Serf Advisory
Atlantic, The, December, 2005 by Mona Simpson
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Hesperus Press's elegant reissue of Jonathan Swift's slim, unfinished Directions to Servants seems particularly relevant now, when servants in America, though they're not typically called servants, are as common in upper-middle-class households as they were in Chekhov's plays. Which of his disillusioned doctors or dreamy heroines could have imagined that in a hundred years we would still be worrying the problems of love and despair while eating meals and sleeping in beds made by serfs? In today's professional class many women work, the men work even more, and the household, if it runs at all, is run by somebody else.
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Directions to Servants lacks the central conceit and driving polemic of A Modest Proposal , but delivers a gallery of sharp miniatures, in aggregate asserting the eternal spunk, appetite, ultimate dignity, and humanity of servants. The premise is the old, satisfying one of ...
