Domestic service and Chilean literature: fictional experiments in narrating the household

Abstract

This article shines light on the interconnectedness of reproductive labour and Latin American literature through two Chilean novels that explore the relationship between peripheral capitalism and domestic servitude: José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night and Diamela Eltit's Mano de Obra. The study of these texts allows for a periodisation of the reproductive sphere under different phases of capitalist accumulation, and exposes an association between the literary treatment of domestic service and the achievement of highly experimental narratives in Latin America. My reading of Obscene goes beyond viewing this novel as postmodernist fiction, by showing how its nightmarish poetics are a consequence of the transformation of the oligarchic household vis-a-vis the collapse of systems of bonded labour in the 1960s. Whereas the prose of Obscene provides a harrowing descent into the intimate connections between master and servant at the moment of their decline, Mano de Obra unveils a surgical prose capable of expressing the new impersonality of social reproduction in the subsequent neoliberal period. Of special interest to this analysis is how Eltit suggests that even the proletariat household can recreate exploitative patterns of domestic servitude to guard against complete immiseration. Three main conclusions result from this reading. First, Latin American fiction is an important literary archive from which capitalism's exploitation of the reproductive sphere can be excavated. Second, Latin American literature shows formal uniqueness when representing domestic service in the periphery. Lastly, fictional representations of domestic service help us understand the institution not as remnant of previous modes of production, but as capitalist strategy for the reproduction of social forces that underpay the cost of life-making processes.