Dara Downey (Visiting Fellow) The Lady’s Maid’s Burden.

Dara Downey (Visiting Fellow) from the School of English in Trinity College Dublin.

Title: The Lady’s Maid’s Burden: Ethnicity, Race, and Servant Status in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ghost Story

This paper examines a range of uncanny tales by late-nineteenth-century American writers, in which domestic servants and slaves feature to a greater or lesser extent. For the most part, these domestic workers, whether employed or enslaved, tend, I argue, to be depicted in ways that draw their racial or ethnic status (primarily Irish/”Celtic”-American or African-American), thereby sharply distinguishing them from their white, Anglo-Protestant, but generally otherwise “unmarked” employers and owners. This paper discusses some of the uses of such figures in American gothic fiction, particularly in relation to the perceived “superstitious” or supernatural status of non-Protestant belief systems, with which these marginal figures are implicitly aligned.