CHAPTER 8Dark and Delayed LaborSEX WORK AND RACIALIZED TIME IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON
Nour Afara
She who will always dazzle with the charms of her person, or surprise by the force of her genius, without allowing the least indulgence to sickness, indolence, or stupidity, is a slave to that vanity which she thinks exalts her to a kind of empire.
—Anonymous, The Histories, Vol. I1
Both volumes of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, as Supposed to Be Related by Themselves (1760) are a collection of fictional stories about Magdalen inmates framed as a nonfictional series of memoirs offered by the imprisoned. The Magdalen House detained prostitutes, as well as women who were allegedly at risk of becoming sex workers because of extramarital liaisons, with the express purpose of rehabilitating them and training them in virtuous types of labor. As Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt point out in their edition of The Histories, much of the public discourse on the inmates in mid-eighteenth-century Britain came from those involved in the governance of Magdalen House, rather than the inmates themselves: “The glimpse we do obtain of the inmates’ lives illuminates the differences between the fictional and the nonfictional attitudes to prostitutes, as signified by their different approaches to autobiography,” including provisions in the rules for the Magdalen House that allowed inmates to take an assumed name.2
The blurred boundaries between nonfictional discourses on sex work and the novelistic structure of The Histories are reflected in the title itself: “Supposed to be related by themselves.” That is, The Histories purports to offer testimony from a “feminocentric community,” similar to Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), on the conditions that pushed inmates into sex work.3 Supporters of this institution during the mid-eighteenth century maintained that women turned to prostitution out of economic necessity—what we categorize today as survival sex work. However, The Histories provide alternative justifications for joining the trade, consequently humanizing the inmates and depicting the sex trade as a line of work that any woman could potentially “fall” into.
My analysis of The Histories takes up the text’s representation of racialized sex workers, in particular, as subjects who speak their experiences but are nonetheless portrayed as resistant to the temporalized labor values of sobriety, frugality, thrift, and hard work—in other words, as idle. In this way, my essay’s exploration of racialized subjects within a purported memoir is in conversation with Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke’s explication of Olivia Fairfield’s letters in The Woman of Colour (1808), which follows this chapter, where the novel’s epistolary conventions significantly foreground the interior life of a woman of African descent.
This chapter examines two case studies from The Histories through the lens of Christina Lupton’s work on temporal striations and coordinates to recover evidence of an idleness rhetoric that “sticks” to racialized sex workers even in such efforts as The Histories to humanize the narrators within.4 My aim is to develop a novel theoretical approach by applying time theory and affect theory to eighteenth-century formations of race and understandings of labor as it was completed by dark-skinned sex workers. In one entry from the first volume of The Histories, for instance, the job descriptions of two “brown complexion[ed]” women are explained, and we begin to see social tensions emerge.5 The narrator is a sex worker whose subjectivity is unsettling because she exaggerates her “exotic” physical features with makeup and trades sex for money. Her sister, who is disabled, however, excels in the domestic sphere where she completes “valid” women’s work.
While I explore the social tensions between the sisters’ different workforces and embodiments in more detail later, for now they serve as an example of how urgently examinations of race are needed in studies of eighteenth-century sex work.6 Records from the period that detail the lives of sex workers elide racialized lived experiences entirely, and thus the workers are typically assumed to be white. By attending to racialized sex work using idleness rhetoric and theories of temporal delays, I argue that we can recover evidence of these women and provide a fuller record of eighteenth-century economies of sex work, especially as they are informed by conversations in critical race and disability studies. As a whole, Unsettling Sexuality moves away from traditional queer and gender studies to call out the rampant Eurocentricity that has shaped these fields. For example, this chapter asserts that affect is constructed across identity categories, thereby pushing back against whitewashed sentimentality to privilege the histories of underexamined racialized subjectivities. Accordingly, my chapter’s focus on racialized embodiment and sexuality serves as a rejection of studies of sex work that position white women as the exclusive or primary laborers of this trade. While queer approaches to precarious labor are robust, they often elide racialized sexuality,7 and this chapter seeks to remedy this opacity by contending that racialized affects queer normative notions of sentimentality.
Eighteenth-century conceptions of productivity and labor, especially as they are applied to sex work, are complicated by dark-skinned laborers because they were, in racist fashion, thought to operate through slowed time. For instance, pejorative descriptions of idleness and lethargy like those noted in the epigraph taken from The Histories were widely ascribed to dark-skinned people and the type of labor they were (in)capable of producing.8 As subjects who have historically been assigned the designations of “idle” and “lazy” because of their complexion and other biologically determined assumptions, in a trade that hardly “counts” as work, their status as laborers needs further elucidation. Scholarship about sex work in this period—most notably by Laura J. Rosenthal and Karen Harvey—centers white women and their place as laborers in the face of precarity.9 While I am motivated by its insights, this body of scholarship typically refers to dark-skinned prostitutes in passing, offering a few pages in a book otherwise filled with white people, and I endeavor to make these understudied women the focus of my chapter.
Because of the elastic state of race throughout the eighteenth century, sex workers could experience both a fall from virtue and a fall into various racial categories depending on who might be observing or employing them.10 While eighteenth-century narratives are occupied with the distinction between and overlap of Blackness and Asianness, my work highlights nuance in how Brownness and Beigeness were represented and conceptualized. Indeed, my work draws from theories and histories by Gretchen Gerzina, Stephen Ahern, and Sowande’ M. Mustakeem on colorism, sex work, and slavery.11 Thinkers of the period had trouble with the slipperiness of race, and their misguided understandings of other cultures led to “misleading dichotomies that … inhibit our interpretation of written … texts and distort our understanding of the history of racialized thinking.”12 Only by making important connections between representations of temporality, idleness, race, and labor can we fully understand eighteenth-century sex work as it was negotiated by women of color.
RACIALIZED LABOR AND IDLE FEMININITY
Throughout the eighteenth century, idleness was a quality often assigned to laborers who did not conform to white, European expectations of productivity and/or hetero- and chrono-normative ways of understanding “quality” work. I open with observations made about Khoikhoi peoples by European travel writers in the seventeenth century to demonstrate how the same pejorative linguistic connection between laziness and racialized labor traveled throughout the eighteenth century, and indeed into these memoir documents. Christopher Fryke infamously composed nineteen categories called “Account of the Hottentots” and perpetuated these racists labels by focusing on the Khoikhoi women’s “idleness” (noting that they sleep all day, lay all over each other, choose not to work) and “primitiveness” (living “like hogs,” utilizing a language that sounds like turkey noises, displaying their sexual organs openly).13 These “observations” construct a racialized identity that revolves around idleness and primitiveness as signifiers of inferiority, inadequacy, and lack of progress—antinomies of the constructed ideals of whiteness (i.e., activity, progress, hard work, and so on).14 Racialized subjects, often regarded as idle or in a state of perpetual sloth, were “sentenced” to this state of being based solely on observations of their mannerisms and assumptions tied to their melanin. In this same vein, observers perceived sex work as a leisurely or effortless form of labor, despite the difficult working conditions. John Ovington perceived the Khoikhoi to be “a very lazy people [who] choose to live … poor and miserable, than to be at pains [effort] for plenty.”15 Further, he decided that “their native inclination to idleness and a careless life, will scarce admit [hardly allow] of either force or reward for reclaiming them from that innate lethargic humour.”16
I compare these eighteenth-century sex workers to the Khoikhoi women because the latter group serves as an earlier example of racialized subjects whose labor was deemed insufficient and consequently regarded as idle. This comparison likewise documents how we might understand the genre of memoir as one that accounts for, and is interwoven with, first-person narratives, natural histories, and novels. In The Anxieties of Idleness, Sara Jordan compiles extensive primary evidence from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries on the treatment and observation of the Khoikhoi and notes the pervasive reports of African idleness.17 European discussions of the grotesque racialized subject typically focused on physical embodiment (e.g., nudity, filth, anomalous genitalia, strange eating habits), which are relayed to descriptions of racialized sex workers. Jordan asserts that such characterizations were deeply associated with presumptions regarding racialized idleness and an innate inability to “keep up” with normative lifestyles, and, consequently, normative time.18 In what follows, I offer two case studies from The Histories to account for a rhetorical connection that exists between designations of idleness and abjection that are recurrently racialized—a rhetorical connection complicated by the text’s status as novelized nonfiction. In so doing, I examine how observations of melanated skin provide alternative approaches to understanding eighteenth-century labor, femininity, and sex work.
CASE STUDY 1: BROWNNESS AND THE FAÇADE OF VIVACITY
The person who, according to the regulation agreed upon, was to have the precedency in talking of herself; a valuable privilege! was about three and twenty; tall and genteel; her complexion was brown, but her features good.
—Anonymous, The Histories, Vol. 119
A trend across all entries included in the volumes of The Histories is that nearly all of them are “race neutral,” a term I borrow from critical race theory.20 This term refers to situations, works of literature, conversations, and the like, wherein whiteness is presumed. To assume whiteness often positions it as a baggage-free political standing that perpetuates racist ideologies including ones about labor and physical energy. As such, these entries either make no mention of race—gesturing toward a racial neutrality in how women sex workers were perceived in eighteenth-century London—or they discuss at length the fairness of skin and the lightness of eyes, which remain tied to whiteness.
One entry deviates from this trend by signaling attention to the woman’s melanin: her “complexion was brown.”21 This woman’s brownness becomes inextricably linked to her labor, overall exertion, and vocational motivation. Because race was relatively fluid during this period, mentions of brownness were nonspecific and could refer to myriad racial configurations. Roxann Wheeler, for instance, accounts for “the emergent character of race” in the long eighteenth century and clarifies that the categories that determine whether a person belongs to various groups extend beyond mere complexion.22 When looking for race, as this chapter shows, we can also search for ideas, behaviors, and descriptions that are invariably connected to race, thus making known how race, affect, and labor become mutually constitutive. What further racializes the narrator’s self-portrait is her disclosure of Turkish sexual partners and, crucially, a moment wherein she compares her beauty to that of a Persian monarch.23 The racialization of the language present in this entry pushes readers to assume that she shares the ethnic heritage of those she strives to emulate. The memoir itself thus becomes a medium by which to understand how embodiment, race, and transnational belonging become narrativized, a set of questions also taken up by Humberto Garcia in chapter 3.
Given that most scholarship on evidence of race in eighteenth-century London centers on Black24 and Chinese25 women, this entry provides some evidence for the presence and activity of other women-of-color sex workers who remain understudied. The lack of substantial biographical information on this narrator indicates her perceived averageness. In other words, her lived experience, her struggles in the trade, and the complications that her race brings on are quotidian. However, this lack of information and its potential insignificant nature makes this entry especially worth examination. Wheeler reminds us that “the deployment of racial discourse mattered in relation to populations other than Africans,” and this variety of discourse analysis brings to the forefront evidence of women of other cultures laboring in the London sex trade in this period.26 Searching for evidence of even more diversity in this labor force is crucial for recent work on mixed-heritage identities borne of the transatlantic slave trade and the burgeoning sex trade in London. Situating this allegedly Persian lady in A. B. Wilkinson’s research on “mixed blood,” for example, illuminates eighteenth-century attitudes about those groups “in-between” Blackness and whiteness—the Beigeness that I suggested earlier—and why they were thought to have come from a “slavish sooty race of mixed-heritage offspring.”27 Whether this woman is of mixed heritage is irrelevant, but what is important is that she represents a racial liminality.
The synopsis, which comes from a different voice than the woman’s, articulates the woman’s brownness. It identifies the woman as a “lady of quality” and describes her wealthy family.28 At the start of her letter, she notes that her high social standing is something from which she benefited, but she does not elaborate. We can infer from the series of events that follow that the social perks she capitalizes on are material rather than social because “[her] father was a very rich trader in a country town [and] it rendered him one of the principal people in it—an advantage that [she] partook in.”29 This is a particularly useful case because it is written as a sort of comparative study: we not only follow our lady’s journey through the pains of her labor but also follow it in tandem with a description of her homely sister, who, “like most girls, had been taught to think marriage the ultimate end of her creation” and therefore seems to be her perfect opposite both in physicality and in personality.30 The sister’s disability is emphasized by the narrative, highlighting a further binarism: sex working/able-bodied/immoral labor versus homemaking/differently-abled/virtuous labor. The “brown”-complexioned woman gives insight into how color is deployed to her advantage by using makeup and embellishments luxurious enough to only be accessible to women of high class. Further, the able-bodied sister stands in direct opposition to her trade because it produces an acute social tension: she is at once normatively able-bodied for futurist purposes and held back in a regression of sorts because of her occupation. Beautifying the exotic/othered body is part of her business model and parcel of her success as a laborer in the sex trade.
Our narrator is conventionally beautiful because she gestures to the parade of men she seems to always have at her disposal—none of them husband material, according to her sister. That the woman describes her sister as being physically disabled in a way that makes her unattractive to potential suitors additionally emphasizes a study in contrasts that seems to diametrically position race and disability.31 She notes that her sister’s aspirations center on “shining in domestic life,” from which she receives a great deal of moral judgement regarding the way she chooses to live her life.32 The narrator’s sister seems unaware of her trade and is likewise unfamiliar with the narrator’s employment through sex work as a marriage-finding mechanism. The narrator is convinced, however, that her approach to love and admiration is not only the ideal method for attracting the “superior sex” but also “the ultimate end of her being,” meaning that she feels she has no other choice; if she wants to find a permanent partner, she could not “wait till that superior sex should please to accept [her] [because that] might never happen at all.”33 Readers are provided with a comparison between the sisters, a simultaneous disdain for the more virtuous and “boring” approach to men completed by her disabled sister, and an extensive discussion of the labor involved in performing pleasure with each man that passes through her life.
These investments of time and labor gesture to the sister’s disapproval of the alleged and false loophole the sex worker employs for marital aspirations. Throughout the entry, the narrator receives unrelenting criticism from her sister, who warns her that “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover; fades in his eyes, and palls upon his sense”; this communicates the age-old moral in which relying on good looks to secure a mate and thus bypassing the true labor of virtue and courtship will result in failure.34 If we understand this loophole to be a way for our narrator to skip the niceties of polite courtship and cut to the step of intimate acquaintance with possible suitors, it might seem that she is avoiding the “real work” of a relationship that might lead to the hetero-domestic marriage plot—at least from her sister’s perspective. Here, we witness the stereotype that sex work is allegedly non-work: if courtship truly is “real work,” then sex work completed to seek out a husband must be “harder work” because there are higher stakes involved (as countless other eighteenth-century novels detail), endangering the worker from the questionable men she might need to entertain.
This rhetorical loophole, however, becomes null and void because the narrator returns home daily “weary of the labour [she] had gone through, in exhibiting all my charms,” and suffers from unseen labor that she endures in her quest to find an ideal mate.35 This labor is only unseen by those not privy to her sexual activities. While in the throes of passion, the narrator remains in the trenches of romantic labor and the narrative in turn demonstrates a progressive conjugality to the entwinement of courtship and sex labor. In short, the narrator purposely mixes business with pleasure. She labors in a mentally and physically exhausting trade as an already mentally and physically exhausted subject due to her racialized status, which is itself a form of “real” labor, pushing to succeed despite systemic obstacles.
The narrator’s alternative approach to labor and subsequent exhaustion exemplifies how she operates within her own temporal coordinates. For this, I draw from Lupton’s work on temporal coordinates and eighteenth-century conceptions of labor and leisure to ask whether certain subjects operate at different temporal coordinates from others depending on the color of their skin.36 The narrator’s approach to marriage differs from that of her sister and is framed as “less work,” but studying her alternative positionality proves otherwise. While both sisters are presumably equally racialized, the narrator’s disabled sister serves as a foil to illustrate how valid women’s labor (the domestic variety) is exalted and sex work is moralized and shunned. Most important to this analysis are Lupton’s theorizations of temporal striation.37 For Lupton, whereas temporal coordinates are the literal placement of a subject—as in where one lives, works, and socializes—temporal striation refers to the subjective experience of this placement—as in why one lives in that place, how one makes a living, and with whom one socializes. While both the narrator and her sister inhabit the same place, they labor in different spaces and have different motivations for their labor, which produce different social circles. For example, while we know her sister remains at home and works on her “good housewifery,” the narrator “did nothing but carry [her]self to places where [she] might be seen.”38 Put somewhat differently, the sisters again become diametrically situated wherein the sister’s housewifery promotes stasis within the private sphere and the narrator’s sex work demands her mobility among the public: she must “carry [her]self to places where [she] might be seen.”39 While the two women in this entry ostensibly share the same temporal coordinates and striation at the start of their lives, these coordinates and striations progressively drift through labor, ability, and age.
The labor completed by the narrator here is framed as “slowed down” because of her alternate striations. The narrator notes that the “first part of the business of every day was adorning [her] person.”40 We are given a description of her extensive preparation process, attempting to replicate the heavy-handed beauty regime of a Persian monarch on her person and of her “never-ceasing labour.”41 The language employed is notably racialized insofar that she highlights the importance of disallowing oneself “the least indulgence to sickness, indolence, or stupidity.”42 Those who fail do so, she adds, are “slave[s] to that vanity which she thinks exalts her to a kind of empire.”43 Monika Fludernik draws on the influential work of Emily Anglin and Sarah Jordan, who remind us that “idleness is often ascribed to the social and racial other.”44 This work channels the alleged indolence of Indian bodies and is apropos of this case study because Fludernik both analyzes how British nabobs understood and mimicked local styles of living in “the Orient” and discusses how descriptors of indolence were inextricably tied to these racialized bodies. By applying Fludernik’s thinking to this case, readers witness an internal tension in the narrator: she seems to be aware of the pejorative connotations of indolence and laziness and how she is at risk of having those affects ascribed to her—arguably more risk than typical for a sex worker because of her Othered status.
The narrator’s anxieties about being perceived as indolent are more fraught when we consider the consequences faced should her “laziness” be exposed. She “sometimes confines [her] spirits … in spite of a depression … affecting vivacity and mirth, to show the brightness of [her] eyes.”45 Unlike Fludernik’s context that centers on British colonizers’ appropriation, romanticization, and simultaneous condemnation of Oriental indolence, the stakes are much more severe for this narrator because her services will no longer be in such great demand if she reveals “how tired” she is despite “acting a part quite contradictory to the turn of [her] mind at that time.”46 This alternative timeline is allegedly slower and less productive. This temporally augmented work ethic is thoroughly discussed: the difficulty keeping up with the demand of her labor market, the façade of her overall “vivacity,” and the recurrent theme of fooling clients into thinking she is brimming with motivation.47 There is a vivid fear that her true affective state might be exposed because of her exhaustion, thus unifying affective labor’s ties to sex work. The risks of the trade are “rubbing off” on her physical, and emotional, states. She must hide the consequences of affective labor if she hopes to keep up with the demands of her workforce.
While the narrator states outright that her beautification routine is laborious and exhausting, she insists that it is nevertheless necessary to give the impression that this otherwise tiring work is effortless and enjoyable. She describes the “first part of the business … [as] adorning [her] person [like] a Persian monarch,” an invocation that conjures dark complexion, Oriental otherness, and geographic displacement.48 Afsaneh Najmabadi has shown that in eighteenth-century Iran, a heavy amount of makeup, prominent eyebrows, and “Venus-shaped” curvaceous bodies were particularly desirable.49 The narrator implicitly emulates this beauty standard, which contrasts the Anglicized beauty standards of the period. She essentially elevates the exoticism of her sex work and its success by amplifying her status as Other. Making herself more visibly Othered allows her to entice customers and therefore increase her chances of securing a permanent partner through business acumen. As such, when considering her complexion, body shape (which could be read as an “adornment” of its own if her body is not naturally full), and particular use of makeup, we can conclude that her beautification process is indeed mentally laborious and physically taxing. This “Persian” lady feigns aesthetic effortlessness and presents in direct opposition to the socially desired norms of British eighteenth-century beauty and labor standards.
Alongside London’s desirability for and fetishization of whiteness, eighteenth-century makeup trends required whiteness as a base. For example, shiny “lead white [face paint], favoured for its opacity” was applied across the entire face and shoulders “to attain the fashionable white complexion” and so that the blush or rouge that was applied in a large circular shape on the cheeks would stand out starkly on the skin.50 Even if the sex worker applied the same blush on her complexion, it would have been a heavy-handed application to appear as visible as it would on paler skin. The ability to show blush on one’s face indicated a certain capacity to empathize, and therefore the person in question was deemed trustworthy. A person with a darker complexion, on whom blush would be harder to detect, was thought to be, as a result, untrustworthy.51 Brian Cummings adds that the act of blushing was thought to “come naturally” and, crucially, that it “could not be willed or learned.”52 Building on Cummings, this definition of blush entirely precludes our Persian lady because she assembles her blush in an exaggerated manner for hypervisibility. Hypervisiblity works doubly if not triply for the narrators whose melanin, physiology, able-bodiedness, and affective labors emphasize her difference.
CASE STUDY 2: BROWNNESS AND ACQUIRED INDOLENCE
This housekeeper was one who, as I learned from the lady I have mentioned as my neighbour, had, during the continuance of her youth, lived with Mr. Merton in another capacity; nor had her office ceased till he married me.
—Mrs. Merton, The Histories, Vol. 253
The affective labors undertaken by the supposedly Persian lady are not unlike those experienced by service workers of the time. Domestic laborers required a bedside manner like that of a sex worker; the difference is that instead of enthusiastically bedding a client, the worker must cheerfully freshen the linens and maintain a socially acceptable level of decorum. This entry from volume two of The Histories magnifies the complicated relationship between the narrator, Mrs. Merton, and her husband’s racialized housekeeper. We learn that the housekeeper was formerly Mr. Merton’s kept mistress, and as such she harbors ill will toward Mrs. Merton, “behaving to her with continual insolence” after being demoted to this service work position.54 Mrs. Merton also admits that she is outraged at the housekeeper for exposing her affair with a Captain Turnham to her husband.55 She does not feel shame about her affair, explaining that she could not possibly lose her virtue twice over. Because she is already married to Mr. Merton, she gestures to the social value of virginity, suggesting that there is no longer anything to save or conceal from other men. She inadvertently highlights the power imbalance in their labor/employment agreement and, crucially, the temporal lag that the housekeeper experiences through her demotion by attempting to shift sympathy to herself. This power imbalance is exacerbated when Mrs. Merton suggests that this temporal lag is caused by the housekeeper’s “indolence” and “corpulency”—both synonyms for idleness as an affective trait—thus gesturing to a sort of physical decay that the housekeeper could not avoid experiencing despite her physically and emotionally taxing labor.56
The narrator’s language racializes the housekeeper by linking opinions on her allegedly lacking work ethic to idleness and disability rhetoric. She explains in a commonsensical tone that the reason this worker lost her position as Mr. Merton’s kept mistress is because “her bloom was past, corpulency had impaired her …, her indolence was so great, [and] she was extravagant, wasteful, and idle.”57 Here, her language is socially loaded: she raises classist, sexist, and racist connotations, which amplify the accusations of the housekeeper’s purported idleness. The narrator displays a recurrent displacement of responsibility, but what remains consistent is her rage toward the housekeeper and her conviction that she underperforms her duties because of her indolence.58 Mrs. Merton’s description of her housekeeper reveals a different type of sex work—one that takes place in the domestic sphere and involves only one man—that consists of the same physical and emotional expectations of any streetworker. Commentary on her “bloom” and “corpulency” juxtaposes what the housekeeper was upon employment and what she became upon demotion: first beautiful, young, energetic, even excelling at her job, and eventually ugly, old, indolent, and lazy. Unlike the previous case study in which the virtuous sister is physically disabled, this housekeeper lacks virtue and is “degraded into a servant” as a result of disability.59 The racialized personality traits—idleness, ugliness, indolence—are only ever attributed to the housekeeper when Mrs. Merton observes her. Just the visibility of her complexion in combination with her status as “ex” prompt Mrs. Merton to derogate her thusly.
While the concept of resilience has only recently been discussed in the academy as a racist and anti-Indigenous concept, it is also inextricably tied to class. Pejorative theories of resilience have long been used to justify the mistreatment of the working classes through ideologies of bootstrapping, suggesting they exist in those social tiers because of a lack of will, and thus absolving bodies in power of responsibility for those precariously employed groups.60 The narrator opens by gendering the concept of resilience and how women should never “give up” on their targets despite the impediments of social obstacles.61 She “never stop[ped] at the first imprudence [when beginning her affair with] Captain Turnham [despite] great difficulty” in avoiding the housekeeper during her evening outings.62 The story’s presumably white narrator identifies herself as resilient, and the obstacle in question is her racialized housekeeper. She continues explaining her plight, defending that she “did not see why [she] would deny [herself] and her lover so great a pleasure [from] professing [their] mutual love” without “receiving punishment of [her] crime from “[her] housekeeper.”63 She narcissistically frames her hardship as challenging and painful, ignoring the loss of work and status experienced by the racialized service worker. Mrs. Merton makes herself the victim, capitalizing on her housekeeper’s precarious employment status and ultimately reversing the linguistic use of resilience for her own gain.
Typically, we would look to the housekeeper’s life events and observe a robust ability to persevere through her sex working “contract,” her demotion, and her new lady’s displaced rage toward her—all of these textbook examples of working hard in the everyday, demonstrating the opposite of an idle subjectivity.64 Instead, readers are presented with a case wherein the narrator vehemently defends her own resilience in attempting to live with her husband’s ex-mistress while maintaining her own extramarital affair. If we are to follow the narrator’s argument that her housekeeper failed to retain her status as mistress because of corporeal idleness (sluggish disposition, gaining weight), a state she pejoratively equates with disability, and now continues to fail at her job as a service worker, does this demotion signal an affective dilution or does idleness rhetoric pervade all her employment positions? Here, “affective dilution” suggests that the housekeeper’s racialized designation as idle might become un-stuck to her or at least less significant to her subjectivity because she is no longer a kept mistress/sex worker. If we consider that these pejorative descriptions are only applied to the housekeeper upon sight (Mrs. Merton seeing her for the first time and having to live with and observe her), and that the requisites of her labor call for able-bodiedness in the way of youth and beauty, then it is possible that these affects remain sticky because of the white gaze making these assignations.
The housekeeper’s alleged social abjection ultimately leads to her demotion: this “fall” occurs not only as the result of Mr. Merton’s marriage but also because of her alleged physical decay.65 The fall signals the temporal lag that defines her subjectivity; in other words, her demotion and aging body literally set her back—a literal time lag. Eighteenth-century opinions on women’s aging positioned it as a type of deformity or disability, something that James Bryan Reeves criticizes as a “deficient understanding of time.”66 Per Lupton’s theorizations, then, the housekeeper experiences a shift in temporal coordinates and striations, one that sets her on a different, “sickly,” and slowed down life path.67 But what of the racialized complications effected by this case study? This temporal disjuncture acknowledges that physical and social factors are tied to the housekeeper’s complexion and work ethic that ultimately slow her down. Ultimately, the housekeeper’s previous status as a kept mistress was instrumental to her social and financial progress—the only mechanism for her upward mobility, which, in its absence, triggers a derailment of her set temporal coordinates and journey up the social ladder.
THEORIZING RACIALIZED SEX WORK: AFFORDANCES FOR FUTURE SCHOLARSHIP
The Magdalen housekeeper’s intense resentment toward the narrator is, as a result, well-founded because she loses work, reputation, and status. Because she had already given up her virtue by engaging in sexual relations with Mr. Merton, she was ostensibly saved from that fall when granted a formal mistress position.68 As such, in her demotion, she has been unsaved—socially tossed to the curb, but with a housekeeper’s income. Her rage is rooted in the loss of all her hard work invested over the years, not only while in service but also presumably in emotional labor as mistress.69 It is by mapping her shifting coordinates and striations, as well as tracking the racialized language used to describe her alleged idle work ethic and indolent personality, that we find evidence of her labor in an otherwise race-neutral collection. This labor expended over a period that the narrator identifies as “several years” long demonstrates a degree of industriousness that is in stark opposition to the assumed state of idleness with which the narrator imbues her.
By rereading eighteenth-century records about sex workers, I have sought to recover evidence of racialized laborers in the sex trade. If we continue to map temporal coordinates (workers’ lives) and striations (workers’ social movements) and read them alongside historically racialized affects, we can imagine a more comprehensive vision of eighteenth-century conceptions of race, labor, sex, and sexuality. I ask in closing, how might we use these narrative hints to enflesh a broader conception of race, affect, and sex work as it is obscured by race-neutral archives?
NOTES
1. Anonymous, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House: As Supposed to Be Related by Themselves: In Two Volumes (London: Printed for John Rivington in St. Paul’s Church-yard, and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1760).
2. Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt, “Introduction,” in The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House: As Supposed to be Related by Themselves: In Two Volumes (London, Routledge, 2006), ix–xxiii (xiii). They note that an early 1917 history of the Magdalen House written by the Rev. H.F.B. Compston contains an evocative but no doubt apocryphal story that inmates within the Magdalen House wore signs that said, “Tell your story to no one” (xiii).
3. Batchelor and Hiatt, “Introduction,” xiv.
4. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). “Stickiness” is a concept discussed by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014). She describes the ways that emotions are tied to particular words and discourses that can operate across different contexts. In this way, “traces” of affective-discursive regimes from a particular context can be mobilized and used in other contexts. Through this phenomenon we can begin to parse the ways in which the discourses and affects tied to decadence in the eighteenth-century London sex trade evolved.
5. Anonymous, Histories, 1:128.
6. Faiza Ali and Jawad Syed, “The White Woman’s Burden: From Colonial Civilisation to Third World Development,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 2 (March 2011): 349–365; and Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003).
7. See, for instance, Eva Pendleton, “Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality,” in Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (New York: Routledge, 1997), 73–82; Corina McKay, “Is Sex Work Queer?” Social Alternatives 18, no. 3 (July 1999): 48–54; Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Brooke M. Belosko, “Queer Theory, Sex Work, and Foucault’s Unreason,” Foucault Studies 8, no. 23 (2017): 141–166.
8. See Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); and Nour Afara, “Forever Idle: The Resilience of Colonial Ideas on Black Bodies,” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 31, no. 1 (2020): 183–205.
9. See Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10. See Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Introduction: The Politics of Difference,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 375–386; Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 387–405; and Rose A. Zimbardo, “African-American Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 527–531.
11. Stephen Ahern, ed., Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
12. Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Blacks so Called,’ 1688–1788,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 137–166 (138).
13. Gitanjali Shahani, “Food, Filth, and the Foreign: Disgust in the Seventeenth-Century Travelogue,” in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, eds. N. K. Eschenbaum and B. Correll (New York: Routledge, 2016), 106–123 (116).
14. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.
15. J. M. Coetzee, “Idleness in South Africa,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 81 (1982): 1–3.
16. Coetzee, “Idleness in South Africa,” 28.
17. Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness, 135.
18. Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness, 135.
19. Anonymous, Histories, 1: 53.
20. See Sunil Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997); Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference,” 387–388; and Devin Vartija, “Revisiting Enlightenment Racial Classification: Time and the Question of Human Diversity,” Intellectual History Review 31, no. 4 (August 2020): 1–23.
21. Anonymous, Histories, 1:128.
22. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 31.
23. Anonymous, Histories, 1:135.
24. See Lyndon J. Dominique, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012); and Catherine Molineux, “Hogarth’s Fashionable Slaves: Moral Corruption in Eighteenth-Century London,” English Literary History 72, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 495–520.
25. See Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “ ‘Frailty, Thy Name Is China’: Women, Chinoiserie and the Threat of Low Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,” Women’s History Review 18, no. 4 (September 2009): 659–668; and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Women, China, and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 153–167.
26. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 9.
27. A. B. Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 173.
28. Anonymous, Histories, 1:129.
29. Anonymous, Histories, 1:129.
30. Anonymous, Histories, 1:129.
31. Jason Farr’s examination of Scott’s Millennium Hall explains how the eighteenth-century novel conceived of disability, and more specifically, how socially constructed bodily standards oppressed disabled people—very much like the Persian narrator’s sister and her everyday limitations and aspirations. See Jason Farr, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: University of New Jersey Press, 2019).
32. Anonymous, Histories, 1:130–131.
33. Anonymous, Histories, 1:130–131.
34. Anonymous, Histories, 1:138.
35. Anonymous, Histories, 1:137.
36. Lupton is interested in how one makes time for reading, either by forcing it into a tight schedule or by having ample time for it in a life of leisure. She suggests that in the former option, for “more compartmentalized lives—ones that would allow temporally designated zones of intense engagement with books as an alternate to work” that they necessarily operate at different temporal coordinates than those individuals in the latter group. Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time, 36.
37. Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time, 34–38.
38. Anonymous, Histories, 1:132.
39. Anonymous, Histories, 1:132.
40. Anonymous, Histories, 1:135
41. Anonymous, Histories, 1:135
42. Anonymous, Histories, 1:136.
43. Anonymous, Histories, 1:136.
44. Monika Fludernik, “The Performativity of Idleness: Representations and Stagings of Idleness in the Context of Colonialism,” in Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 129–153.
45. Anonymous, Histories, 1:137.
46. Anonymous, Histories, 1:137.
47. Anonymous, Histories, 1:137.
48. Anonymous, Histories, 1:135.
49. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Gendered Transformations: Beauty, Love, and Sexuality in Qajar Iran,” Iranian Studies 34, no. 1–4 (2001): 89–102.
50. Aimée Marcereau DeGalan, “Lead White or Dead White? Dangerous Beauty Practices of Eighteenth-Century England,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 76, no. 1–2 (2002): 38–49 (41).
51. Brian Cummings, “Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 39–45.
52. Cummings, “Animal Passions and Human Sciences,” 44–45.
53. Anonymous, Histories, 2:146.
54. Anonymous, Histories, 2:147.
55. Adding to the precarity this housekeeper faces is the fact that she is not given a name at any point in the narrative, and as such, her entire existence is her occupation.
56. Anonymous, Histories, 2:146.
57. Anonymous, Histories, 2:146–147.
58. Anonymous, Histories, 2:146.
59. Anonymous, Histories, 2:146.
60. Kay Aranda, Laetitia Zeeman, Julie Scholes, and Arantxa Santa-María Morales, “The Resilient Subject: Exploring Subjectivity, Identity and the Body in Narratives of Resilience,” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 16, no. 5 (September 2012): 548–563; Mark Neocleous, “Resisting Resilience,” Radical Philosophy 178 (March/April 2013): 2–7; and Paul Pierson, “The New Politics of the Welfare State,” World Politics 48, no. 2 (January 1995): 143–179.
61. Anonymous, Histories, 2:143.
62. Anonymous, Histories, 2:143–144.
63. Anonymous, Histories, 2:145.
64. Pun intended with the use of the term “textbook,” as this case is taken from a conduct book.
65. Here, I am referring to the etymology of decadence, circa 1500 (closely linked to idleness in historical studies about Blackness and Brownness and work ethic, see note 4).
66. James Bryant Reeves, “Untimely Old Age and Deformity in Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 229–256.
67. Reeves, “Untimely Old Age and Deformity,” 256.
68. Anonymous, Histories, 2:150.
69. We can read the housekeeper’s rage through Audre Lorde’s descriptions of “metabolizing hatred” or being “force-fed” racist hatred. Lorde suggests that the racialized subject learns to deal with this hatred despite its indigestibility. Similarly, the housekeeper in this case is forced to hate Mrs. Merton because of the mistreatment she receives from her and learns to deal with this oppression in her everyday life. See Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 144–175, especially 152; and Shiloh Whitney, “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (August 2016): 278–291.