Unsexing work: Agency and identity in Victorian literature
Description
Nineteenth-century formulations situate work as an important factor in the complicated calculus of identity. Unlike signifiers of identity such as gender and class, work seems to present a special case in that it is something one does, not a category one inhabits. Thus work seems to offer a way to willfully manage identity and access agency, thereby counteracting Victorian theories of identity-as-agency. Rather than being restricted to one's gender and its concomitant powers, for example, one might change class status or adopt a position normally occupied by the opposite sex through her or his work. Yet for both Victorian thinkers and contemporary theorists, the relationships between identity, work, and agency are matters of considerable debate This project uses Victorian and contemporary theories of agency to examine the question of how work and identity relate to agency in The Moonstone, Daniel Deronda, The Law and the Lady, and Our Mutual Friend . I argue that work needs to be 'unsexed': against the idea of work-as-volitional-agency, I demonstrate that where work is understood to endow a subject with the power to volitionally produce agency, it actually ensconces that subject in a different, essentialized identity category. Further, I suggest that the complementary insights of critical theory and Victorian literature problematize the assumption that agency automatically accrues to a category of identity, whether one inhabits said category biologically, racially, or whether one enters that category via work. Thus I deploy the term 'unsexing' to signify the Victorian notion that one might volitionally change her or his identity via work, but also, and more importantly, to complicate any automatic correspondence between work and agency. Thus to 'unsex' becomes a metaphor for detaching identity from agency, including identity which arises out of work. By unsexing work, I disassociate work from the notion that it offers a subject the possibility to remake herself or change her identity in any way that construes a guarantee of agency