The Moonstone: Service Work as Narrative Work

Abstract

More than any of the previous novels I have discussed, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) makes explicit the interrelation of service work and narrative work through its use of character-narrators. As we will see, the novel uses narration to engage with problems of service work and its discipline in ways that are distinct from the methods examined in prior chapters, where narrative work uses and improvises with existing discourse to search out new forms of useful work or skills, all the while turning its plotting and narration to use disciplining such work. By contrast, because the character-narrators of The Moonstone take up such narrative work directly, the problem of disciplining new modes of service work becomes a problem of disciplining narrative work. Indeed, the novel makes this conjunction of service and narrative work quite clear by making its narrators unproductive laborers, including a number of domestic service workers and professionals. By displacing service work into narrative work, The Moonstone highlights the use of financial and economic mechanisms to discipline narrative work, focusing in particular on the wage as a means of asserting control over the narrative work of its narrators. This is not to say cultural discourses play no role here, but rather that the novel’s mystery plot, use of banking, and narrative organization highlight the importance of an economic disciplining of unruly and potentially threatening forms of work that gesture toward what I discussed in the prior chapter as biopolitical production. As a result, the wage acts as a crucial disciplinary mechanism for the novel’s socially productive immaterial forms of service work, here conjured by the use of character-narrators.