| Abstract: | The article constructs a framework for future inquiry about the role of the servant class in the works of Lady Augusta Gregory and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Irish writer Lady Gregory, like her African American counterpart, regarded the working classes with marked ambivalence. The elite of their respective societies, both artists patronized those of lesser social stature to varying degrees. At the same time, however, they both faced powerful adversaries and colleagues alike who sought to keep these female writers themselves ‘in their place.’ As a result of their complex identities, the servant figures perform deeply provocative roles in their writing. The nanny/mammy, with all of the attendant problems of race, class, and gender, embodies the sometimes similar and sometimes divergent battles waged by these two pioneering artists. Questioning notions of ownership and the labor of literary production, the essay also uses the nanny figure as a metaphor to probe Fauset's and Lady Gregory's remarkable trials of dispossession. |
