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Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
Narrative struggles in the eighteenth-century English novel can be traced to the allocation of narrative space to a multiplicity of characters. The narrative positioning of the servant comes to embody the anxieties of the author and of the age. As servants are associated with the transmission of stories with varying degrees of reliability, they easily turn into stand-ins for authorial performance, especially in eighteenth-century novels, where the performance of reliability is a crucial aspect of authorial self-fashioning. Servants make up a large portion of the reading public in the period and their desire for upward social mobility inevitably finds both narrative and characterological representation. However, as exemplified by the “Pamela controversy,” famously sparked by Samuel Richardson’s novel, open depictions of the possibility of social mobility also engendered unease. This article studies the allocation of narrative space to servants in three novels: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is an epistolary novel narrated by the letters of a servant character. Therefore, the servant character is established as the center of narrative attention; however, it is this very centrality that unsettles her position and turns her into a figure in “service” of the novel’s moral purpose. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews presents a more convoluted struggle over the claiming of narrative space since Joseph’s ambivalent release from the servant position is continuously challenged by other servants. Finally, servants in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are situated at the margins of narrative space as parodical embodiments of the desire to rise to the level of narrative and public visibility.
Armstrong, N. (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. google scholar
Booker, K. (2018). Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society: 1650-1850. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. google scholar
Donoghue, E. (1996). Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. New York: Harper Perennial. google scholar
Fernandez, J. (2010). Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy. New York: Routledge. google scholar
Fielding, H. (2008). Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Ed. Thomas Keymer. New York: Oxford University Press. google scholar
Frank, J. (1997). Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor. Stanford: Stanford University Press. google scholar
Hill, B. (1996). Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. google scholar
Keymer, T. (2006). Sterne and the ‘New Species of Writing. In Thomas Keymer (ed.), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press. 50-75. google scholar
Lehmann, G. (2016). “The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carre, and Cecile Revauger (Eds.), The Invisible Women: Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain (pp. 9-25). New York: Routledge. 9-25. google scholar
Maciulewicz, J. (2018). Representations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative Writing. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. google scholar
McKeon, M. (2002). The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. google scholar
McKeon, M. (2005). The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. google scholar
Pearson, J. (1999). Women’s Reading in Britain 1759-1835: A Dangerous Recreation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. google scholar
Richardson, S. (2001). Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. New York: Oxford University Press. google scholar
Robbins, B. (1993). The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. Durham: Duke University Press. google scholar
Rouyer-Daney, Maria-Claire (2016). “The Representation of Housework in the Eighteenth-Century Women’s Press.” The Invisible Women: Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Ed. Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carre, and Cecile Revauger. New York: Routledge. 27-35. google scholar
Smallwood, A. J. (2016). “Women in Action: Elizabeth Inchbald, Heroines and Serving Madis in British Comedis of the 1780s and 1790s.” In Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carre, and Cecile Revauger (Eds.), The Invisible Women: Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain (pp. 139-145). New York: Routledge. google scholar
Kristina, S. (2009). Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. google scholar
Steedman, C. (2007). Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. google scholar
Sterne, L. (1980). Tristram Shandy. Ed. Howard Anderson. New York W.W. Norton. google scholar
Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. google scholar
Woloch, A. (2003). The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. google scholar
Yeazell, R. B. (1991). Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: Chicago University Press. google scholar
Levi, M. (2022). Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, 32(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2021-978306
AMA
Levi M. Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Litera. Mayıs 2022;32(1):1-20. doi:10.26650/LITERA2021-978306
Chicago
Levi, Melih. “Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel”. Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies 32, sy. 1 (Mayıs 2022): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2021-978306.
EndNote
Levi M (01 Mayıs 2022) Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies 32 1 1–20.
IEEE
M. Levi, “Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel”, Litera, c. 32, sy. 1, ss. 1–20, 2022, doi: 10.26650/LITERA2021-978306.
ISNAD
Levi, Melih. “Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel”. Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies 32/1 (Mayıs 2022), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2021-978306.
JAMA
Levi M. Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Litera. 2022;32:1–20.
MLA
Levi, Melih. “Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel”. Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, c. 32, sy. 1, 2022, ss. 1-20, doi:10.26650/LITERA2021-978306.
Vancouver
Levi M. Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Litera. 2022;32(1):1-20.