Alumni Engagement Events
[PAST EVENT] Cloud Lecture 2025 - Talia Schaffer
Access & Features
- Free food
- Open to the public
The Character of Care or, whom does Grace Poole really serve?
How might it illuminate our theories of character if we decide to focus, not on the protagonist, but rather on the novel’s most invisibilized, marginalized figures? In this talk, I explore what happens if we look at service workers. After all, domestic labor (including caregiving) was one of the largest paid employment sectors in the Victorian era, and constituted women’s unpaid labor as well. Since service was a virtually universal experience for real women, we might well expect it to govern female characters’ lives. Modern sociologists have discussed how caregivers experience invisibilization, maternalism, and emotional labor, concepts that shed light on both the conditions our characters suffer, and on our own reading experience. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to read so as to make service visible, deducing these figures’ lives from the slight textual clues we are afforded. My example is Grace Poole, the keeper who guards Bertha in Jane Eyre. I ask: what happens if we take Grace seriously as a character? What might Jane Eyre look like from Grace’s point of view; what agency and emotions might she be covertly expressing; and what might her existence reveal about the larger structures of this novel? By asking whom Grace Poole really serves, I ask two questions: to whom is her allegiance given within the world of Jane Eyre, and what larger fictional structures does her character sustain?
ABOUT TALIA SCHAFFER
Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY, whose work focuses on gender, disability, care, and domesticity in the Victorian novel. She is the author of Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, (Princeton UP, 2021), Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fictionl (Oxford UP, 2016); Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford UP, 2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture on Late-Victorian England (University Press of Virginia, 2000), along with several edited collections, most recently Care and Disability: Relational Representations (2025).
Sponsored by: English Department