Domestic service and Chilean literature: fictional experiments in narrating the household

Since its foundations, the Latin American novel has been permeated by the reality of domestic service, exposing the minutiae of this institution's dependent and exploitative relationships of patronage and servitude, the unequal conformations of class, race and gender that sustain them and the particularities of the reproductive sphere in peripheral economies. As early as José Fernández de Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) and Jorge Isaac's foundational María (1867), domestic service is depicted through minor characters, that, notwithstanding their fleeting appearances, help portray the totality of a complex social organisation transitioning from colonialism to capitalism. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, in novels such as Clarice Lispector's A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964) or, more recently, in Alia Trabucco's Limpia (2022), the theme of domestic service proves one of the principal obsessions of the Latin American novel and its inquiry into the workings of the continent's care economy. However universal domestic service has been, literary criticism on this topic has been surprisingly recent, as per groundbreaking studies such as Sonia Roncador's Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil (2014), and María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella's Los de Abajo (2018). ¹ Similarly, until the 1990s, the social sciences afforded little attention to the phenomenon, a startling neglect given that domestic service has been one of the principal occupations of women in Latin America historically, the institution advancing side by side with capitalism's development in the region. ²

This article assesses how two Chilean novels – José Donoso's masterpiece The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) (hereafter, OPN) and Diamela Eltit's mesmerising Mano de Obra (2002) (MdO) – historicise changes in Chile's reproductive sphere, while simultaneously revealing the perpetual crises of social reproduction visible across peripheral geographies. Additionally, it contends that, in depicting domestic service, the Latin American novel has achieved distinctive aesthetic features due to the tensions of representing the vestiges of previous social formations while also appealing to a global literary market. In OPN, the use of neobaroque and realist undertones captures a history of domestic service that spans the colonial enclosures of the nineteenth century through to the collapse of systems of bonded labour in the 1960s. ³ In contrast, the surgical prose of MdO reveals how Chile's neoliberal regime has left proletarian workers unable to attend to their own social reproduction and looking to replicate earlier forms of servitude within their social class. The variegated representations of domestic service in these texts demonstrate how supposedly archaic social arrangements within the capitalist regime, in fact, drive the novel form to experimentation. If the novel can renew itself through literary interpretations of persistent institutions, I trust that this spirit of reinvention can be applied to envisioning structures of reproduction that are not grounded in exploitation.

The Obscene Bird of Night: A world of monstrous service

From its publication, José Donoso's monstruous yet sublime Obscene Bird of the Night was understood to be a breakthrough in the contemporary Latin American novel. Beforehand, novels such as Coronación (1957) and El lugar sin límites (1966) had bestowed Donoso with the reputation of a minor but promising writer who orbited the 1960s–1970s Latin American ‘boom’ without having enough credentials to be considered part of it. ⁴ A full treatment of this association is beyond the scope of this article, but the author's tension with a movement that assumed literary experimentalism as a marker of universality is an excellent point of entry to understand why a novel whose principal thematic is domestic service has primarily been discussed as postmodernist fiction instead. ⁵ I argue that OPN's literary distinctiveness – articulated in a neobaroque poetics that displays a constant shift in narrators, a double-natured identity of characters and alterations of time and space – is anything but ahistorical and comes as a direct consequence of its comprehensive treatment of domestic service. The book spans a pre-national configuration of colonial Chile through to the roughly ten years during which Donoso wrote it, a time frame that coincides with the dismantling of the latifundio land system through successive agrarian reforms led by the governments of Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964) and Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970). ⁶ Because the latifundio was the platform on which servitude in Chile was conceived, naturalised and sustained for more than three centuries (Bengoa, 1988: 85), it should come as no surprise that the history of its origins, growth and dissolution serves as the framework through which Donoso closes in on the antagonistic but intimate relationship between master and servant.

OPN's portrayal of the different stages of this relationship in a moment when the political and social context threatened its survival exemplifies the impulse on the part of the Latin American novel to historicise the continent's reproductive sphere. The novel's historicisation of the continent's so-called private domain is comparable to Nancy Fraser's (2017) strategy of periodising social reproduction on a global scale since the nineteenth century, reflecting the feminist possibilities of the literary realm and countering contemporaneous omissions in the social sciences (noted by Chaney and García Castro, 1989). The prominence that OPN gives to so-called women's labour should not come as a surprise. During the 1960s, Frei's and Allende's agrarian reforms positioned women's legal status and expected gender roles at the centre of national discussions, with rural women participating heavily in political organisation without eventually obtaining land rights that might have redefined their expected subserviency (Tinsman, 2002). What is most remarkable, then, is how, in its treatment of so-called feminine labour, OPN offers a history of domestic service in Chile by using different literary strategies – a move that might help us redefine the relationship between the Latin American novel and understudied histories of social reproduction within the continent.

The interplay between distinct moments of domestic service and literary form is accomplished in OPN through four storylines, each happening in a particular household and time period. The novel opens in La Chimba, a colonial building that, by the 1960s, had been transformed into an asylum where landowners sent their elderly female servants to spend their last, unproductive years of life.

This narration is cross-sectioned by a second storyline in which readers get to know Jerónimo de Azcoitía and his wife, Inés de Santillana, a couple that reside in the estate of La Rinconada during the 1930s and who are unable to conceive an heir to continue their lineage. A third section presents an altered Rinconada, in which hired monsters recreate a sense of normalcy for the deformed child of Jerónimo and Inés. Permeating these three storylines is an oral legend taking place in an enormous estate of southern Chile in the eighteenth century, which acts as an allegorised tale of how Chile's unequal reproductive sphere was constituted from the colonisation of the Mapuche people from the Araucanía region. In this tale, the daughter of a powerful landowner morphs between a witch – who acts in tandem with her female servant to make the land infertile – and a saint – responsible for miracles happening in the recently inaugurated convent of La Chimba.

The first version we hear of the oral legend – narrated by servants, peasants and members of the working class – tells of a landowner's child and her indigenous ‘nana’, who allegedly make the land infertile through witchcraft. It is rumoured that the pair escape the landowner's home at night and travel the estate by changing bodies into a frightful ‘chonchón’ and a yellow female dog, respectively. ⁷ Unable to resist the uncertainty of hearsay, the landowner enters his daughter's bedroom one night to find a scene that causes such horror that he uses his poncho to obscure what is happening for both characters and readers alike. He secures his daughter and asks his sons and workers to dispose of the body of the ‘witch’ servant lying on the girl's bed by plunging it into the Maule river. He also commands them to assassinate the yellow dog standing outside of the girl's window, in which the spirit of the ‘witch’ servant supposedly subsists. Consciously negating the link between his daughter and the chonchón, he ultimately sends the girl to the convent of La Chimba, where she is to spend the rest of her life.

Mostly voiced by members of the bourgeoisie, the second version of the legend has, at its centre, the same aristocratic girl, now secluded in La Chimba. This version overlooks why and how the girl arrived there, with the purpose of showing her in a saintly light and granting her authorship of the miracles that saved the convent from natural disasters. The narrators of OPN insist that we understand these contrasting versions as two sides of the same coin, each simulating a ‘natural’ relationship between women and the domestic sphere in a time when a division of the reproductive and productive realms supported the expansion of capitalism in Chile. The difference relies on how each fiction portrays femininity. In the first, female subjects who fail to fit neatly into the household are dehumanised and viewed as witches for challenging their place. In the second, the norms of the convent serve as a metaphor for the private sphere by celebrating an aristocratic femaleness in order to sustain itself.

The first version of the legend also demonstrates how the story mobilises supposedly essential differences between white and indigenous femininities, an alliance presented as so anomalous as to be threatening. This menace is attributed to the indigenous servant's negative influence in introducing the girl to black magic and facilitating the despoliation of her father's land. Consequently, it functions as a cautionary tale fabricated to discourage alliances between women of different classes and races by exhibiting the grave consequences that can result from crossing such borders. An alternative reading, though, would recognise the girl's engagement with her servant's Mapuche culture, which destabilises Chile's consolidation as a republic based on the eradication, displacement and disciplining of the Mapuche people (Bengoa, 2000: 156). Specifically, for Mapuche women during colonialist-capitalism, a disfiguration of their identities occurred in order to convert them into anonymous labourers of the reproductive sphere, as it became customary to categorise them as witches when they did not readily comply to positions of subordination and exploitation within the private sphere (Bacigalupo, 2003). Seen in this light, the legend serves as evidence of the ideologies employed to separate white from indigenous femininities, while constraining the latter in a reproductive sphere not their own.

Unsurprisingly, indigenous femininity is removed from the second version of the legend altogether, which proves more attuned to female imaginaries evolving in Europe during capitalism's early stages. Undergirding these was the figure of the ‘angel in the house’, a construction that supported the illusion of a private sphere separated from the market (Fraser, 2017: 27). According to Nancy Armstrong (1987: 6), nineteenth-century English novels portrayed this idealised woman as disconnected from sexuality and proximate to a metaphysical realm, a description attuned with the aristocratic girl of the legend's second version. As soon as she is secluded in La Chimba, she is removed from the everyday and can be viewed in near-metaphysical terms when performing miracles that safeguard the convent from outside forces. As stated in OPN: ‘Inés formed a cross with her arms, extending them with a terrible effort in which she seemed to sacrifice herself to support the walls, and she supported them, and the Casa didn’t fall’ (Donoso, [1970]) 2003: 282). But if the European ‘angel in the house’ shored up separate spheres, this ‘angel in the convent’ idealises white aristocratic women by projecting them as spiritual, not menial, workers – a role reflected in how elite conservative women of the time understood their social position in terms of motherhood and the promotion of Catholic charity (Cerda et al., 2021: 55). In upholding the convent through female sacrifice, the legend posits that the spiritual labour of the aristocratic woman preserves the private sphere. The indigenous woman – generally responsible for the maintenance of the household and said spheres – is effaced, in a move that replicates the devaluation of the reproductive labour of gendered and racialised bodies so crucial to capitalism.

Reproductive fictions created between colonialism and the consolidation of Chile as a republic are still at play in the section of the novel that deals with Jerónimo and Inés’ time in the estate of La Rinconada, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Narrated with a realist undertone, registering the couple's world as homogeneous and stable, this segment of OPN follows the return of a young Jerónimo from Europe during the First World War, his marriage to an aristocratic Inés and the condemnation they receive when unable to conceive. This last storyline is fundamental as it enables OPN to push the limits of realism and traditional literary depictions of master–servant relationships in Chile alike. After their courtship, wedding and first years together, the couple turn in desperation to Inés's Mapuche nana, la Peta Ponce, for advice. This figure informs Inés that she and Jerónimo must simply have sex at the same time as Peta and Humberto, Jerónimo's secretary and servant, advice that gives way to an act of parallel copulation that results in a monstrous child. Here, realist conventions of time and space are broken as the narrative of La Rinconada comes to a halt and a character named Mudito (a deformed version of Humberto who becomes the janitor of La Chimba) takes over the narration. ⁸ Simultaneously, traditional master–servant relationships are transgressed as servants, usually tasked with the social reproduction of their patrons, instead help to fulfil their biological reproduction.

This intricate storyline acts as an allegory for events happening within a universe slowly but surely giving signs of exhaustion. In the first half of the twentieth century, revolts against the hacienda – the institution promoting master–servant relationships as the axis of domestic life – were taking place across rural Chile. When these began, the aristocratic class was already in a decline brought about by its conservatism and inability to let go of pseudo-feudal structures (Bengoa, 1988: 274–277). Those employed in domestic service clearly demonstrated the desire for institutional change when the first union of household workers was created in 1926 (Gálvez and Todaro, 1989: 309). This initiative coincided with a pattern of female migration from rural to urban settings, initially motivated by the desire for employment in a new type of domestic service (Hojman, 1989: 112).

This collapse in traditional master–servant relationships not only informed everyday realities but also heavily influenced Chile's literary development. Up until the writing of OPN, such relationships were usually expressed through realism, as seen in novels like Luis Orrego's Casa Grande (1908) or Donoso's own Coronación. Instead, OPN displays a drift away from realism reflected in the neobaroque, nightmarish and near-surreal tone used to recount the mid-twentieth-century section in La Chimba. Considered the most experimental part of OPN, this section follows the feverish plans of innumerable female ex-servants and a feminised Mudito, plans which culminate in the birth of a miraculous child born of an orphan living in the convent. The women believe that nurturing this child will guarantee their entry to heaven, resulting in a fulfilment never obtained during their prior years of servitude. One former servant attests that the child ‘will perform the greatest miracle of all by doing away with the experience of death for us […] when he decides, every one of us who's served him will climb into a white hearse drawn by three pairs of horses harnessed with mantles and plumes and white reins and we’ll ascend to heaven’ (Donoso, [1970]) 2003: 377). This outlandish narrative must be read in relation to the profound transformations in Chilean social reproduction. The oligarchic character of Misiá Raquel, for example, confirms that ‘people nowadays don’t have servants like the ones we used to have, the ones you have to worry about all your life’ (Donoso, [1970]) 2003: 249), a statement reinforced by Javier Martínez and Álvaro Díaz's claim that, by 1973, ‘there was not a single latifundio remaining in the country’ (1996: 62). Each within their own contexts (fiction and economic history), what both Misiá Raquel and Martínez and Díaz's statements miss is the afterlife of the thousands of hacienda workers whose livelihoods depended on servitude, and who did not benefit from the agrarian reforms; specifically, lower-class single women of colour (Hojman, 1989: 112–123; Rebolledo, 1993). In gathering a population with these characteristics in La Chimba, Donoso tackles the issue as it unfurls in real time, creating a fictional platform for the interior life of a population heavily reliant on religious and magical thought to shield them from despair.

Certain literary techniques also decode the phenomena of displacement and dispossession experienced by the women in the convent. The change from a first-person singular narrator (el Mudito) to the first-person plural gives voice to countless female ex-servants, making it impossible to treat their travails as individual events and, simultaneously, illustrating the effacement of their individuality usual for workers in the reproductive sphere. A complementary combination of excessive language, and the characterisation of La Chimba as a monstrous, ever-growing structure, reflects a snowballing, yet unaccounted for, population. As Mudito acknowledges, even when old servants ‘die off’, they are replaced ‘by other identical old women who also die when the time comes to make room that other old women come to claim because they need it’ (Donoso, [1970]) 2003: 249). However, unexpectedly, Donoso ends OPN on a positive note, with the old women moving to a formal asylum paid for with the undisclosed fortune of one of the servants. This positive resolution of a universe that, until then, showed itself through chaos can be read as symptomatic of the optimism that Salvador Allende's government (which entered its first year of office when OPN was finished) might have brought to servitude as practice. Nevertheless, with Augusto Pinochet's subsequent dictatorship, and the installation of an aggressive neoliberal regime, the exploitation of subjects for social reproduction was far from over, as revealed next.

A world of precariousness: Diamela Eltit’s Mano de Obra

In the decades between the publication of Donoso's OPN and the publishing of Eltit's Mano de Obra (2002), any prediction of Chilean history that was made at the dawn of the 1970s would have been turned on its head. First, the Socialist government of Salvador Allende was truncated by Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. Second, in the almost two decades of Pinochet's rule, a new socioeconomic order emerged that would continue to benefit the higher strata, this time through the implementation of neoliberalism. The now global neoliberal model pushed for the moral and political debilitation of the workforce by promoting policies that reduced the capacity of unions to organise, endorsed ‘a model of flexible individual contracts’ and depressed the minimum wage, while privatising public services like health or pension funds (Martínez and Díaz, 1996: 60–61, 93).

This precaritisation of the workforce is the principal theme behind Eltit's MdO, a novel that discloses an ontology of neoliberalisation across both public and private spheres, and which builds upon Eltit's own journey as an activist attentive to the affects, aesthetics and violence conjured in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods. The novel comprises two sections, which differ in style and perspective. The first, ‘The Awakening of the Workers’, recounts in a tone that Patrick Dove has described as ‘lyrical’ and ‘schizoid’ (2006: 83) the narrator's sense of alienation while working in a supermarket where supervisors are compulsively vigilant and clients ridiculously demanding. ⁹ Titled ‘All Chile, 1970’ and written in a succinct style that departs from Eltit's usually dense and poetic language, the second section explores the relationship between ‘productive’ work and the social reproductive activities needed to regenerate the workforce, by focusing on how eight housemates working in a supermarket struggle to organise their domestic life in tandem with their working day. The remainder of this article concentrates on this second section to demonstrate how it uses domestic service to expose the gravity of the so-called crisis of care in Chile.

Early on, readers might experience overwhelming fatigue at the workers’ plight. This generalised sensation comes as a consequence of the employees’ unending workplace tasks, compounded by the additional burden of their being unable to attend within the domestic sphere to ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis’ (Brenner and Laslett, 1991: 314). A profound dread of being fired contributes to the workers’ angst, as their supervisors refuse to acknowledge a job well done and, instead, highlight the multitude of young and old, healthy and sick, lined up outside the supermarket in hopes of employment. In this state of exhaustion, healthy relationships and class solidarity alike seem impossible, and the workers come to replicate their toxic workplace culture by transferring it to the household. Clear examples of this are the giving of adulatory yet hypocritical compliments to household members who have garnered slightly better treatment from their supervisors, or the threatening of housemates with eviction when they fail to keep up with the pace of the workday.

While the workers’ home is not exactly representative of the Chilean proletariat household at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it does expose how the general body of the Chilean workforce has become incapable of meeting its most basic requirements for social reproduction. This explains the novel's turn to a literary language that César Barros has described as ‘popular’ and ‘lewd’ (2013: 247), and whose aridity exposes the near impossibility of the characters’ existence. ¹⁰ Isabel, a talented product promoter, who holds a precarious contract for each of the products she exhibits, becomes insomniac because of the exhaustion of her standing-only role. Her housemates find it near impossible to pay their bills on time, resulting in basic utilities being cut, and their living in ‘the dark or thirsty or without food’ (2002: 363). In addition, the housemates menace their own with eviction if ‘unemployed or sick’ (2002: 324), as happens with Sonia, a chicken chopper who is threatened with expulsion after contracting stomach flu.

The only exception occurs with Gloria, who gets expelled from the supermarket and whom her housemates agree to make their unpaid, live-in domestic servant. Echoing the oppression of women working in the sector, Gloria's changed role alters the disposition of her housemates towards her. She is forced ‘to leave her room and sleep in a tiny room at the back’, as well as hand over her personal belongings (2002: 318). She is also obliged to comply with the sexual and affective demands of her male ‘employers’ and former peers, replicating the paternalistic model of the latifundio, where servants were falsely projected as part of the family. This turn towards indentured domestic service in an economic period during which there has been a notable expansion of the workforce – in large part, as a consequence of the depression of wages – is an embarrassing reminder of capitalism's incapacity to sustain its promise of wage labour. It also serves as a warning of how, given the right circumstances, even workers at the base of the pyramid might recreate versions of earlier forms of exploitation to guarantee their own subsistence.

An exact correlation between domestic service in Eltit's fictive household and the form that this institution takes in Chile by the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century is not entirely clear from studies at hand. Only the middle and higher strata of society tend to have servants, still. Since the 1990s, meanwhile, domestic service has become an urban and mostly ‘live-out’ labour, principally occupied by women migrating from Perú, while the former prevalence of indigenous Chilean women has declined to only 20 per cent of the sector (Staab and Maher, 2006). ¹¹ Considering that Gloria does not become a live-out domestic servant, is very much Chilean and is hired by a proletariat rather than by a middle- or higher-strata household, she does not map neatly onto these new realities. Yet Eltit's representation of domestic service does engender a discussion of how, under neoliberalism, the tendency of the Latin American working class is towards precaritisation rather than proletarianisation. Through Gloria, readers see the ease with which boundaries between formality and informality, and wage and unwaged work might blur, independent of the worker's positioning within populations that have been historically vulnerable. Whereas in OPN, one might have believed that precaritisation was the consequence of a distinct historical event (the collapse of the latifundio) and that it targeted populations commonly considered vulnerable (female indigenous subjects), MdO instead indicates that impoverishment is a broad-spectrum condition. Moreover, Eltit's reactivation of indentured domestic service within the proletariat sphere exposes the current crisis of social reproduction in one of its crudest forms, as Gloria's exploitation comes from subjects that have likewise suffered at the hands of the market. In proposing that the neoliberal predisposition towards privatising social reproduction can touch or has touched the lower strata, Eltit also lingers on a question that is dear to critiques of social reproduction: how long can a system that undermines the politics and economics of care survive?

In the context of Latin America, one might be tempted to answer that as long as there is a surplus population readily available to do the dirty work of domesticity, the unbalanced relationship between production and reproduction will remain intact. Nevertheless, Eltit points to the falsehood of this assertion when, by the end of the novel and notwithstanding Gloria's labour, her housemates are forced to surrender their home as its basic maintenance becomes unsustainable. No amount of exploitation within the domestic sphere, it appears, can balance the shortage of their salaries, the duration of their workdays and the perpetual absence of state-governed institutions. As a result of this failed interdependency between minimum wages and unregulated domestic work, Eltit closes her masterpiece with the characters’ looking to one particular housemate, Gabriel, who seems to conceive of an alternative future. However, in the final two sentences, Eltit leaves readers wondering what this prospect might look like when Gabriel states: ‘Let's walk. Let's turn the page’ (2002: 382).

In terms of language, Eltit moves away from the opaque writing common to her oeuvre, and into a succinct, ‘economical’ style that registers a profound but controlled rage; an anger that touches the oppressed (as seen in the example of Gloria) but is also channelled towards the oppressor: ‘Generally, the most coward supervisor calls you […] and he tells you shit. Lies!’ (2002: 335). This rage does not fade by the end of the book and, potentially, could be marshalled towards the search for new forms of social reproduction. MdO, therefore, cautions its readers as to capitalist unsustainability through concise and direct language, which also serves as a new iteration of an aesthetics of domestic service within Latin American peripheral literary traditions.

In conclusion, Donoso and Eltit's fictions demonstrate the Latin American novel's ability to capture the devastating transformations undergone by the social reproductive sphere throughout the development of capitalism. Between Donoso's depictions of domestic service before and after the dissolution of the hacienda in the twentieth century, and MdO's account of a general neoliberal tendency towards precaratisation of the workforce, these texts periodise and problematise the persistence of an institution that has largely been disregarded as archaic, despite its essential capitalist function in the continuation of human life. Paradoxically, in repeatedly representing domestic service over time, the Latin American novel has shown a constant tendency to literary innovation. The neobaroque language that Donoso uses to narrate the experiences of the old ex-servants in La Chimba is utterly different from the dry language through which Eltit narrates Gloria's fall into domestic service. We are left, then, with the question of whether, in this tendency towards constant renewal while exploring an institution seemingly obsolete but profoundly useful to capitalism, the Latin American novel has a role in conceiving of new forms of living untarnished by the exploitation of human subjects in the ‘sanctuary’ of the household.