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• W748314123 abstract "In a recent article Michael Neill reflected on his bleak experiences as a young domestic servant during the 1970s. He and his wife, he explains, were 'boilerman and char in a damp Victorian mansion whose châtelaine could no longer afford the retinue of servants for which such buildings were designed.' In this dilapidated household servants were kept in place through donations, such as 'occasional gifts of discarded food' which 'served as delicate reminders of our subordinate status.' Despite his unwholesome living conditions and 'tiny allowance', however, when Neill decided to leave, his employer was surprisingly offended. While he saw his departure as 'the straightforward termination of a commercial arrangement', for her it signified 'the wanton abrogation of an intimate bond, an act of unpardonable disloyalty that brought tears of justified resentment to her eyes'.1Neill's employer organized her household through complex giftexchanges. She rewarded service - and simultaneously reminded employees that they were merely servants - by strategically distributing 'gifts', including one particularly memorable 'jug of cloudy bitter, still sludgy with hops'.2 In response, Neill was expected to offer loyalty and enduring service even though he could earn greater financial rewards and a more comfortable living elsewhere. He was, we might say, expected to make a giftof his service.For the young Neill, the notion that servitude was a type of giftformed an antiquated facade concealing a hierarchical relationship. It was a residual discourse, in Raymond Williams' terms.3 This article argues that the roots of this persistently influential discourse can be found in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Here, household manuals and religious tracts instructed servants to devote themselves to their masters without thinking of rewards. For example, in 1578 Walter Darell cautioned that no servant should 'stand so much in his own conceit, as to say, I will do no more than my covenant requireth' because 'if thou once become a servant, whatsoever thou do to thy master above thy promise, if it tend to his profit and commodity, is but thy bounden duty'.4 For Darell, servants should not look to be rewarded for their duties since they were fulfilling naturally subordinate roles. According to this account and others, the ideal servant gave his services like a gratuitous gift.Yet even in this period such an ideology caused problems. Other texts argued that if servants gave their services freely they would be rewarded spiritually and financially. William Gouge, for example, praised the instrumental, unrewarded servant, but underwrote his praise by insisting that dutiful servants would earn spiritual rewards, stating that: 'servants that by their faithful service bring honour and glory to God shall again receive honor and glory'.5 In short, as Scott Cutler Shershow puts it, these early modern writers promised that servants would be rewarded only if they would 'give without expectation of reward'.6These conflicting opinions about whether servants should be rewarded for their work reveal much about the hierarchy of early modern master/servant relationships. Servants were often imagined as cogs in the household machinery - the hands and feet beneath the controlling head of the household, in a microcosmic version of the macrocosmic body politic. But contemporaries were keen to stress that servants were capable of earning an independent living. In this way they could be distinguished from the supposedly parasitical 'able-bodied poor'. In an era which prized independent productivity, the notion that servants did not strive to earn financial rewards was often applauded but persistently troubling. Such inconsistent commentary on the social and occupational role and duty of the servant raises questions: how can a servant simultaneously earn a living and give his services without thought of reward? And how can he ever 'merit' or earn anything in his own right if he is merely an organ in the household body? …" @default.
• W748314123 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W748314123 date "2013-09-01" @default.
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• W748314123 title "Giving and Serving in Timon of Athens" @default.
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