The Dialogical Servant: Master-servant relations and the construction of servant identity in elite 19th and 21st century British households.

This thesis examines the relationship between domestic servants and their employers in Britain in two separate time periods: the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Based on diverse sources, including archived servant letters from the nineteenth century and oral history interviews conducted with contemporary servants working in elite homes in Britain today, I set out to reconsider traditional perspectives on servants, their lived experience and their interactions with their employers.
In working with their narratives, I set out to challenge reductive understandings of servants’ roles and to reconceptualise them as multi-faceted individuals. Through an examination of servants’ interpersonal linguistic strategies and the relational aspects of their interactions, I conceptualise the master-servant relationship as a site for the construction and contestation of servant identity. In so doing, I reveal the complex tensions and ambiguities that characterise working relations between masters and servants, relations that are deeply intimate yet also indisputably economic.
Building on themes of interpersonal relations, identity, representation, and agency, I chart the continuities and discontinuities that emerge in master-servant relations to produce the concept of the dialogical servant. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I demonstrate that servant identity is not a final and fixed subjectivity but rather is contingent, emergent and dynamically managed in interaction, and contested and reworked through an ongoing, dialogical relationship between individuals. In bringing material from two different time periods into conversation, this thesis contributes new insights to both historical and contemporary understandings of domestic service, establishing how servants author their own identities and make meaning within the specific social and cultural contexts of their everyday lives.