Peculiar Intimacy: Immigrant Labor, the Servant Problem, and Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case

Brian Sweeney

This paper offers a fresh reading of a novel by Anna Katharine Green’s million-copy bestseller The Leavenworth Case (1878), regarded as the first modern detective novel, in order to resituate the origins of the detective novel in questions regarding immigration, labor, and national collectivity in post-Reconstruction America.  At a moment when plantation fiction was nostalgically depicting the relation between master and slave as one in which familial intimacy triumphed over economic relations, the servant was emerging as a “problem” for the American moneyed classes.  Articles in magazines like Harper’s complained bitterly of the Irish servant’s refusal to ignore her economic self-interest in order to conceive of herself as tied to her employer by unbreakable bonds of affect.  By seeking economic self-determination, Irish servants (as they were represented in such debates) perversely resisted their employers’ efforts to possess them sentimentally and thus exposed the forms of economic inequality that existed at the heart of the supposedly affective domain of the bourgeois home.  In The Leavenworth Case, the murder by one of his household employees of the wealthy philanthropist Horatio Leavenworth--a murder committed for both love and money--foregrounds anxieties about the interpenetration of affection and economic calculation in the bourgeois household also evident in the “servant problem” debates.  In attempting to resolve these anxieties in fictional form, The Leavenworth Case brings a new genre into being, one at whose center stands the detective, a character who represents a radical dissociation of agency and economic self-interest one might call the "professional attitude."