"No Followers": The Victorian Servant Problem‪.‬

The Victorian problem of uppity and unruly servants debated in middle-class periodicals and household manuals could not be solved because servants themselves were not the problem. The transgressive potential of servants, despite the claims of middle-class commentators, did not arise from the vicious character flaws they attributed to servants. Instead, the servant problem was only an especially visible symptom of much more fundamental conflicts within middle-class culture as a whole. These conflicts determined that any servant--no matter how loyal, honest, and diligent--ultimately must be a problem. The real problem for masters and mistresses was not the servant's character but the servant's place in the middle-class household. Servants occupied a peculiarly liminal and highly ambivalent position within the domestic sphere that confounded the apparently natural boundaries and categories of bourgeois culture. Because servants revealed the boundaries and categories to be illusory fictions, they could not help but produce anxiety in the minds of their employers, whose social authority and sexual identity was underwritten by those fictions. The ensuing anxiety fueled and informed the increasingly complex discussions of the 'servant problem' over the course of the nineteenth century. I. Servants' Characters