KEEPING HOUSE: DOMESTICITY AND DISORDER IN SARAH GERTRUDE MILLIN'S MIDDLE CLASS AND THE JORDANS

The article engages with two neglected novels in Millin's opus, Middle Class and The Jordans. In a close reading of the novels, I argue that depictions of filial disorder in the white middle class home can be mapped onto questions of class in the city. In contradistinction to the obsessions of her best-known novel, God's Step-Children, considerations of race remain relatively scarce in the texts, where depiction of class conflict between the city's white inhabitants takes precedence. Millin's elision of Johannesburg's black population mirrors contemporaneous public discourses that sought to construct the city in terms of the European modern. Reading the fictions against the backdrop of the 1922 Miner's Revolt, I argue that the novels seek to affirm Johannesburg's trajectory towards white middle class respectability by naturalising the authority of the orderly bourgeois home over the disorder embodied in the white proletariat.