SOURCE: “Invigilating Our Mutual Friend: Gender and the Legitimation of Professional Authority,” in Novel, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 154-72.

In the following essay, Shuman posits that Our Mutual Friend demystifies the Victorian domestic sphere at the same time it legitimates the professionalism of the intellectual worker.

Examining the contradictions of nineteenth-century professional authorship and the gendered separation of public and private in David Copperfield, Mary Poovey argues that “stabilizing and mobilizing a particular image of woman, the domestic sphere, and woman's work were critical” to the fixing of “the English writer's social role” and “the legitimation and depoliticization of capitalist market and class relations” (89). Since Poovey, it has become a truism to assert that professional Victorian intellectuals rely on the extraeconomic authority granted the domestic woman by the doctrine of separate spheres in order to resolve the contradictions of their place in capitalist relations of production: they may...