Personal and Political Spheres, Intertwined
“Massa and Maids” and “The Gaze on the Threshold” both examine racial, class-based, and sexual power dynamics in conjunction with servitude in the colonial histories of Korea and England respectively, in order to draw conclusions about how household relations shaped cultural relations, and vice versa.
Servitude is a cultural subject; hierarchies have been so upheld from the times periods discussed (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) into modern culture, that it is difficult to pick at the scab without revealing the wound. Analyzing historical servitude from a gendered perspective reveals how little has changed since major colonialist movements. At the same time, servitude is deeply personal; the scale of its reach results in a bearing on how we develop and interact in our day-to-day, even (and especially) our own households. “Massa and Maids” and “The Gaze on the Threshold” both stood out as readings that were able to bridge the gap between personal stories and larger echoing patterns across nations, which were reminiscent of last week’s discussion about policy and material effects.
In “Massa and Maids,” McClintock focuses on the British Empire’s relationship with servitude, and the psychological and intellectual repercussions of what she refers to as a “contact zone.” She uses multiple strategies, including examining parables from figures such as Arthur Munby and Sigmund Freud. Of Munby, she describes a man who is obsessed with the contrast, or “gender doubling,” between laboring women and upper-class women. He sought to control and view the working women voyeuristically, even imperially (80). Of Freud, she dissects the Oedipal theory through the lens of his own household, which shows that he has conveniently left the figure of the maid, his sexual “prime originator,” out, in favor of blaming the mother (87). Ultimately, she draws on both these cases to make a larger claim about the archetype of the “flaneur,” the voyeuristic, perverted man, shaping the development of surveillance, policing, and management (121). At the same time, McClintock acknowledges the origins of gender doubling as an effect of economic factors of Victorian society, specifically in the mining industry, which is tied to the emergence of capitalism itself (115). Overall, the text blends personal factors of psychology, fetish, and adolescent development with broader factors of economics, sociology and imperialism, to form a more nuanced understanding of servitude in the British Victorian era.
Similarly, “The Gaze on the Threshold” acknowledges interracial and transnational politics in conjunction with household and interpersonal dynamics to create a better picture of Korean servitude in Japanese households in Korea before and during colonization. Jiyoung Suh often cites government and economic roles in the shaping of the housemaid system in Korea. For example, the colonial government was interested in Korean men marrying Japanese women, and not vice versa, because they gained imperial citizens and military inductees in the former case, but not the latter (449). However, the mitigation of intermarriage was not entirely successful. While the colonial government sought to control the personal domain through legalization, they affect each other circularly. Additionally, the personal and cultural sectors meet in the class imagery, rumors, and media reported by Suh. “High collar, “New Woman,” imagery distributed through newspapers (443), scandalizing reports of love affairs and theft (444) and the caricature of the ttalgakbari (445) each exemplified cultural interpretations of specific personal cases to various (often small) degrees of truth, which re-circulated personal beliefs and later government beliefs about the role of omoni in society. Suh’s work on the specific case of Japanese colonization of Korea is heavily founded on the circular motion of the public and private spheres of information, opinion, and communication.
These ideas of small-scale and large-scale patterns are echoes of a previous discussion on servitude and gender’s role in slavery in the Americas. One specific instance was from the close reading activity: “Ambivalent lawmakers assumed that white women’s work was circumscribable as they passed legislation that, logically, would have encouraged the use of tax free laborers to cultivate crops for export. Virginia legislators saw black women, on the other hand, as permanent laborers,” (Morgan 74). The role of the naturalization of black women’s labor based on the intersection of race was rooted not in logic, economic incentivization, or materiality, but in public opinion, or an “unsettling (Morgan 73) feeling. Yet, materially, they did have colossal effects in the development of race-based slavery and its intersection with gender.
In conclusion, the continuities and changes in historical contexts that impact racialized and gendered experience of domestic work cannot be considered solely on the basis of economic or political spheres of imperialism, capitalism, or slavery, nor can they be considered based solely on the (inter)personal beliefs, psychology, or dynamics of those who sought to define, control, or capitalize on gendered domestic work. As evidenced by “Massa and Maids” and “The Gaze on the Threshold” in addition to the previous reading and discussion, they inextricably define and affect each other.
