Abstract
Performing Class: Domestic Labor in Working-Class Modernism examines intersectional aspects of class, race, gender, and sexuality to offer a new understanding of how modernist narrative practices both obscure and foreground domestic work in writing by Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Zora Neale Hurston. By analyzing texts that spotlight and/or conceal domestic worker subjectivity, this dissertation refuses the bias inherent in modernist studies toward writing by and for the middle and upper classes and puts forth a conception of class performativity. My analysis of class extends beyond traditional socioeconomic indicators like wealth and assets, to specifically investigate how class itself is embodied and, like gender (Butler), is performative because it requires daily reconstructions and practices that are generative of class belonging, but do not necessarily reflect social reality. While the terms “performance” and “performativity” have their own distinct interdisciplinary theoretical genealogies, I examine narrative instances of performances (e.g., characters acting and role playing) to think about how class subjectivity itself is performative. Using performativity as a theoretical lens reveals how class and power dynamics are not only reflected in modernist narratives, but are also, I argue, imbricated in modernist aesthetic practices. Domestic workers are unique because they both do and are their labor. Because domestic labor takes place within the home rather than the factory or other industrial sites of labor, distinctions between public and private spheres collapse with the erasure of boundaries between home and work, particularly for live-in domestic servants. Servant labor (and other forms of domestic and care work more generally) is considered reproductive rather than productive, therefore, a debate persists among Marxist and feminist scholars about the kind of value domestic labor creates and how it differs from labor that produces commodities for the market. Although feminist scholars have argued that the sustainability of productive labor and of society itself depends upon reproductive labor, the disjuncture between domestic activities and “work” endures, even when domestic labor is performed by paid workers. What results is an incessant system that exploits and devalues labor that is expected to be, and is therefore rendered, invisible. By tracing how labor constructs class subjectivity for both the domestic worker and employer, this dissertation ultimately proposes a link between performing labor and performing class in both the fictive worlds and professional lives of Woolf, Lawrence, and Hurston.
My first two chapters explore the intersections of class, gender, and sexuality and the performative qualities of servant labor in British modernist texts. In Chapter 1, I examine Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to argue that the party is a site of class performance where the process of self-fashioning occurs amid the planning and execution of Clarissa’s high society gathering. I examine how Woolf’s modernist aesthetic practices render domestic labor (in)visible and how the figure of the servant is used to generate, reconstruct, and repeat classed norms. Chapter 2 examines Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, focusing on occasions of sexual and linguistic role playing to argue that class-based hierarchies are (temporarily) upended through eroticized and performative inversions of classed labor and language, a narrative practice I call erotic class masquerade. Chapter 3 departs from a white British context to investigate how racialized class performance is imbued with performing literal domestic work in selected works by Black American writer Hurston, whose career was bookended by her own work as a maid. I trace Hurston’s experimentation with conceptions of justice and agency through her recalibration of stereotypes of Black women domestic workers (e.g., the exploited, the abused, and the mammy). Reading Hurston through the lens of labor and class performativity, I suggest, reveals her process of creating a rhetoric of Black feminist working-class labor that is inextricably linked to her lived experience as a domestic worker.