Laboring in a Place of Rest: Reconsidering Victorian Domestic Work and Its Narratives

Abstract

Victorian domesticity may have traditionally been acknowledged as a—if not the—definitional value of nineteenth-century British culture, but actual domestic labor has received comparatively little critical attention. What precisely this labor constituted and to what extent it should be invisible according to an ideology that was premised on its cultural significance informed debates at the time, while its depiction in popular culture ranged from class-conscious negotiations of hands-on housework to tragicomical evocations of failed domestic management as a personal crisis. Arguing for the pressing importance of recalibrating the critical investigation of domestic labor, this article explores how Victorian writers continually recrafted the ongoing cultural obsession with the well-maintained home and the question of what might constitute its most apt representation. A critical reassessment of the resulting ambiguities and complexities hence also makes an important contribution to current discussions of emotional labor, caretaking, and the experience of mundane emotions, such as boredom, as an essential part of the everyday of modernity.