Sisters and the English Household

Front matter

Domesticity and Women’s Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Anne D. Wallace A

ANTHEM NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIES

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Alternative Domesticities: Revaluing the Sibling in the House

2. “Out into the Orchard”: The Departure of the Sibling in the House

4. George Eliot’s Natural History of the English Family Notes

Index

127 175

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books have long histories. The ideas and early versions of this book stretch back to my doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, to Kurt Heinzelman’s scholarship on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and to Richard Sha’s unfailing friendship and encouragement through the years since we were students together. Librarians at the University of Southern Mississippi brought me obscure microfilm sources, helped me find the Parliamentary Papers and guided me through the Hansard microfiche files. Colleagues and friends in Hattiesburg listened, and listened: Phillip Gentile, Alison Steiner, Ellen Weinauer—I name only the “most of alls.” Here at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from among the many who have befriended and helped me, I especially thank: Melissa Richard, who vetted the first complete version of the text; Robert Langenfeld, who came to my rescue more than once with editorial expertise, savvy and general counsel; and Nancy Myers and Lydia Howard, who were there with practical and emotional support almost daily over many years.

Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 were first published as “Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage,” in Judith Thompson and Marjorie Stone’s edited collection Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (U of Wisconsin P, 2006, pp. 100—23). Portions of Chapter 3 appear in “The Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835— 1907,” available at BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Frano Felluga, https://ravonjournal.org/branch/ (January 2012). Elements of Chapters | and 2 are differently articulated in “Family and Friendship,” in William Wordsworth in Context, edited by Andrew Bennett (Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 224-31).

Virginia Vogel Wallace and Sarah Wallace Richert are always with me and ever to be thanked. Without Tony Harrison, this book would not exist. There is the small matter of “the Harrison Fellowship,” which supported me while I thought through and wrote early drafts of Chapters 3 and 4 over the summer of 2002. But then there are much greater matters: Tony’s exceptional scholarly influence and his labors to support other scholars, x SISTERS AND THE ENGLISH HOUSEHOLD constant exemplars of what is best in our profession; his unflagging work in reading and editing this book in many parts and versions; his inspiring intellectual companionship, and his sometimes almost stern urgings to carry on; and, more than all, his love. There is nothing to be done but to return it.

Introduction

In the last decade or so, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we currently name, plot, and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre-twentiethcentury writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting: even Corbett and Tadmor, who are consciously working against such assumptions, demonstrate continuing tendencies to define “brother” and “sister” in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal, relations that reinscribe these stabilizing, universalizing terms, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in “family.”

Sisters and the English Household works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize “family” as a further historicizing of “domesticity” that renders it multiple and fluid, rather than monolithic; and a turn toward the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. I argue for the recognition of at least two distinct ideals of domesticity, both functional throughout the nineteenth century, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings’ lives (corporate domesticity), and one of which expected the domestic, material, and to some extent emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, though long counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, sibling-anchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once generally expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labor was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth century’s protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household, and domestic ideals. The sister’s autonomy also drove a gradually increasing imperative to exclude adult unmarried siblings from the households of their married siblings, an imperative often figured as expatriation from the homely, or the national “domestic” space, or both.

By means of these interventions, Sisters and the English Household resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England, recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative, rather than contingent and dependent; and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, rather than finding the foundation of that identity in some revised or reconstituted version of individuated subjectivity. With the sibling, especially the adult unmarried sister, revalued as a figure of primary significance—economic and legal, as well as emotional, significance—this figure also becomes an index of complex, shifting attitudes toward labor, industrialization, gender roles, and individual and national identities.

I began work on this study because I was perplexed by the rhetorical conflation of sibling love and married love that I saw in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary works. For instance, in Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), Lord Orville describes himself as Evelina’s “friend” and “brother” for some hundred pages before he becomes her husband: “‘My dear Miss Anville,’ cried [Orville], warmly, ‘allow me to be your friend; think of me as if I were indeed your brother, and let me entreat you to accept my best services if there is anything in which I can be so happy as to shew my regard,—my respect for you!” (315, emphasis original). The significance of this passage through metaphorical “brother” (Orville reiterates the term more than once) to husband is reinforced by the appearance of a blood half brother who eventually marries an imposter, a girl who was passed off as the true Evelina to her aristocratic father and fostered by him. At one point the half brother believes that his beloved, the spurious (but innocent) “Evelina,” is his blood sister, whom of course he could never marry. The gradual discovery of Evelina’s and Macartney’s blood identities enables Evelina’s recovery of her inheritance, and leads to two suitable, prosperous marriages in both of which the spouses have at one time or another thought of each other as siblings. At the end of the novel it is clear that these two couples—the metaphorical brother Orville and the true heiress Evelina, Evelina’s blood half brother, Macartney, and her “sister” by fosterage—are now united in a stable, desirable family configuration that includes Evelina’s erring but forgiven father. Evelina closes her first and last letter as “Evelina Belmont” (her now restored birth name) to her foster father

Mr. Villars with this postscript: “Lady Louisa [Orville’s blood sister], at her own particular desire, will be present at the ceremony [Orville and Evelina’s wedding] [...] Mr. Macartney will, the same morning, unite himself with my foster-sister; and my father himself will give us both away” (404).

Evelina is by no means unusual in its conflation of sibling and marital affections: in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature, blood, affinal, and metaphorical sibling relations are commonly represented as positive models for or preludes to marriage, or both. The rhetorical vehicle of this representation, a representation usually carried through in plot and character as well, is the repeated use of the terms naming each of the two sorts of relationships to describe and define the other, as when the sister-speaker of George Eliot’s “Brother and Sister” sonnets (1874) names her adult estrangement from her beloved brother as “divorce,” or when, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price’s attachment to her brother William is described as above “the conjugal tie,” so deeply seated that it could be ended only “by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify” (273). The apparent congruence of sibling and marital relational terms in so many literary texts of the period, and the implicitly positive connotations of their reciprocal definitions, perplexed me because, in my cultural lexicon, sibling and marital relations are sharply distinguished from each other. For most Americans in the early twenty-first century, assimilated to modern European theories of the psyche and the family, the marriage relation is defined by sexual affinity (often, but not necessarily, including the production of children) and the emotions allied to sexual love, while we define the adult brother-sister relation by its asexual nature, its distinct difference from the marriage relation. If a man in whom I am interested says to me, “but I love you like a sister,” I know there is little hope of a romance.

Scholars, and readers generally, have often noticed the frequent conjunctions of sibling and conjugal relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature. But until rather recently, most assumed (as I had) the universal validity of our present-day sharp distinction between those relations, attributing the literary conflation of sibling and spousal relations, and representations of intimate emotional attachments among siblings, to some unusual, abnormal, or deplorable condition: the arrested psychosexual or culturally limited psycholinguistic development of the writer, or the cultural restriction of sexual expressions or representations. Modern biographers, scholarly and popular, have written about deeply attached sibling authors— for instance, the Wordsworths, the Lambs, the Brontés—in much the same way, focusing on the presumably extraordinary character of their intimate domestic and emotional relations.

As I considered these studies and the texts they examine, it seemed clear to me that while incestuous desire, envious sisters-in-law, and other manifestations of a sibling relationship in conflict with the spousal relationship can certainly be found in the literature of the period, there is also a considerable body of work that seems to promote siblinghood as a valuable precursor or continuing support to marriage, a positive material and emotional addition to the household. If nineteenth-century English people did not necessarily question or deplore intimate domestic and emotional relations among siblings, if a household like the Wordsworths’—with two unmarried sisters living with their married siblings for the full term of their adult lives—might not be strange but well within the range of common and approved arrangements in that period, then why would scholars so routinely set aside that possibility? What barriers stood in the way of a more thoroughgoing historicization of nineteenth-century English sibling relations and of an articulation of this possibility of siblings’ positive value in literary representations of family and household?

Mary Jean Corbett’s Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (2008) begins to answer these questions, taking on the more comprehensive issue of scholarly efforts to historicize the umbrella category of “family.” Arguing that familial terms and structures we now assume as stable were contested and multivalent through the end of the nineteenth century, Corbett posits that these assumptions of stability erect ideological and rhetorical boundaries that have limited critical exploration of nineteenth-century literary representations of “family”:

[T]he stories that readers, writers, and intellectuals tell about “the Victorian family,” for instance—not just a major object of analysis for “the discourses of the human sciences in the nineteenth century” [Pollak 3] but among that century’s most enduring products—frequently fail to interrogate their dependence on assumptions or beliefs naturalized or invented by readers, writers, and intellectuals of that era [...] it is time to change the theoretical and historical lens through which we look at scholarly artifacts like “the Victorian family” or “the marriage plot” by defamiliarizing both the objects of analysis and the theoretical tools we have used to construct them. (21)

For Corbett this change involves recognizing a variety of “sexual and reproductive arrangements of the nineteenth century [that are] frequently crowded out of the dominant narrative now normatively referred to as ‘normative’” (21), including a much closer positive conjunction of sibling and marital relationships, less distinction between consanguinous and affinal bonds, and an implicitly higher valuation of sibling relations as ongoing, though not universal, features of the period’s notions of “family.” Also essential to this defamiliarization, as Corbett’s argument demonstrates in its own rhetorical stance, is a consistent awareness, explication, or replacement of the common terms that tend in our own time to reinscribe the naturalized concepts they carry—most fundamentally, “nuclear family,” a term that Corbett uses only with explicit caveats, and more frequently avoids altogether by replacing it with “first family” or “second family,” as appropriate. Corbett carefully maintains this stance, allowing her to keep the historical, contingent, fluctuating condition of “family” and its related terms clearly in view.

Corbett’s analysis and proposed remedies accord closely with those of Naomi Tadmor, who opens her 2001 study Family and Friends in Eighteenth- Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage with a review of histories of the family over the previous half-century. Noting the “very considerable body of knowledge” developed during these decades of study of the English family, she observes the early debates about whether that family could be best described “mainly by processes of change, or by enduring patterns of continuity,” and the eventual subsidence of this debate in the early 1980s when “the importance of nuclear family life in early modern England seemed firmly established” (1, 3, 4). From that point on, Tadmor says, the field has been in a “stalemate” (6) maintained in large part by the settled use of social science terms by historians of the family. Despite “critical reservations” about the proper definitions and cee uses of key terms, Tadmor notes, “‘the nuclear family’ and ‘the extended family’ and ‘extended’ kinship ties remained among the most used terms within debates on the history of the family” (7). Scholars’ recurrence to these terms has kept them from asking what Tadmor calls “simple historical questions [...] what concepts of the family did people in the past have? What did the family mean for them? In what terms did they understand family relations, household residence, kinship relationships, friendship, and patronage?” (9-10) Instead the stable terminology of histories of the family continually reinscribes the same areas of prime significance: marriage, parent-child relations, lineal inheritance. For Tadmor, the necessary change must be to “branch from relationships of blood and marriage to other social ties” —“friend,” and “connexion,” to name two of the alternative ties she foregrounds (10).

Through Corbett’s sustained rhetorical turn from the naturalizing terminology of family studies, a turn both she and Tadmor find essential, Corbett also withdraws to a greater distance from the framework of modern psychological theory to which many scholars revert when studying family. Stepping back from Michel Foucaults identification of psychoanalysis as a “‘rediscovery’” (Foucault 113) of the true origins of individual sexuality, Corbett explains that she is less interested in reproducing the psychoanalytic Oedipal norm “that one would find the parents-child relationship at the root of everyone’s sexuality” and more intent on considering the residual impact of alliance [...] Rereading middle-class incests with an eye to how they were shaped by shifting constructions of family relations, in siblingship and cousinhood, enables us to articulate different perspectives on both the hegemonic construction of incest as intergenerational and heterosexual and the somewhat static and circumscribed image of “the bourgeois family” that Foucault creates. (18, quotation from Foucault 113)

This passage demonstrates both the care with which Corbett articulates “family” as a fluid cultural construction and the deliberate effort she makes to differentiate her argument from the usual emphases of literary studies of “family.”

Yet this same passage also demonstrates how the most skeptical and determined scholars are drawn back to the same familiar categories: incest, desire, sexuality and espousal, parent-child relations. In Corbett’s formulation, “siblingship and cousinhood” appear as the “residual impact of alliance” (emphasis added), where “alliance” must primarily (though not exclusively) mean “marriage.” Despite the differences with which Corbett engages these categories (incest, etc.), their primary, originating position in much of her analysis reinstates the essential framing structures of the “family” she seeks to reexamine. The subtitle of her study prominently reinstalls the “center” she still circles: Sex, Marriage, and Incest. Similarly, ‘Tadmor’s study subsumes her commentary on “brother” and “sister” under the term “related friends,” a usage that included various kin. Tadmor’s interest lies in recovering this familial usage of “friends,” and she elsewhere briefly notes the plurality of

33 cC 99 ce uses of “sister,” “sister in law,” “my wife’s sister” and so forth. But in Tadmor’s alternative rubric “sister” and “brother” disappear as first-level terms and relationships, their potential significance as primary or contested elements of “family” slipping out of sight.

In fact, it is here, at the specific nexus of sibling relationships, that even vigorous challenges to ahistorical accounts of “family” seem to falter, as they circle back to the same stable analytical categories, the same established areas of prime significance. Here too one may still find undisturbed the initial assumption of universalizing theories about self and family that have been so strongly challenged in other contexts. From 2001 to 2004 three book-length studies on eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literary siblings appeared (one encompassing American literature as well as British), and another more broadly on literary kinship, each of the four citing the sibling relation or the figure of the sister as a neglected critical site, and proposing the remedy of recontextualizing these relations in various material and cultural histories.! Two of these studies, Valerie

Sanders’s The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to

Woolf (2002) and Sarah Annes Brown’s Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (2003), begin by assuming a universal psychology of siblinghood, supported by psychological and sociological theory, and articulate what they regard as belonging specifically to the nineteenth century in terms of these universal human emotions. Although both recognize that a different valuation of sibling relations is, as Sanders puts it, “by no means [...] confined to a few eccentric families, but [...] endemic to [nineteenth-century] culture” (10), they persist in characterizing it as “obsessive” (Sanders 10) or as otherwise departing from the assumed universal psychological template of “family.”

Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818 (2004) undertakes a much more specific and nuanced program of historicization and, as in Corbett’s and Tadmor’s studies, works to recover the significance of sibling and other collateral relations. Perry identifies a shift in the eighteenth-century English family not unlike the one I track in the nineteenth century, though her formulation of the alternative to the “nuclear” model is different from mine. But Perry frames her study’s purpose as the recovery of the “psychological meanings of kin relations” (3) as these changed through the eighteenth century: “literary texts provide the insights about how the conception of ‘family’ changed in eighteenth-century England and the strain that put on existing relationships. History provides the causal or correlative explanations for the social and psychological phenomena that literature reveals” (1). The word “psychological” and its cognates appear four times in the first four pages of her book, and frame every significant shift in the discussion that follows. For instance (and this is of course an important instance for me), the chapter on “Sister-Right” opens in this way:

The relationships among siblings, older and younger siblings of the same sex as well as brothers and sisters, is a fascinating flashpoint for understanding the deeper psychological meanings of the kinship shift from an axis of consanguinity to an axis of conjugality [...] as some psychologists now recognize, siblings are one’s “first real partners in life,” the peers from whom one first learns about identity and social relationships. (107-8)?

The rest of this paragraph then speaks to how eighteenth-century siblings’ expectations of each other were “repositioned” by the shift in family models (108). But the structure of the paragraph, like its language, tells us where the primary importance lies: in “deeper psychological meanings,” in the universalized “first real partner” relation among siblings and their lifelong relationships. I understand that Perry means to say that both early partnership and later influence convey and are shaped by these changing social parameters, including shifting valuations of kin relations. But by persistently foregrounding the recovery of the psyche, whether collective, textual, or fictional, Perry continues to imply a universalized human psychic structure, modifiable by history to be sure, but always “there,” and the repository of the most fundamental, most important meanings.

Leila Silvana May’s Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2001) more successfully copes with the ideological collapse toward the universalized psyche, primarily through the invocation of a (modified) Hegelian notion of “desire [as] itself a historical product, provoked by the social order’s power to prohibit and to permit, to bestow personal identity” (36-37). This enables May’s position that “sister” is primarily an ideological construction, its parameters traceable in fiction and social treatise (Sarah Ellis’s famous instructions for sisters, for instance), and attributable to social histories. Her analysis of the sister as a figure portending resistance and disruption, though designed as a figure of harmony and coherence, accords well with my own sense of the unmarried adult sister’s signification of a disturbing legal and material autonomy, masked as it is beneath her cultural subjection. But having asserted the sister’s significance as pivotal ideological respondent to “an ever more tightly knit and strongly hierarchical nuclear family” (15), a figure designed to carry the weight of domestic ideologies in place of the mother and wife, May turns from the explicitly constructed sister to “the unarticulated aspects of the sororal ideal” (22): repressed incestuous desire. Despite the historical specifics with which May fences this notion—the androgynous atmosphere of the nursery, the British (nuclear) family anchored by the sister figure as a “sociopolitical construct[s] under siege” (21)—it is good old (Freudian) sexual desire, naturalized desire, that has popped up here. Quoting Nancy F. Anderson on the “‘dammed up libidinous feelings within the [Victorian] home,’” May identifies the sister as “produced by the desire of the other” within “this torrid zone of hyperemotionality, which must deny itself as such” (23). May offers an original reading of the sister figure as a social construction of primary significance, but once the “unarticulated” significance of the sister figure is located in sexual desire structured by the nuclear family, that reading is diluted by traditional interests in emotion and sexuality, with their insistent gestures toward an individuated deep self.

If the mechanism by which universalizing theories of “family” have been reinscribed has been scholars’ reversion to the established terminologies of those theories, then a parallel mechanism evident in the work of scholars seeking to historicize sibling relations has been what Nancy Armstrong calls “histories of subjectivity,” descriptions of the individuated but universally structured “deep self” that displace material histories of politics, law, economy, and so forth, locating the driving force of culture in individuals’ personal identities (Desire and Domestic Fiction, 1987). Read back into the same fictions from which they are derived, Armstrong argues, modern ideologies of the self effectively screen out historical and cultural difference by giving primary significance to the paired psychic qualities, universal humanness and idiosyncratic development. Whether appearing as broad expressions of psychological theory, as in Perry’s and May’s critical work, or as accounts of fictional or historical individual psychic development, as in George Eliot’s novels or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, “histories of subjectivity” function not just as a parallel but also as a cooperative mechanism with the established terminologies of histories of family to regenerate ahistorical accounts of “family” and its various relational terms.

Corbett’s Family Likeness provides a proximate example of this cooperative regeneration. Working to escape monolithic constructions like “the Victorian family,” and to destabilize the relational terms assumed to define “family,” Corbett nonetheless remains firmly on the grounds demanded by our belief in a “deep self”: sexuality and desire, as they are instantiated in the cultural forms of marriage, remain drivers of familial relationships, even as crucial relational terms are reframed as fluid and contested. So although cousins, and siblings, and “friends” in Tadmor’s sense of a wider metaphorical kinship, reenter the picture with increased importance in Corbett’s account, they do so as “residual” effects of the sexual and marital relations that remain the primary, generative source of the (now various) meanings of “family.” For instance, analyzing the often-read passage about Fanny and William’s powerful sibling attachment in Austen’s Mansfield Park, Corbett frames the significance of the passage in this way: “Idealizing first affections and critiquing their disruption, the narrative voice [...] implies that marriage should support rather than nullify sibling ties; indeed, the ideological framework even for so-called companionate marriage encouraged the creation of new affinal bonds of comparable strength to consanguineal ones” (40). Corbett specifically contrasts the “affectionate nuclear model” that “now constitutes the heterosexual norm” with the model Mansfeld Park seems to offer, noting that this heterosexual, intergenerational norm has made “the practice of making marriages with an eye to maintaining and reinforcing horizontal, intragenerational bonds” historically invisible (40), and expresses her intention to “take up issues of economics and status” as a critique of such ahistoricity (41).

Yet in Corbett’s formulation, marriage “supports” sibling ties; marriage generates “new affinal bonds” with the strength of blood bonds (as if the new affinal bonds were children born of the “second family” marriage), and “maintain[s] and reinforce[s]” the horizontal bonds of siblings and cousins, including metaphorical (what Corbett calls “fictive”) siblings and cousins. Although the horizontal, intragenerational bonds have much greater value in her formulation than in those she critiques, marriage retains its primary and generative function in constituting “family.” As Corbett makes her turn to “economics and status,” she describes this as a turn from “the marriage plot and the fiction of romantic love between strangers” to “the family plot, in which marriage figures as agent and instrument of breaking or making family bonds” (41). Siblinghood remains adjunct, secondary, “residual”—now visible, and significant, but still a by-blow. The primary, generative function of marriage and sexuality remains, leaving the very structures Corbett means to contest, “the reproductive heterosexual norm” and the consequent privileging of “vertical, intergenerational relation[s]” (40), at the foundation of “family.”

Throughout her study, Corbett’s effort to unsettle that norm is periodically undermined by partial reappearances of the underlying normative ground. In her third chapter, in which Corbett examines the Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister (MDWS) controversy as an embodiment of the ongoing cultural negotiation of “family” and its component terms, “desire” reemerges as a crucial explanation of the complex currents of that controversy. Corbett finds neither the naturalized assumption that the wife and her unmarried sister necessarily stand as rivals for the husband’s affection, nor the “male fantasy of the ‘second choice’” enabled by the sisters’ familial likeness (variously formulated by scholars including, as Corbett notes, Karen Chase and Michael Levenson), adequate to fully explain the “husband-wife-sister triangle” that she understands as the structuring principle of the debate (69, 74). Instead she posits “the wife’s desire to retain the sister for herself even as she also gains a husband of her own” as the mirror image of the husband’s desire for “plenitude,” “two desires that traverse the second family”: “Recognizing the wife’s wish to possess sister and husband as comparable, indeed structurally parallel, to the husband’s wish for ‘two sisters’ enables us to inquire into the conjoined fate of male and female desire” (in her focus texts, but obviously in general as well) (74-75). Corbett’s “desire” is not wholly sexual desire, encompassing unsexualized affection that derives from the material proximities and needs of the “first family” as well, and her analysis on this point is compelling in its own terms. But once the mirrored relationships are cast as “desire” —and that is their conclusive description—we are again within the rhetorical and ideological bounds of subjectivity, the individuated deep self, embedded though it is in historical situation. This constraint is particularly visible in the declared advantage of the new perspective afforded by her analysis, which is not (for the moment) a better understanding of “family,” but a better understanding of “desire,” now located in both husband and wife, which is presumed to lead to that improved understanding of “family.” Once again the naturalized priorities of modern theories of the psyche take precedence.

INTRODUCTION ll

Corbett’s work is not unique either in its historicizing intention or in its withdrawal (partial, in her case) toward some version of modern psychological theory. The common trajectories of these critical studies demonstrate my reasons for withdrawing further from the naturalized assumptions that conjugal relations generate “family,” and that the “deep self,” fostered in the conjugal family and the cognate nation-state, generates identity. Because it has proven exceptionally difficult to avoid the rhetorical reinscription of these assumptions, I introduce new terms naming two alternative models of domesticity that I read as being simultaneous functional ideals, in conversation with each other, and continuously contested, in nineteenth-century English discourse. I posit a family structure in which sibling and spousal relations were mutually constitutive, a model I call “corporate domesticity,” that existed side by side with the gradually solidifying spouses-and-children model that was eventually dubbed the “nuclear family,” and that I call “industrial domesticity.” My first chapter offers further reasons for introducing new terminology but, in brief, I developed these terms to lay emphasis on the ideological content of “family” models, and on the specific material conditions in which these different idealizations were embedded. “Domesticity” calls attention to the ideological dimensions, and also to the physical space of, or surrounding, household and “family” and their relational structures. The modifiers “corporate” and “industrial” make explicit reference to material economic contexts, as well as to the time frame in which these notions of family developed, and can be attached to “household” and “family” in such a way as to mute some of these terms’ tendencies to restabilize our current assumptions about their meanings.