ABSTRACT
The novels I examine elsewhere in this study feature characters that employ servants. Through them, I argue that reading domestic servants’ marginal or threshold status in these texts enables us to see modernist domestic space as differently and newly aware of disturbances at the thresholds that create domesticity. Thresholds, too, operate within the structure of modernist texts, and in fact help to create that structure. As both novelists and servants cross and recross those thresholds in their labors, thresholds draw together the space of the text and the space of home, linking the work of novel-making and of home-making. But, with the exception of Woolf’s unfinished and unpublished short story “The Cook,” none of these texts features a domestic worker as a central character. Perhaps because of the servant’s unsettling ability to disturb and define domestic boundaries-mandated to cross thresholds without the opportunity to feel entirely at home in their domestic workplacethe middle-and upper-class novelists who benefit from service still exercise their control over their servants through the narratives they write. Perhaps, too, as these novelists write from their own perspectives-usually, though not invariably, those of the employers and not of the servants-the vision of those unsettled thresholds is better expressed through the experiences of those similarly classed characters who have previously felt those thresholds to be more stable than they suddenly seem to be.3
