicuous consumption throughout the century meant that an increasing number of families had one or more servants in their homes. These interlopers had access to every area of private life, and, by extension, to every personal secret that one might care to harbour – Patricia Meyer Spacks notes that in the eighteenth century ‘the consistency with which servants’ manuals recommended discretion, keeping the family secrets to oneself, reveals the universal assumption that servants would know such secrets.’²⁴ Such knowledge was as powerful as it was potentially subversive, a critical means of delineating social boundaries – as Eliza Haywood asserts in her manual for servants, published in 1744: ‘Things that may seem to you matters of perfect Indifference, may happen to prove of great important to those concerned in them.’²⁵ Control over the private ‘self’ assured not only that the foremost signifiers of identity were protected, but also that the patriarchal power balance was maintained. Moreover, it was assumed, as Mercier, Locke, Swift and others suggest, that servants were essentially an enemy class who not only had unlimited access to family secrets, but who also consistently demonstrated a willingness to violate confidences. Their ability to move both upstairs and downstairs was fundamentally troubling, and their capacity for narrative expression compounded upper-class concerns. The servant’s mere presence in a room could end a conversation, compromise their employer’s authority and even place an indiscreet individual on the path to ruin.

Since obtaining absolute privacy was impossible, the domestic self was only secure if servants were silent. Unfortunately for many employers at this time, servant loyalty and discretion was at least partially determined by the individual’s job satisfaction within the developing socio-economic marketplace. Michael McKeon notes that during the ‘volatile modernization’ of the eighteenth century ‘the theory of domestic service continued to be dominated by a medieval model of personal discretion and submission that was increasingly at odds with the practicalities of wage employment’, and that this distance between personal loyalty and the economics of service increasingly undermined a paternalistic value system and concepts of personal honour.²⁶ Dawn Nawrot suggests that ‘conduct authors’ such as Daniel Defoe ‘registered this uneasy cultural shift toward contractual domestic labour relations by representing servants as somehow at odds with traditional domestic values’.²⁷ Fictional servants who demonstrate superhuman loyalty to their employers provide what Janet Todd describes as an ‘escape and fantasy for harassed and intimidated employers’ who are troubled by the social realities of contemporary class identity and who wish to experience an idealised relationship based on mutual trust and affection.²⁸ Alternative depictions show servants growing drunk and riotous, shamelessly fleecing their masters and carelessly spreading family gossip all over the neighbourhood. While the reality was somewhere in between these extremes, the hierarchical domestic space was severely compromised by the threat, realised or not, of servant rebellion. This threat only grew in urgency with the rise of revolutionary and reactionary politics at the end of the century.

Even examples of ideal servants in literature and in life suggest that not only is the private self under constant threat from external interrogation, but also that the self, regardless of one’s social identity, is potentially deeply flawed. Social criticisms by figures such as Elizabeth Bonhote and Mary Wollstonecraft (both of whom also produced their own proto-feminist Gothic texts) and fictional works such as James Townley’s High Life Below Stairs (1795) place responsibility for servant behaviour on the shoulders of their employers, arguing that ‘If Persons of Rank would act up to their Standard, it would be impossible that their Servants could ape them.’²⁹ As Bonhote argues, ‘the meanest, most deprived of human beings, may, if treated with cruelty and injustice, prove a dangerous enemy; or, on the contrary, rise so far superior to his present station, as to be a valuable and useful friend.’³⁰ Since masters were responsible for educating their servants on moral matters (both by example and through conventional teaching methods), servant narratives thus reflect the servant’s willingness or unwillingness to subvert their identities in favour of an employer’s authority. The fear of not only failing to enforce hierarchical structures but of also being ‘aped’, of having one’s foibles performed in a grotesque servant parody, emphasises the moral-economic impetus underpinning paternalistic structures and casts a shadow over the servant-master relationship and the servant’s independent narrative. Popular conceptions of the servant’s