Keeping the Victorian House

A Collection of Essays

Vanessa D. Dickerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317244769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1995. The essays in this volume demonstrate how Victorian women took up various positions along a continuum that ranged from the desire of Shelley's creature for the power and acceptance it associated with the house to the rejection of Brontë's heroine of the immobility and powerlessness she ultimately experienced there. More specifically the essays in this volume explore the nature of the Victorian woman's domestic relations by centring in one activity that most informed her place in what was often the father's house: housekeeping. The essays in this edition determine how writers, especially novelists, both male and female, used housekeeping to construct, reconstruct, represent, and inscribe the female self and condition. This title will be of interest to students of history and literature.

PART ONE

In My Father’s House; or, In Search of a Home of Her Own

Housekeeping and Hegemony in Dickens’s Bleak House^*

Martin A. Danahay

There has been much critical debate over the character of Esther Summerson in Dickens’s Bleak House. This controversy has focussed on whether Esther Summerson is an “ambiguous” and “repugnant” figure, a “female paragon to whom Dickens felt so committed that he lost critical control over her creation,” or a “subtle psychological portrait clear in its outlines and convincing in its details.”¹ Sidestepping such psychologically based discussions of individual character, I propose a reading of the character of Esther Summerson in terms of her work in the novel. I will read Esther as a “sign of the feminine,”² a character who reveals the Victorian cultural construction of work along gender lines. Esther seems to have many roles in the novel; she cares for children, she organizes households, and she provides companionship for various male figures. All these roles can, however, be grouped under one term: housekeeper.

Since Bleak House ends with Esther’s marriage, it does not represent Esther in the role of housewife, although “housekeeper” and “housewife” are obviously closely related terms; both participate in the nineteenth-century British cultural construction of the feminine in terms of domesticity. The ideology of women’s natural domesticity, although present in previous centuries, was articulated most forcefully from the beginning of the nineteenth century on.³ Ann Oakley in her tripartite history of the housewife denotes the period 1840–1914, within which Bleak House (1851–53) falls, as marking a “decline in the employment of women outside the home associated with the rising popularity of the belief in women’s natural domesticity.”⁴ Although large numbers of women, especially working-class women, continued to work inside and outside the home, the expectation was that they be economically dependent and unproductive.⁵

Esther Summerson is a “keeper” of other people’s houses and other people’s children. She represents an intermediate stage in the development of the term housewife as we use it now. As Oakley points out, it was not until the “servant crisis” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when domestic help became less readily available that “the housewife and homeworker roles … merged.”⁶ Since one of Esther’s main roles is organizing households and servants, she does not perform much of the daily manual labor in Bleak House. Her tasks are managerial. We do see in Esther Summerson, however, the same conjunction of the ideas of domestic labor and the socialization of children as in the concept “housewife.” The two terms imply the same relationship between woman as mother and woman as domestic worker. Ann Oakley’s definition of housewife reflects the conjunction of these aspects of the gender-specific role:

A housewife is a woman: a housewife does housework … the synthesis of “house” and “wife” in a single term establishes the connections between womanhood, marriage, and the dwelling place of family groups. The role of housewife is a family role: it is a feminine role. Yet it is also a work role.⁷

As Oakley emphasizes, the term housewife denotes a particular form of work which, however, has an ambiguous status because it does not fit within the conventions of industrialized labor. Housekeepers work in the home, not in the factory, and they do not receive a direct wage for their work. Their labor is therefore not recognized as “work” in the same sense as male forms of industry. For instance, when in the census of 1851 the Registrar General acknowledged the existence of a large segment of the population of Britain who performed such work but were not paid for it, a “5th class” or category had to be invented to accommodate the data. In the 1851 census women were both confined to a class of their own, and separated from other forms of paid labor. The description of this new “5^th class” emphasizes the different roles that women were acknowledged to play, but which did not fit the conventional categories of waged labor:

The 5th class comprises large numbers of the population that have hitherto been held to have no occupation—but it requires no argument to prove that the wife, the mother, the mistress, of an English family—fills offices and discharges duties of no ordinary importance.⁸

Unable to unite the categories of wife, mother, mistress and work, the census must create a new class to accommodate women as people who do not have “occupations” but rather “duties.” Unlike the occupation of lawyer or doctor, the duties of the housekeeper or housewife do not have status in and of themselves but only in so far as they help reproduce and maintain the Great British Family.

Feminist histories of housework have demonstrated how in pre-industrial households woman’s work as housekeeper had prestige, and was directly related to the means of production, which was based in the extended family.⁹ As factories replaced families as the sites of production from the late eighteenth century on, women’s work became increasingly severed from direct market relations and devalued in consequence. The site of women’s labor became a family increasingly defined in terms of consumption rather than production.¹⁰ Thus the roles of mother, wife, and housekeeper in the 1851 census are all firmly circumscribed within the domestic sphere and are separated from “productive” wage labor. While the author of the Census may feel that the social value of these occupations needs no defense, he does not think that such services require payment.

As women continued to labor in the home, just as they had before industrialization, the labor they performed became progressively privatized and isolated from public forms of work such as being an operative in a factory. As the family became a center for the reproduction of labor rather than the production of material goods, women’s work suffered a consequent loss in social prestige. A “gender hierarchy” of labor was created “where-by women’s work was given a lower social and economic value than that of men.”¹¹ This “hierarchy of labor” is reflected in Dickens’s novel by the status of Esther Summerson vis a vis the male professionals such as Dr. Woodcourt, the lawyer Tulkinghorn and Inspector Bucket. Esther’s position is shown as subordinate to the prestige of these men. Her labor is not explicitly recognized as work in the same sense as the tasks performed by the male professionals. This lack of acknowledgment of Esther’s labor results directly from the growing separation of women from work in the Victorian period. The ideology of “separate spheres,” however, was not uniform or completely coherent. As Dickens’s representation of Esther shows, there were conflicting and contradictory images circulating in the Victorian discourse on work.

Dickens inscribes Esther within a contradictory ideology. One prevalent Victorian image of women was the “leisured lady” who incarnated “the leisure most men could not afford to enjoy.”¹² Upper- and middle-class women were not expected to work, because to be leisured was a marker of the wealth and success of their husbands.¹³ They were therefore told to devote their energies to maintaining the household and organizing a few servants to carry out the physical labor in the home. So great was the separation of the notion of the lady from work that “’working ladies’ was … a contradiction in terms.”¹⁴

The association of women and leisure rather than work presented difficulties when Dickens tried to represent Esther in the role of housekeeper rather than a leisured lady. Dickens subscribes to a middle-class work ethic. Leisure in this ethic is seen as vice, industry as virtue. The “lady of leisure” in the novel, Lady Dedlock, is part of the corrupt and stagnant aristocracy of Chesney Wold. It is vital that Esther work in order to distinguish her from the corrupt world of aristocratic leisure, even if her labor is not explicitly acknowledged as work in the same sense as the tasks carried out by men.

Although Dickens represents Esther in terms of her work roles as housekeeper, he cannot portray her as a working woman in the sense of having a definite profession that would take her outside the home. For Esther to have a profession or an evangelical cause that took her outside the domestic sphere would threaten her femininity. Women at work “lose the grace of sex”¹⁵ and become “loose” signifiers out of place. Thus “for Dickens, respectable women … simply do not perform professional work” so that “his representations of female professionals … are unambivalently hostile.”¹⁶ For Dickens a professional woman was by definition not “respectable.”

By the time Dickens was writing Bleak House it was becoming increasingly difficult to join the feminine and work as various pieces of State legislation defined women and children as “protected persons” who must be separated from the rigors of certain kinds of labor. The Mines Act of 1842, for instance, prevented women from performing certain kinds of labor in the mines, and several different Factory Acts regulated the number of hours women and children could work. These Acts, according to Malos, “went along with attempts to restrict the field of employment for all women and especially all married women and mothers.”¹⁷ Not only does Dickens distinguish women from professional work, when he represents them as doing “good works” (i.e. unpaid acts of charity) he is critical also. As we shall see, Dickens’s censure of women who neglect the home for the “good works” of evangelical and charitable causes is extreme.

Dickens therefore has Esther Summerson carry out a form of labor restricted completely to the domestic sphere and represents it in a way that does not acknowledge its status as work. Esther’s work is seen as a natural extension of her biology, a genetic aptitude for looking after children and organizing domestic affairs that does not have to be learned because it is instinctive. Dickens in inscribing a maternal instinct in the character of Esther Summerson betrays the domestic ideology that Davidoff and Hall describe as asserting that “women, whether biological mothers or not, had a maternal instinct.”¹⁸ Dickens presents motherhood as an instinct to differentiate it from a trade or profession, which requires skills acquired through training or apprenticeship. Esther herself is therefore shown as unaware of how and why she does these things. Her narrative is peppered with gaps and elisions that denote the space of unconsciousness Dickens had to create to enable Esther both to work and not be damagingly aware that she is a “working woman.”

These contradictions create the peculiar gaps in Esther Summerson’s character that have so troubled critics. Rather than read these gaps as signs either of failed characterization or subtle psychological insight, I would read them as products of the Victorian gender hierarchy of labor in which women’s work could not be acknowledged overtly. Dickens’s difficulty in creating the character Esther Summerson points ultimately to contradictions in his own subject position as a male professional author attempting to represent a paragon of female subjectivity who both worked and was unaware that she did so. In the reading of the novel I present below, these gaps are a sign of a possible break in what Ann Oakley has termed the “circle of learnt deprivation and induced subjugation”¹⁹ of women’s enforced domesticity in that they point to fissures in the seemingly uniform surface of hegemony. The space of unconsciousness that Dickens had to create in Esther Summerson betrays the way in which he represses the alienating aspects of both her labor, and his own activity as a male professional writer.

The symbol of Esther’s work in the novel is the key. It is a peculiar aspect of Esther’s role in the novel that wherever she goes she is given keys. When she first enters Bleak House she is handed a basket of keys:

A maid … brought a basket into my room, with two

bunches of keys in it, all labelled.

“For you would like to thank Profeou, miss, if you please,” said she.

“For me?,” said I.

“The housekeeping keys, miss.”²⁰

Upon her arrival at Bleak House Esther is immediately cast in the role of housekeeper and given keys. She is initially surprised, but this surprise gives way immediately, and without any attempt at explanation on Dickens’s part, to wonder at “the magnitude of my trust.” This sequence is repeated when Esther goes in search of Necket’s children and she is given a key by the landlady. No directions are given with the gift. On each occasion the giver of the key assumes that Esther will know what to do with it:

I glanced at the key, and glanced at her; but she took it for granted that I knew what to do with it. As it could only be intended for the children’s door, I came out without asking any more questions, and led the way up the dark stairs.²¹

Esther herself is portrayed as unaware of why people give her keys, but she inevitably ends up doing the right thing with them anyway. Her “maternal instinct” is shown in this case leading her to the correct door, and she takes the children into her protective custody. The key is obviously a very important symbol for women’s work in Dickens’s novels generally, not just in Bleak House.²² For instance, in Oliver Twist when Fagin wishes to disguise Nancy as a suitable guardian for Oliver, he gives her two things: a basket, symbolizing her role as the purchaser of food for her fictitious family, and a large door key symbolizing her role as protector of the home’s security and integrity. This, in Fagin’s words, makes her look “more respectable” and ensures that her impersonation of Oliver’s sister will be more credible.²³ The symbol of the key identifies both Esther and Nancy immediately as housekeepers and protectors of children, entitled to make a ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Housekeeping and Housekept Angels
• Part One: In My Father’s House; or, In Search of a Home of Her Own
• Part Two: A Woman’s Work Is Never Done: Women’s Work and Domestic Space
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index