Andrew's Wiki
Professional Domesticity

Thesis

• “how domestic work…gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professionals…novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality in to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism…women sought identity and privilege”

Intro

• Begins w/”Of Queen’s Gardens,” Ruskin’s paean to the home: as peace, shelter, calmness, contra to the anxiety ridden hostile world; “sacred place”
  • she notes it’s a state of mind
• “mid-century novelistic discourse fostered a collectivist spirit” 2
  • Oliphant described her writing as immersed in the entire domestic atmosphere of conversation, sewing, visits; and done to support her family economically: novel writing is social, not isolated, although sometimes she casts this as sacrificial (not her ideal, not her artistic best)
• Themes
  • “wisdom of experience” v “information of education”
  • pay: “makes work legible” but does not necessarily follow from work (just cuz you don’t get paid doesn’t mean you don’t work)
  • professional domesticity as communitarian: “small community where routine work is held as the primary source of meaning in life” 7 and unfortunately she doesn’t mean in the political sense
    • this labor is “intellectual rather than physical” hence it’s middle class
    • as “elected vocation” with “extroverted, continuous, self-renunciative nature”
    • “cultivated knowledge of the specific to the service of others” – hence it’s vocational, hence professional
      • ie, “concerned with the social role and value of communal principles”
    • “nonpersonal sociability” 7
• She admits that a housewife would never exactly be like a doctor in Victorian society

• “professional domesticity afforded women an escape from emotional life without demanding that they abandon their putative monopoly on emotion”
  • This to me is misguided: these women don’t choose to be domestic; it’s their ball and chain; the rhetoric of professionalism is MERELY that, rhetoric, not reality. It’s ideology “trust me work for men for free; you’ll like it”
• “the Victorian homekeeper depicted in these novels stood on common ground with the intellectual and the artist” 9 b/c both are amateurs using language of professionalism
  • Um, sorry, but artists and intellectuals are paid
• why use professional rhetoric? b/c you’ll be privileges and benefits from it (it worked in arguments for the vote and for property rights)
  • I’m sorry, but I don’t know how you’re going to combine these novels w/the arguments over suffrage and property
• I agree with her mission to undermine leisure/work, consumption/production, private/public
• what does this do to private/public sphere? “temporary means of resolving the oppositions” 10
• The Complication
  • often accompanied by sense of alienation

Other References

• Harold Perkins: the professional: “eschews wage-labor in favor service-based prestige” qtd 5 The Rise of Professional Society
• Poovey and Armstrong: “demonstrated how the separate sphere doctrine of Victorian England used emotion and psychology to displace politics and effectively elide class conflict from the collective consciousness.”
  • “middle class political interest masquerading as psychology” 8
  • Armstrong: creation of a personal life via gendering of the household (ie sexual and romantic ideology) “lubricate[d] the sharp contradictions of social praxis” b/c it was a universalizing discourse
  • Poovey: private/public, persona/political “provides the basis for the rise of an ideological professionalization whose exclusionary logic only replicated middle-class hegemony”
    • home psychological
    • women only amateurs; this status allows you to see the opposite category come into focus, the male professional
• Where is she diff from Poovey and Armstrong? She sees that the home actually promotes a communitarian ideal rather than the individualist subjectivity the other two portray; home not psychological but professional
• Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: rationalization of housework swerved between trusting and not trusting housework via numbers and scientific improvement; “a complete economic analysis of household labor itself, especially that performed by wageless, middle-class, emotionally invested women, is irretrievable…cannot be known.” 187
  • me: but why do we want to find the truth in finding out “how much they saved the household by making jam?” the numerical value is not as important as the structural function, which we can ferret out
• The two groundbreaking works of Victorian studies of domesticity are Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction and Mary Poovey Uneven Developments
  • Armstrong: “that domestic fiction was crucial to the regulation of social behavior because it formulated the home as a disciplinary space where private life was distinct from social life and sexuality divorced from political history; and that the controlling idea of the separate spheres functioned principally as a way of displacing divisions of class into divisions of gender.” qtd in review of the present book by Tim Dolan in Victorian Studies
    • Dolan likes in this book how it shows the ethic of service and self-sacrifice in professionalism

My Problem

• Only referring to novels is silly b/c this project needs to deal more completely with culture and history.
  • for example, these novels don’t generally look at lower middle class woman, so it doesn’t at all explain the feeling of compulsion and coercion and the LACK of personal vocation that might have been more normal
  • she wants to say that fiction will afford us insight into what stats can’t give us, but she oddly forgets that history isn’t just statistics
• Particular readings suffer, for example of Wemmick’s Castle in Great Expectations: see shays “a tension between our impression that the novel’s home-office distinction is arbitrary and a nagging sense that it carries hidden significance” 80
  • Um, sorry but aren’t you as the critic supposed to understand the significance?
  • This tension is NOT arbitrary at all