Page 42 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

36 CULTURAL STUDIES

middle-class home institutes the servants’ class difference based on their
practical and symbolic proximity to dirt, work and, implicitly, to sexuality and
animality. Spatially, the servants are segregated from the family:

The servants…lived and worked in the dark underground parts of the
house or slept in the inaccessible, often spooky attics. Their territory was
the ‘back passages’ (nursery euphemism for anus) where the working parts
of the household machine were visible and where waste and rubbish were
removed.
(Davidoff, 1983:27)
The servants’ duties, as part of the household machine include all activities that
involve manual labour and dirt, the two things that the bourgeois woman must
remain separate from:
Their most important job was to remove dirt and waste: to dust; empty slop
pails and chamber pots; peel fruit and vegetables, pluck fowl; sweep and
scrub floors, walls and windows; remove ash and cinders; black lead
grates; wash clothes and linen.
(Davidoff, 1983:44)

Cleaning—who does it and who doesn’t, and the inverse but complementary,
who is clean and who isn’t—coordinates, aligns and regulates the significations
of Victorian gender and class hierarchies such that the social, monetary and
practical bases of these distinctions are difficult to perceive. All through her
piece, Davidoff emphasizes that Victorian society understood class and racial
difference in the public as well as the private sphere according to registers of
cleanliness or the lack of it, control over sexuality or the lack of it, regulation of
all forms of physical expression or the lack of them. These criteria, which are
precisely those which regulate appropriate bourgeois femininity, naturalize racial
and class inequality, by reading the signs of that inequality on the other’s body,
What is not accounted for is monetary and economic difference.

Scene 5:
Hysterical cleaning and the abhorrenee of exchange

Defilement is what is jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system,’ It is what
escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social
aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a
temporary agglomeration of individuals and, in short, constitutes a
classification system or a structure.
(Kristeva, 1982)