lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.
what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?
pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then
...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.
Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.
I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.
If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.
British social class barriers fucked hard.
This is the society that enabled Charles Darwin's Galapagos-related discoveries contributing to the theory of natural selection by giving him a world tour based purely on the captain of a ship needing a companion because it wasn't fucking acceptable of him to socialize with his crew.
