(no subject)

[flemmings]

Decided not to have massage last week which was a huge mistake. Evidently without it, everything sulks and goes board-like. I had an appointmnt today but Tuesday morning had a weather advisory for Weds containing that direst of all words, freezing rain. Rebooked for tomorrow in 80 kmh wind gusts.  This is what happens in early April. My optimistic intention to walk over to Bathurst subway and take transit to Spadina is not going to happen until at least mid-month.

Have read all but one Nero Wolfe which is on hold. The upside of a series is not having to decide what to read next, and I have no idea what I'll do once finished with Wolfe. I did try one other book, The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels, and dropped it after five pages. Victorian ladies didn't answer their own doorbells. Why are modern writers so utterly oblivious to the historical existence of servants?

Comments

[anna_wing]

For Western writers, it's part of not understanding how openly hierarchical societies function. They also tend not to understand the different kinds of relationship that people have with live-in servants, depending on how many there are, their status within the wider society, the different kinds of racial, class and caste issues that arise in different societies, the status of the employers etc etc.

I remember reading an otherwise very interesting book about Virginia Woolf's somewhat fraught relationships with her household staff (Alison Light, "Mrs Woolf and the Servants"), where the author found it noteworthy that Woolf was never on (mutual) first-name terms with her long-time cook/housekeeper Nellie Boxall.

Light also, irritatingly, never settled on how she referred to Woolf, so it was "Woolf", "Mrs Woolf" or "Virginia" throughout the book apparently at random. It was a library copy, or I swear I would just have blue-pencilled the whole thing...in the introduction, Light made much of the fact that one of her grandmothers was "in service", but said nothing that I recall about the one who wasn't, so I think that there might have been ideological issues involved as well.

[flemmings]

For sure we have no idea of openly hierarchical structures outside of maybe business corporations- and those can vary a lot. There was a book whose name my aging brain refuses to remember even though I wrote an article about it, that compared the inherent assumptions in American and Japanese societies. The American one was 'we are all equal' and 'we are all friends' so of course we want to get onto first name bases as soon as possible. (The book's 40 or 50 years old and I suspect the author was thinking we = default white, because the assumption may be modified in inter-racial relations.)

I think our discomfort with the idea of servants is that in a domestic setting ie not formal, one where we expect intimacy, servants are very much not our equals, and we necessarily expect them to resent that fact (since they also share society's unthinking assumption about equality.)

I'm surprised that English Light doesn't get that cook doesn't address her employer by her first name. I thought class was still a factor in English society, and how much more so a century ago.

The name-switching would have driven me batty as well, but it does sound like ideology comes into it. Like the way earlier writers always called Jane Austen and the Brontes by their first names and never knew what to do with George, until later feminist academics insisted on last names always.