Аннотация:This essay focuses on a central strand of a complex process: the intersection of class and gender ideologies in an icon of Victorian fiction, the “Angel in the House,” who comprises and is constituted by her ideological other, the servant. A wife, the presiding hearth angel of Victorian social myth, actually performed an important and extensive economic function. Prevailing ideology held that the house was a haven, a private domain opposed to the public sphere of commerce; but, in fact, the mistress managed her husband's earnings to acquire social and political status and thus served as a significant adjunct to his commercial endeavors. Several discursive practices coalesced in the 1830s and 1840s to give middle-class women unprecedented power, so that running the bourgeois household became an exercise in class management, a process both inscribed and exposed in the Victorian novel.
