In The Labors of Modernism, Mary Wilson analyzes the unrecognized
role of domestic servants in the experimental forms and narratives
of Modernist fiction by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nella
Larsen, and Jean Rhys. Examining issues of class, gender, and race
in a transatlantic Modernist context, Wilson brings attention to
the place where servants enter literature: the threshold. In
tracking their movements across the architectural borders
separating indoors and outdoors and across the physical doorways
between rooms, Wilson illuminates the ways in which the servants
who open doors symbolize larger social limits and exclusions, as
well as states of consciousness. The relationship between female
servants and their female employers is of particular importance in
the work of female authors, for whom the home and the novel are
especially interconnected sites of authorization and domestication.
Modernist fiction, Wilson shows, uses domestic service to tame and
interrogate not only issues of class, but also the overlapping
distinctions of racial and ethnic identities. As Woolf, Stein,
Larsen, and Rhys use the novel to interrogate the limitations of
gendered domestic ideologies, they find they must deploy these same
ideologies to manage the servant characters whose labor maintains
the domestic spaces they find limiting. Thus the position of
servants in these texts forces the reader to recognize servants not
just as characters, but as conditions for the production of
literature and of the homes in which literature is created.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
