ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf famously dates the beginning of modernity “In or about December, 1910,” when “human character changed” (“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 91). This change appears first not in the writer’s study, or in the cosmopolitan metropole, as we might expect. It begins in the servants’ hall, when a cook leaves the dank kitchen and unexpectedly crosses the threshold to chat with her mistress in the drawing-room-as Woolf says, “now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat” (91). Woolf’s example is intended to be comic, but her humor is a revealing dodge: the modern novel, she indicates, now has to take into account a new domestic reality, in which servants are no longer willing to remain simply background creatures. While recent critics have carefully studied the gender, racial, ethnic, and imperial coordinates of modernism, fewer have discussed class, and almost none has considered the close link between narrative structure and servants in modernist fiction.3 This is perhaps because Western literary modernism’s
historical moment coincides with the decline of widespread domestic servitude in Great Britain and the United States from its Victorian heights, and with the advent of widely available domestic technology that replaces the servants who used to keep the middle-class home. Those bustling, jolly, uniformed kitchenmaids, housekeepers, and cooks seem out of place in the modern world, and certainly in the modern novel. And as Melvyn Dubofsky notes, servants are a relic of a pre-capitalist society, an “anachronistic use of labor”—potentially figures of antimodernism, rather than a crucial part of twentieth-century modernity (89).
