“Kitchen Literature”: the Female Servant in Sensation Fiction

“KITCHEN LITERATURE”: THE FEMALE SERVANT IN SENSATION FICTION by ELIZABETH LEE STEERE (Under the Direction of Tricia Lootens) ABSTRACT This project considers how the sensation fiction genre popular in the 1860s fits into the canon of nineteenth-century literature and considers how its depiction of gender and class reflects its context of social change. Contemporary critics derided the genre as “Kitchen Literature” because of its popularity among the newly literate servant classes, but this term also reflects the prominence of the genre’s influential servant characters. I demonstrate how the female servant in particular is a key figure who embodies the most “sensational” aspects contemporary critics identified in sensation fiction in her subversion of the Victorian boundaries of class and gender. Through the lens of the female servant, I trace the origins of the sensation fiction genre to the more canonical novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and argue to broaden the genre’s definition to include the sensation short story. I consider how, among the more well-known sensation titles, distinct character patterns emerge: the criminal servant, the actress-qua-servant, and the servant as spouse. Ultimately, my research suggests that, far from a fad of a single decade, sensation fiction has remained influential and its tropes are still found today in Neo-Victorian literature and popular culture. INDEX WORDS: Sensation fiction, Nineteenth-century English literature, Domestic employees, Servants, Governesses, Maids, Class, Gender. “KITCHEN LITERATURE”: THE FEMALE SERVANT IN SENSATION FICTION by ELIZABETH LEE STEERE B.A., Wake Forest University, 2003 M.Ed., North Carolina State University, 2004 M.A., North Carolina State University, 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Elizabeth Lee Steere All Rights Reserved “KITCHEN LITERATURE”: THE FEMALE SERVANT IN SENSATION FICTION by ELIZABETH LEE STEERE Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Committee: Richard Menke Roxanne Eberle Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2012 DEDICATION For Alexander, my motivation both intra- and extra-utero. And for Ben, who makes it all worthwhile. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My project has greatly benefitted from the guidance of my major professor, Tricia Lootens. It has also been improved by the feedback from my committee members, Richard Menke and Roxanne Eberle. Some material in these chapters has been previously published in Women’s Writing, GRAAT: Anglophone Studies, and Victorian Network, and I extend my appreciation to the peer reviewers and editors of those journals. The kernel for this work was formed at North Carolina State University in Leila May’s class, and my initial foray into Victorian studies began with Tony Harrison. During my studies there, Marvin Hunt was very helpful, and Candy Beal encouraged me greatly along the way. Barbara Mertz’s books are responsible for piquing my interest in Victorian sensationalism even before I knew what that was. I want to thank the staff of the Oconee County Library in Watkinsville for welcoming me so warmly to Athens. I have much gratitude for the staff and faculty of the UGA FYC program, the UGA Writing Center, and the UGA at Oxford program, which allowed me to conduct some of my research at the Bodleian Library. I am very grateful for the support of my friends—among them, Kate Daley-Bailey, Summerlin Page, Dylan Morris, Morgan McDowell, Molly Rushing, the Johnson-Scheniders, the Hahn-Kastellacs, Leasa Weimer, Christine Manuck, and Andrea Lavin Kossis. So many of my fellow graduate students at the University of Georgia have been a great support system during my time in the program, among them Nicole Lobdell, Maria Chappell, the Lovatt-Husseys, Brown Spierses and Cromwell-Dawsons. My siblings Justin, Jonathan, and Kathryn have been wonderful sounding boards. v I could never have done any of this without Ben Steere, who is and always has been the best colleague, editor, friend, and husband. Thank you so much for soothing our crying baby while I typed away—I’m so glad we didn’t have to resort to dosing him with laudanum. Most of all, I want to thank my mother, Anne Roberts Lee, for being my primary role model and inspiration. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: “KITCHEN LITERATURE” ............................................1 2 “LET NOTHING EVER INDUCE YOU TO READ NOVELS”: SERVANTS AND SENSATIONALISM IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY..................17 3 “MERELY TELLING THE TRUTH”: SERVANTS’ STORIES IN JANE EYRE AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS .......................................................................41 4 “PRIVILEGED SPIES”: THE CRIMINAL SERVANT IN LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET ...........................................................................................................71 5 “SHE HAD HER RÔLE TO PLAY”: EAST LYNNE AND THE SERVANT ACTRESS......................................................................................................101 6 “WE WILL STILL BE HUSBAND AND WIFE”: THE SERVANT AS SPOUSE IN GASKELL’S “THE GREY WOMAN”.........................................................133 7 “THE STUFF OF LURID FICTION”: SENSATION FICTION IN THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY.........................................................................................166 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................190 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: “KITCHEN LITERATURE” Among the paintings displayed at the 1865 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was one fairly unassuming portrait by William Powell Frith. It depicts a woman posing next to a writing desk with a small stack of books and a manuscript on it. She wears a modest black dress and gazes directly at the viewer with a frank expression. The Examiner’s review of the Exhibition concluded with an assessment of this particular painting, condemning the figure as “look[ing] like a lady’s maid whom one might think twice before engaging” (“Pictures” 364). The subject was the author Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who was known at the time as the “Queen of the circulating libraries,” but whom the Examiner instead contemptuously dubbed “The Queen of Kitchen Literature” (“Pictures” 364). “Kitchen Literature” was the derisive term that the Examiner coined to describe the genre of “sensation fiction” that became popular in the 1860s.1 The term “kitchen literature” derived from sensation fiction’s purported readership; as a North British Review article claimed in 1865, sensation novels “temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing-room” (Rae 204). In other words, the sensation novels that the cook or the maid would read were now being read by the mistress of the house as well. (In 1864, the Herts Guardian somewhat cynically read the situation as “quasi-fashionable novelists… profiting by the discovery that there are a Lady Betty and a Lord Tomnoddy of the drawing-room 1 Other publications, such as Herts Guardian, the Morning Post, and Western Times also subsequently employed the term. 1 with brains torpid as those of Betsey[sic] and Jeames[sic] in the kitchen” [“Kitchen Literature” 7]). The Examiner critics did not consider “Kitchen Literature” to be particularly artful or literary, as an 1863 article entitled “Miss Braddon’s Kitchen Stuff” suggests: To the compounding of “sensation novels” out of such stuff as we find in Lady Audley's Secret or Aurora Floyd there goes no genius of any sort. For the production of this sort of kitchen literature little more is wanted than the cacoethes scribendi, a coarse mind, avoidance of all contact with good literature, and a full dietary of unwholesome reading. (8) The Examiner further bemoans the “devolution” of taste that was evident as both ladies and their domestic servants read the same titles only in different formats. Its 1867 review of a sensation novel remarks that Kitchen Literature… delights the imagination of a scullery maid, while it gratifies the frivolity of any Lady Aramina who, sharing the tastes of Betty the scullery maid, reads Betty’s books when they are republished in three volumes octavo, and differs from her humble sister only in having had the opportunity of rising to a higher level of intelligence and not having used it. (“Review: Leslie Tyrrell” 500- 501) In fact, the popularity of the genre extended well beyond Lady Aramina and Betty the scullery maid; it transcended the boundaries of class, education, and gender. For instance, future prime minister William Gladstone was so engrossed in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) that he cancelled a theatre engagement to finish it in a day, and the future King Edward VII was such a fan of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) that he convinced the Dean of Westminster, 2 Arthur Stanley, to read it as well (Pykett, Collins 107; E. Jay viii). Thus, these books were hardly “designed only for the delight of empty men, fast ladies, and slow scullerymaids,” as yet another Examiner review claimed (“Review: Won By Beauty” 428). Despite the popularity and cultural impact of these novels in the nineteenth century, modern critics have been slow to embrace the serious study of sensation fiction. Only in recent decades have scholars begun to

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