MAIDS AND GOVERNESSES

The female domestic servant in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature is characterized by contradiction: she is peripheral yet central to the action, invisible yet always in plain sight, disenfranchised yet intimately dangerous. Indeed, her presumed capacity to injure her employers tells us something about the fears of the well-heeled of the period; for example, Freud’s patient Dora wounds him when she decides to terminate treatment with a "fortnight’s notice," as if she were his employed domestic servant. In this course, we will consider the unusual powers and opaque perspectives of women marginalized as specters in the wealthy houses they serve. How might we develop reading and writing strategies that could express the inexpressible: forbidden vectors of desire, criminality, perversity, sadism, and capital circulating through the vantage points of maids and governesses? What do these perspectives divulge about the norms and anxieties underwriting the maintenance of race, gender, and class-based hierarchies?