American Culture of Servitude: the Problem of Domestic Service in Antebellum Literature and Culture

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Theses and Dissertations--English English 2017 AMERICAN CULTURE OF SERVITUDE: THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE AND CULTURE Andrea Holliger University of Kentucky, [email protected] Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2017.391 Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Holliger, Andrea, "AMERICAN CULTURE OF SERVITUDE: THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE AND CULTURE" (2017). Theses and Dissertations--English. 61. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/61 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations--English by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Andrea Holliger, Student Dr. Marion Rust, Major Professor Dr. Andrew Doolen, Director of Graduate Studies AMERICAN CULTURE OF SERVITUDE: THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE AND CULTURE DISSERTATION A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky By Andrea Michelle Holliger Lexington, Kentucky Director: Dr. Marion Rust, Associate Professor of English Lexington, Kentucky 2015 Copyright © Andrea Michelle Holliger 2015 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION AMERICAN CULTURE OF SERVITUDE: THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE AND CULTURE My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War. I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring the famous Leather-stocking character – not (as has canonically been the case) as an icon of American independence, but as an icon of American servitude. I historicize this reading with the legal history of master/servant statutes in the early nineteenth century. While public opinion quarantined servitude to an oppressed racial minority, the apparatuses of the law were dramatically expanding servitude’s purview, rendering the master/servant relation the touchstone from which to understand all employment relations. Following, my second chapter examines Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1833). I show that Kirkland’s text dramatizes the narrativity of identity-formation and its potential class consequences. Throughout, Kirkland suggests that this is particularly a women’s problem, whose narratives of self are charged with maintaining the narratives of the family and, synecdochically, the nation. Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) is a revolutionary intervention into the narratives of laborless-ness. I read the adoptions within the novel alongside the legalization of bounded servitude for children, since antebellum minors could be adopted or sign indentures if doing so was determined to be in their “best interest.” In my fourth and final chapter, I examine Civil War draft resistance. In her House and Home Papers columns for The Atlantic (1863-4), Harriet Beecher Stowe turned to the tropes of servitude to make sense of these violent eruptions. Yet this strategy laid bare servitude’s place as the basis for many other forms of state power (including military service) and servitude’s incompatibility with principles of individual sovereignty. KEYWORDS: Domestic Service, US Literature Before the Civil War, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Domesticity, Providence Andrea M. Holliger Student’s Signature May 13th, 2015 Date AMERICAN CULTURE OF SERVITUDE: THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE AND CULTURE By Andrea Michelle Holliger Dr. Marion Rust Director of Dissertation Dr. Andrew Doolen Director of Graduate Studies May 13th, 2015 Date Table of Contents Chapter One: Narrative and Experience in Dialogue: Making Meaning through the Servant Problem ....................... 1 The Statistics of Nineteenth-Century American Servitude ..................................................................................... 9 The Narrative of Servitude, 1820-1865: An Overview ........................................................................................ 11 Exemplary Servants ........................................................................................................................................ 19 A Culture of Servitude: Necessary and Right ...................................................................................................... 20 A Necessity: The Labor of the Home in Antebellum America ......................................................................... 20 Proper and Right: The Providential Organization of Individual and National Life ........................................... 23 Bringing a Culture of Servitude to Bear on the Study of Antebellum America: Chapter Breakdown ................... 30 Table 1.1- Domestic Servants in the United States ...................................................................................... 35 Table 1.2 - Women's Workforce Participation ............................................................................................. 36 Table 1.3 - Immigrants Arriving in America Listing Domestic Service as Occupation................................. 36 Chapter Two: “A kind of locum tenens”: the Leather-stocking and the Body of American Servitude ...................... 37 The Secret History of Master-Servant Law ......................................................................................................... 42 Constructing a Collective .................................................................................................................................... 47 Aristocracy vs. Democracy ................................................................................................................................. 53 Curtailing Choice ............................................................................................................................................ 57 Corporal Coercion Deferred ............................................................................................................................ 60 Chapter Three: “The Great Gulf Between”: Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and the Narrativity of a Culture of Servitude ............................................................................................................................................. 70 Mary Clavers’s Servant Problem ........................................................................................................................ 77 The Body and Meaning....................................................................................................................................... 96 Chapter Four: Like Family: The Lamplighter’s Daughter-Servants ....................................................................... 103 The Line Between Dependents ......................................................................................................................... 114 The Servant Problem: Securing the Family’s Borders ....................................................................................... 122 The Uncanny Servant .................................................................................................................................... 124 Cummins’s Intervention...................................................................................................................................

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