The Social Work of Unproductive Labor

Abstract

This chapter provides a framework for understanding service work in the Victorian novel by examining political economy’s changing articulations of unproductive labor, and the relation of these articulations to the mid-nineteenth-century liberalization of finance and the expansion of the service sector. My analysis of unproductive labor builds from the work of J. G. A. Pocock for its eighteenth-century beginnings, and relies on the analysis of gentlemanly capitalism by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins in their account of the British Empire. My discussion in this chapter thus explores how unproductive labor and the gentlemanly converge in financial services, and how this affects the appearance of other modes of services. One result of this approach is to provide a bridge between scholarly accounts of political economy from Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Regenia Gagnier with those of masculinity and work from Tim Barringer, James Eli Adams, and Herbert Sussman. Using lenses of class and gender, my argument suggests a particularly ambivalent experience of service work during the Victorian era. In an increasingly financialized and professionalized society, services are marked by duplicity, acting socially as dependent and productive, and personally as dominated and self-constructing. The relation of body and intellect to external forces of domination is central to this ambivalence. Independence, useful skills, and professional disinterestedness mitigate the force of domination by creating or maintaining something separate from the work-relation, yet gender norms and racism place these mitigating factors out of reach for women and minorities engaged in service.