That work can be read as love (and vice versa) creates a representational challenge that occupies both literary and theoretical texts. Silvia Federici’s “Wages Against Housework” begins with the provocation, “They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work.” This line suggests more than simply the misreading of one for the other; it aims to make so-called “women’s work” visible while simultaneously highlighting the feeling, intimacy, and care that this work demands. Forms of activity that are typically read as labors of love feel laborious and never-ending. Instead of acknowledging work’s resemblance to love only to dismiss it, we want to persist with the thought that “love” may indeed involve work, building upon the scholarship of feminist sociologists and political thinkers such as Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart), Viviana Zelizer (The Purchase of Intimacy), and Kathi Weeks (The Problem With Work, “Down With Love”).
What nineteenth-century novels bring to this theoretical apparatus is a site of inquiry where questions about what counts as love and what counts as work can be relationally explored. Scholars of the nineteenth-century novel such as Jeff Nunokawa (The Afterlife of Property), Deborah Lutz (The Dangerous Lover), and Talia Schaffer (Romance’s Rival) have attended to how relations of labor and exchange undergird and organize the meanings of love in fiction. Love is less hermeneutically suspect for Roland Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes on Barthes), taking form as a site of discourse where feeling and trope appear to blend, but his view nonetheless admits the necessity of (symbolic/aesthetic) work as love’s condition of possibility (“love’s word has its work to perform–like a mourning”). The nineteenth-century novel’s attunement to various forms of social relations, especially those that pertain to romance plots and domestic work, as well as its interest in characters’ affective lives makes it a useful point of entry for theorizing the lover’s work.
To ensure time for a lively discussion of these issues during the Q&A, our panel will consist of three 15-minute presentations. Each of our panelists offers a distinct way of thinking through the coincidence of love and work, as well as the aesthetic and political imperatives that bring them together. Our panel will begin with Hyunsoo Kim, who posits love as a fantastical construction of modern labor that is ultimately at odds with it. In her analysis of Frank Norris’s McTeague, Kim claims that love is not only “corrupted” by capitalist modernity but also (re)produced by it as an “unattainable ideal,” problematizing “white love” in the context of miscegenation anxiety in the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century.
Our second panelist, Letizia Ghibaudo, builds on the idealization of love through work and argues that love is lost (and found) in labor. The French artist novel, exemplified by Balzac, Goncourt, and Zola, illustrates how love slips into artistic work as “intimate relationships become entangled in the demands of creative labor: the artist’s devotion to art often competes with (yet paradoxically depends upon) the presence of the beloved woman.”
Sonal Rana, our final panelist, questions the possibilities and limitations of the novel as a narrative form that might emancipate love and work from each other. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the protagonist’s choice of Rochester over St. John appears as “her selection of love over labor.” Reading Jane’s “extricating” pursuit of love as enabled by her difference from her racially othered double (and erotic rival) Bertha Mason, Rana considers how Jane’s recognition of her love overlaps with her decision about the kind of work she wants to perform and under what conditions. The panel will conclude with an unstructured Q&A.
Like work, what precisely counts as love is difficult to name, and we hope that studying the entanglement of these two terms might help us develop more sophisticated ways to think about this difficulty.