Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday is a holiday all English servants traditionally had off. This seems like a generous tradition (and concession) by employers, and it suggests that the life of these workers, who otherwise lived with their employers, was not necessarily a terrible one. Yet as the novel explores, the tradition belies the fundamentally unjust and inhumane relationship between this servant class and the families who employ them. Most obviously, there is a huge disparity in wealth and income. Jane is initially shocked by the fact that each of the dead Niven boys had “a whole room, full of furniture, each” (104). Most servants, like her, own little more than the clothes on their backs or what they can pack into a small suitcase. As Jane also observes, “[B]eing a maid […] you lived in someone else’s house, you didn’t have a home of your own to go to” (103). Servants were not able to rent their own room or apartment, let alone buy a house, but had to live in a place that their employers directly owned and controlled. This meant they had little independence or privacy.

It also meant a lack of leisure. Always at the call of their employers, the novel’s servants are never really free from work. As Jane laments while fantasizing about a relaxing bath, “[M]aids never took long hot baths or were given unscheduled evenings off, especially when they had the day off anyway” (137). What’s more, the work these servants have to do is often demeaning and menial. At best it involves dusting or cooking. At worst it involves, like Ethel, cleaning up stained bed linen or, in Jane’s case, “undoing” (undressing) their employers. Jane’s inability to have a public relationship with Paul is merely the most explicit symbol of this class divide and the subordinate role that servants occupy.

However, it would be wrong to think that the novel’s “masters” are straightforwardly happy either. Especially in the context of the 1920s, when the recent war had shaken the old English bourgeois way of life, the property-owning classes are affected by a certain malaise. As Jane observes, in theory “those who served served, and those who were being served—lived” (99). However, as she goes on to say about the Nivens, “[I]t felt at the time entirely the other way around. It was the servants who lived, and they had a hard life of it, and the ones who were served seemed not to know exactly what to do with their lives” (99-100). The fact that they do not work means they lack purpose. They go through the rituals associated with their class—the pre-celebration “celebration” of a marriage, the portraits on the wall, etc.—but they are haunted by a sense of their station’s emptiness and by a related sense that their way of life, and their authority over the servants on which it is based, is becoming an anachronism. The fact that Paul’s death renders the novel’s major upper-middle class families without heirs brings this point home, particularly in the context of a work interested in the relationship between sex and creation (of children or otherwise).