[The following discussion comes from the introduction to the author’s The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Thackeray created the decorative initial depicting a butler for Vanity Fair — George P. Landow]
ram Stoker’s Dracula explicit use of violence, sexuality, and professional work makes it the most fitting text to conclude an account of service work in the Victorian novel. Critics have certainly not missed the importance of professional work to the construction of Stoker’s novel, from the consortium of professional vampire hunters detailed by Nicholas Daly to the centrality of Mina’s secretarial work described by Charles E. Prescott and Grace A. Giorgio, and the linkage between Harker’s fears of professional and sexual incompetence described in psychoanalytic terms by Dejan Kuzmanovic. As such, it is less pressing to demonstrate that service work as such marks Dracula than to consider how the history of an emergent service sector alters our understanding of the text.
Although his focus falls on capital rather than professionalism, Franco Moretti’s account of the novel in Signs Taken for Wonders provides a fine place to begin. Moretti’s argument situates the novel in light of the coming predominance of German and American industry, framing the Count as an allegory of foreign monopoly capital, and the plot as an attempt to eliminate this modernizing form of capital for an older, limited, and feudal one. A similar foreign threat marked late Victorian services. This is not to obviate the resonances of capital and finance in the Count’s monetary hemorrhage but to also link it to issues in clerical labor, specifically the vilification of foreign clerks by British clerical workers from the 1880s onward. In his history of Victorian clerks, Gregory Anderson describes how British clerks used German clerks as a ‘scapegoat’ (7):
Although the impact of young female clerks represented a profound and lasting structural change in the clerical labour market, the great weight of criticism from resentful clerks fell not upon them but upon the effect of foreign and especially German clerks. The status panic among English clerks which resulted from the influx of these competitors was only part of a general loss of confidence among the English commercial class during the Great Depression [of the 1880s] in the face of German commercial and industrial rivalry. [60-61]
Here we see how an emergent reality—continuing economic depression and the loss of British commercial and industrial power—created potentially useful antagonisms for employers. Workers fractured by nationality do not organize for better working conditions. Moreover, Anderson notes that British clerks believed that ‘German clerks possessed such attributes as steadiness, perseverance and reliability’—characteristics that should sound familiar as integral qualities of gentlemanliness—as ‘racial characteristics’ (62). In short, British clerks viewed their competing foreign workers as not merely better educated—as they may have been—but, more troublingly, more racially disposed to gentlemanliness than they could hope to become The conjunction of racial threats and professional labor in Dracula thus may not so much dramatize what Stephen Arata detects as the threat of reverse colonization but rather anxieties about work. The feudal remnants that Moretti identifies in the novel, then, may also be understood as the discursive modes of discipline crucial to Britain’s service-oriented imperial economy—that is, the ingrained role of deference, gentlemanliness, and respectability. … Dracula captures these discursive models for disciplining service work, with Stoker’s vampire hunters using their selflessness to triumph over the Count’s selfishness. To be disinterested is to be a proper service worker.
This historical excursus does not exhaust the manifold interpretative potentials lurking in Dracula. However, it does illustrate how discourses of gentlemanliness and respectability may discipline service work through the processes of subjectivation and how such self-discipline may affect one’s experience of work as capitalism’s fundamental form of social domination. Dracula uncovers the subjective qualities of capitalism’s demand to work to survive, in particular, how individuals come to embrace their domination in work as their self-definition. Because nineteenth-century service workers often identified with the interests of their employers, this made them reluctant to organize. The tension between British and foreign clerks in the 1880s indicates, however, these were uneasy identifications. Judith Butler’s work on subjectivation suggests that the constant performance of a subject’s identifications may feed this uneasiness and create a sense of some fundamental unfitness. Such uneasiness, in this case, allows exploitation and stagnating wages to appear to workers as the result of their incapacities rather than of antagonisms in the work-relation and leads workers to feel that there must be more deserving and less expensive workers.
Lauren Berlant’s account of ‘cruel optimism’ illuminates how the subjects produced by this process experience it. Berlant captures the experience in which performed identifications are felt to be both necessary and impossible for the subject—that is, the affectual experience of performing deeply personal yet punishing attachments.Berlant locates cruel optimism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as part of the recession of Western European fantasies of a mid-twentieth century good life… [yet] the nineteenth-century service sector offers a point of entry for a pre-history of cruel optimism. The clerks of the late nineteenth century also felt themselves confronted by the loss of a good life, though one distinct from that of the expanding middle-class of the mid-twentieth century, and this loss solicited similar crises of identification. Anderson’s notes that for Victorian clerks stagnating wages and the loss of economic mobility—or the imagined possibility thereof—generated ‘status panic’ (60) Given their otherwise working-class wages, status was a very real, if immaterial, form of compensation for these workers, and they experienced its loss as a direct undermining of the discourses that sustained their images of themselves and that served to discipline their work. This is not to say that they gave up respectability and gentlemanliness so much as felt them to be lost.
What cruel optimism allows us to locate in the experience of the late Victorian service sector worker is an insistence on one’s respectability and one’s belonging to the employing class even in the face of the impossibility of such belonging. The contrasting realization—that the work is punishing and without social benefits—offers the contrasting toxic possibility that cannot be imagined. Thomas Piketty’s magisterial survey of tax data from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emphasizes this impossibility. Although Victorians may have felt that they were in the midst of an emerging middle-class society, the late nineteenth century had a level of wealth stratification unmatched even by the twenty-first century’s new Gilded Age (343-45) The belle époque of the fin-de-siècle was not one of shared wealth, and no one would have had a closer view from the outside of this concentration of capital than its clerical workforce. The insidious quality of cruel optimism twists this capital concentration to produce a toxic fantasy of alien interlopers who not only take existing jobs but also are more suited for them due to an imagined racialization of class-based qualities. A sense of one’s own unfitness is at the heart of this experience, a lived precarity that racial and national chauvinism tries but fails to cover.
Furthermore, such anxiety about foreign workers masked the period’s real historical shift in the clerical workforce: the entry of women. (The radicalized response to this situation affords a missing bridge between accounts of Dracula that focus on professional work and Friedrich Kittler’s excavation of the links between the construction of gender and technology in Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Kittler’s otherwise German-specific work turns to Dracula to highlight modernity’s production of a gender model predicated on the disarticulation of language into mobile lexical units, but Kittler does not engage with the novel’s British context or, more to my point, the social and economic anxieties of British service work.) Dracula’s knot of clerical work, professionalism, and sexuality dramatizes a contradictory consciousness of this experience, displacing into foreign threats fears of the altered role of women in work and social production.
Related material
Bibliography
Anderson, Gregory. Victorian Clerks. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.
Arata, Stephen D. ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.’ Victorian Studies 33.4 (Summer 1990): 627-34.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Hoppit, Julian. ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002): 141-65.
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Kuzmanovic, Dejan. "Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Victorian Literature and Culture 37.2 (2009): 411-425.
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Form. London: Verso, 2006.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014.
Sherman, Sandra. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Last modified 4 January 2020