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Domestic Affairs

Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Kristina Straub author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:11th Feb '09

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Domestic Affairs cover

Straub's study is unprecedented in its particular focus; it treats sexuality and gender... and attends to relations of class and labor in ways very few studies do. -- Jill Campbell, Yale University

In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.From Daniel Defoe's Family Instructor to William Godwin's political novel Caleb Williams, literature written for and about servants tells a hitherto untold story about the development of sexual and gender ideologies in the early modern period. This original study explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of such literary and nonliterary eighteenth-century texts. The early modern family was not biologically defined. It included domestic servants who often had strong emotional and intimate ties to their masters and mistresses. Kristina Straub argues that many modern assumptions about sexuality and gender identity have their roots in these affective relationships of the eighteenth-century family. By analyzing a range of popular and literary works-from plays and novels to newspapers and conduct manuals-Straub uncovers the economic, social, and erotic dynamics that influenced the development of these modern identities and ideologies. Highlighting themes important in eighteenth-century studies-gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence-Straub explores how the common aspects of human experience often intersected within the domestic sphere of master and servant. In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.

Straub succeeds in providing valuable insights into how understandings of the servant-master relationship inflected and even drove her examples and were also involved in shaping understandings of gender, clas, and the family more broadly. -- Catherine Keohane Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 2010

ISBN: 9780801890499

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 22mm

Weight: 476g

240 pages