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Role Reversal In 1889, the British Weekly sponsored an investigation into London working women, with a strong emphasis on the relationship between mistresses and servants. At a meeting arranged to hear the servants' side of the matter, the journalist asked for ways by which "a better understanding can be brought about between servants and mistresses": "'In my opinion,' said a rather solemn-looking man, 'someone ought to write a book like "Vice Versa," and put the mistress in the servant's place'." 2 This proved to be a prescient remark; Vice Versa, a recently popular novel, featured a tyrannical father who exchanged places with his son. 3 It invoked an idea of role reversal or 'changing places', which had long been, and continues to be, a powerful cultural device, recurring in folk songs, fairy tales, literary narratives, and social commentary. The power of a Cinderella plot, Tichborne case or a Mills and Boon romance is based on the sentimental appeal of rags to riches narratives; riches to rags has proved just as compelling. Role reversal plots draw power from the disjuncture caused by social mobility, and transgression of boundaries. Accounts such as George Orwell's impersonation of a 'down and out' rest on the idea that in 'changing places', one adopts a role as an outsider, an onlooker in 'another life'. There is an epistemic advantage in role reversal, whether one shifts from a position of power and social esteem to one of marginality, or vice versa. Many accounts are humorous in their portrayal of inappropriate behaviour in 'changing places'. Others use changing places to focus critically on hypocrisy and double standards. In this paper, I investigate a set of narratives of role reversal in the realm of domestic service, spanning the late nineteenth-century to the mid-twentieth. Such accounts are historically interesting because they form a part of a cultural genre, 'the servant question'. This compelling and apparently irresolvable social question formed an important social imaginary within British society for at least three centuries, as a vehicle for discussion about status, authority and social change. 4 This paper draws attention to role reversal as a particular element in the ongoing process of establishing identities and idioms of class, both as a fantasy and occasional social experiment. While never able to resolve the ambiguities of class, role reversal had a persistent and profound fascination for many middle class women who kept servants. Those women who 'passed' as working class servants were attempting to stabilize the identities of mistress and servant through transgression, though they were also pursuing individual psychic satisfactions and social
Role Reversal In 1889, the British Weekly sponsored an investigation into London working women, with a strong emphasis on the relationship between mistresses and servants. At a meeting arranged to hear the servants' side of the matter, the journalist asked for ways by which "a better understanding can be brought about between servants and mistresses": "'In my opinion,' said a rather solemn-looking man, 'someone ought to write a book like "Vice Versa," and put the mistress in the servant's place'." 2 This proved to be a prescient remark; Vice Versa, a recently popular novel, featured a tyrannical father who exchanged places with his son. 3 It invoked an idea of role reversal or 'changing places', which had long been, and continues to be, a powerful cultural device, recurring in folk songs, fairy tales, literary narratives, and social commentary. The power of a Cinderella plot, Tichborne case or a Mills and Boon romance is based on the sentimental appeal of rags to riches narratives; riches to rags has proved just as compelling. Role reversal plots draw power from the disjuncture caused by social mobility, and transgression of boundaries. Accounts such as George Orwell's impersonation of a 'down and out' rest on the idea that in 'changing places', one adopts a role as an outsider, an onlooker in 'another life'. There is an epistemic advantage in role reversal, whether one shifts from a position of power and social esteem to one of marginality, or vice versa. Many accounts are humorous in their portrayal of inappropriate behaviour in 'changing places'. Others use changing places to focus critically on hypocrisy and double standards. In this paper, I investigate a set of narratives of role reversal in the realm of domestic service, spanning the late nineteenth-century to the mid-twentieth. Such accounts are historically interesting because they form a part of a cultural genre, 'the servant question'. This compelling and apparently irresolvable social question formed an important social imaginary within British society for at least three centuries, as a vehicle for discussion about status, authority and social change. 4 This paper draws attention to role reversal as a particular element in the ongoing process of establishing identities and idioms of class, both as a fantasy and occasional social experiment. While never able to resolve the ambiguities of class, role reversal had a persistent and profound fascination for many middle class women who kept servants. Those women who 'passed' as working class servants were attempting to stabilize the identities of mistress and servant through transgression, though they were also pursuing individual psychic satisfactions and social
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