The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel

How 'Luster,' 'Such A Fun Age,' and similar novels express tensions between white women and WOC in elite circles

Sept. 9, 2024 cover for The New Yorker by R. Kikuo Johnson

This essay was first published in the Volume 2.1 print issue of The Cleveland Review of Books¹ in 2024.

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The young nanny has long captured our collective imagination as a feminine ideal: youthful, vulnerable in a stranger’s home, and professionally obligated to please. She’s invariably beautiful, or at least sexually appealing in her availability, and it is a classic trope for men to fall for their nannies or governesses: Jude Law, Captain von Trapp, and, of course, the epitome of literary examples, Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Yet for all her girlishness, the young nanny also gets to serve as a mother figure without having had to make the physical sacrifice of childbirth. And while she lives among the elites, gaining access to their most intimate belongings and quarters, she is not corrupted by their wealth or privileges because she remains an outsider.

Jane Eyre may be the quintessential young-nanny novel in Western literature, but in the twentieth century, there have been branching explorations of this narrative. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story from the perspective of Bertha Mason (Mr. Rochester’s infamous first wife, the “Madwoman in the Attic”) and sheds light on her upbringing as a white plantation-class girl in Jamaica. In Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, the nanny is a young Black immigrant woman from the West Indies.

In the past few years, several novels have taken this narrative in a new direction, where the young nannies are American-born and well-educated women of color. Re Jane by Patricia Park turns Jane Eyre into Jane Re, a mixed-race Korean/white woman living in New York City. Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age features a Black woman, Emira Tucker, who becomes a babysitter for a wealthy white family in Philadelphia. Luster by Raven Leilani follows Edie, a Black woman who begins an affair with Eric, an older, affluent white man, and becomes a makeshift live-in nanny for him and his wife’s adopted Black daughter. Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu focuses on Willa Chen, a mixed-race Chinese/white woman who becomes a nanny for a rich white family in New York City.

With the power of authorship comes the power of writing oneself into desirable narratives. Given that the young nanny is a feminine ideal, it is no wonder that well-educated and upwardly mobile women of color (Park, Reid, Leilani, and Wu all have MFAs) would want to feature characters like themselves in this enviable role. On top of this, the tropes of the young nanny narrative provide a natural setup for the racial clashes women of color experience when among their elite white peers.

“Elite” and “peers” are the key terms here, because compared to the rigid social divides in older and more traditional master/servant narratives, the class barrier between the protagonists of these novels and their employers is more porous. Jane, Emira, Edie, and Willa are all college-educated with upward class trajectories. Before becoming a nanny for the Mazer-Farleys, Jane has a post-college offer lined up at a finance firm. Edie works as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. Willa is amidst a mid-twenties drift of self-discovery, more concerned with finding herself than making money. As the first in her family to attend college, Emira comes closest to being working class, but she ends up working as an assistant to a high-ranking government official.

At the same time, their white employers do not belong to an incomprehensibly superior socio-economic stratosphere. They are the “working rich,” with their salaries and investments merely sustaining the mortgages on their homes and private school tuitions for their children. Granted, there are substantial material differences between the white families and their nannies: in the homes they live in, the clothes they wear, and the food they eat. But the nannies are also significantly younger, with all of them between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-five. The wealth and tastes of their employers are more a function of age than uncrossable divides in birth stations—a fact that Edie eventually acknowledges when she observes that “all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life.” She regrets, too, that on their dates, she became “awed” by Eric’s “middling command” of the wine list. Whatever chasm in upbringing exists between the Erics and Edies of the world, it is clearly bridgeable. Given the nannies’ education and aspirations, it is foreseeable that they will one day join their employers’ social tier.

The major barrier, however, is race. Typically, racism has been characterized either at the systemic levels, such as discrimination in employment, educational, and media-visibility opportunities, or at the interpersonal level, such as overt acts of aggression like violence or slurs. But much less examined is the racism experienced in women’s social spheres. Writer Elaine Hsieh Chou noted this reality with respect to Asian women (but which could also be said regarding all women of color) in an interview in Vanity Fair: “Our oppression by white men is persistent and obvious; our oppression by white women is just as persistent, only better concealed under the false assumption that because white women also live under the patriarchy, they are incapable of causing harm.”²

Chou highlights the fact that since people tend to socialize more frequently with their own gender, men and women of color will likely experience their most personal and cutting racist encounters from their own gender. She asserts that white women’s racism against Asian women is shown in how they denigrate the relatively common relationships between white men and Asian women: the white men are portrayed as gross losers and the Asian women as sexually cunning and desperate. In both Win Me Something and Luster, when the protagonists try on the clothes of their white female employers, there is an element of social retribution in their acts. Willa and Edie want to feel equal to the type of women that, for all their lives, they’ve been told they are lesser than. In fact, forget equality—the dresses look better on them.

As the female perspective becomes prioritized, especially those of women of color, it makes sense that this homosocial form of female-centric racism is more prominently discussed. The appeal of the nanny narrative becomes apparent as women of color writers are able to use it to air their intra-class and intra-gender grievances without being too overt. Female aggression is not looked kindly upon, and women attacking other women is often criticized as internalized misogyny. By taking on the perspective of nannies, however, even highly educated ones, they are there as the help, not as rival social intruders. And the employer-employee framework turns what might be seen as petty elite infighting into a classic story of class struggle.

The nannies are all employed by heterosexual nuclear families that follow modernized gender roles in which both parents work, but where the wife/mother still takes a lead in domestic concerns. As such, the white wife/mother becomes the primary authority figure who hires, instructs, and communicates with the nannies. These young women of color come to represent the new blood, while the affluent white women’s high-status positions render them unavoidably the antagonists. But antagonism, of course, does not mean constant hostility: only someone who presents an obstacle for the protagonist’s desire. As the ladies of the house, the white female employers are looked upon by the nannies with some awe. Before meeting her boss, Nathalie, Willa imagines her to be towering and imposing. Nathalie turns out to be petite, but Willa is still taken aback and intimidated by her beauty. When Edie spies on Eric and Rebecca having sex, she thinks that “regrettably, they are beautiful.”

Still, there is a sentiment that the beauty and wealth of these white female employers are only theirs because of undeserved racial advantages and that comeuppance is at hand. The most glaring example is Emira’s boss, Alix Chamberlain, who’s the embodiment of a 2010s upper-class girlboss white feminist. Alix has her own business that coaches professional women on how to write cover letters (which she’s parlayed into a book deal), and she idolizes Hillary Clinton. Missing her more glamorous Sex and the City-like life back in New York City, Alix envies Emira’s youth and beauty and becomes obsessed with her, even reading notifications on Emira’s unattended phone to live vicariously through her dating life. When Emira decides to quit, Alix steals and leaks Emira’s video of when Emira was racially profiled by a security guard for supposedly kidnapping Alix’s daughter. Alix then portrays herself as a woke ally to Emira, thus convincing her to stay (and drumming up publicity for her book). Her plan backfires when Emira discovers what she did and quits her job on a live television interview with Alix.

But even the white women who aren’t as nefarious as Alix suffer unhappy endings. Jane frequently notes how much older and uglier her employer, Beth Mazer, is compared to Beth’s husband, Ed Farley, with whom Jane has an instantly reciprocated attraction. Meanwhile, Beth confides in Jane about her dead sex life with Ed, which Jane isn’t surprised by. She not only notes Beth’s physical flaws (“I told them about Beth’s hairy armpits . . . I couldn’t believe she was the one who got to be with Ed.”), she also blames Beth’s earnest feminism for pushing her husband away. During her employment, Jane turns not only Ed, but also their daughter, Devon, against Beth (“The truth was, we could not wait for Beth to be gone.”). Ed eventually sleeps with Jane, and Beth divorces him. But Ed does not view Jane as a mere sexual conquest, and after his divorce, he and Jane pursue a real relationship. To add insult to injury, Beth has to reconcile with Jane because of her connection with Devon, whose temporary anger at Jane is less about Jane having had an affair with Devon’s father, and more about Jane having abruptly quit her nanny position. Compared to Beth, Jane proves herself to be the superior lover and mother, usurping her entirely.

“If you need me a pick-me-up, I welcome you to make a white man your bitch,” says Edie early on in Luster. But what about making a white woman her bitch? There is something akin to a female version of a cuckold fantasy in how Edie moves into Eric and Rebecca’s home and becomes a mother figure to Akila in ways that Rebecca cannot, such as when Edie teaches Akila how to take care of her Black hair. Rebecca has to house, pay, and be civil towards the younger and more attractive woman (Edie benchmarks her looks against Rebecca’s: “I finally conclude that I’m better looking”) who is sleeping with her husband. Rebecca isn’t completely compliant: she makes Edie wear a dress for her and Eric’s anniversary party that’s so expensive and tight that Edie is convinced Rebecca wants to humiliate her. But she also takes Edie under her wing, such as bringing her to her workplace at the morgue, or driving her to the hospital when Edie miscarries her and Eric’s baby. Still, Rebecca has to tolerate Edie and Eric continuing their affair in her home, with the telltale signs impossible to ignore (“Bobby pins are left behind, and a crystal centerpiece is destroyed”).

If the nannies are set on an adversarial collision course with their white female employers, the clash with their white male employers is in less direct competition. Aspiring for the same social stratum as the white women they work for, the nannies also go for—or at least are drawn to—the same type of men: in Jane and Edie’s cases, the exact same men. For the others, they look within their employers’ intimate circles: Emira dates Kelley Copeland, who is Alix’s ex-boyfriend from high school, and Willa has a semi-romance with Nathalie’s brother, Ethan, whom she later learns was on a break from his fiancée, who looks like her.

It follows a logic that all but the most in-denial image-conscious people can admit to understanding: among predominantly heterosexual social spheres, the same-gender members of an out-group are a more direct threat than opposite-gender ones. This explains why the white male characters are written more sympathetically than their female counterparts. Kelley may be guilty of fetishizing Black culture, but he never crosses into villainy. Crucially, he keeps his promise to Emira in never releasing the video he recorded of her racial profiling incident and is blameless for Alix’s machinations. While both Beth and Ed are far wealthier than Jane, she finds Ed relatable because of his working-class Irish/Italian Brooklyn roots. Even in a white patriarchy that’s unwelcoming to people of color, a white man is still the more comforting and relatable figure than the white woman. While Edie has her issues with Eric—towards the end of the book, she wonders if their relationship has become transactional, as an exchange of her “twenty-something pussy and his fraying telomeres”—her actions are crueler to Rebecca. At least Eric got a hot affair out of the whole endeavor.

This is not to say that these novels are just examples of silly female cattiness. The feminine experience of racism is no more or less important than its masculine counterpart, and it deserves to be explored in our culture. To respect women’s perspectives is to respect their grievances in their private lives, especially those that occur in the many moments that are invisible from men. But there is an issue worth debating about what kind of societal ideal these types of narratives are striving for. Should stories of racism primarily be about the social obstacles that select people of color face as they make their intra-elite ascendance? It is notable that though the nannies all find themselves gaining unprecedented access to a world that had been closed off to them, other than a couple having affairs with their male employers, none of them cause much of a ruckus. There are no plots to throw wild parties with their old friends back home while the masters of the house are out, or schemes to burglarize the estate.

Granted, were these novels to follow such plotlines, they’d be of a completely different nature. But that also shows the implicit intention of these books. It would never occur to the nannies to act out because doing so would be class betrayal. For all their self-perception as outsiders, they are much closer in status with their employers than they would like to believe. As such, their crowning act of aggression is not revolution, but assimilation.

Is there anything wrong with preferring assimilation to revolution? Assimilation has become a dirty word in socially progressive circles, where everyone wants to see themselves as defiant radicals. But assimilation is far more peaceful than revolution. If the nannies’ goal is personal happiness, assimilation is more conducive to that goal than revolution, where the logical endpoint could be ostracization, violence, and even death. Going out in a blaze of bloody glory is also one that is more amenable to traditionally masculine notions of warlike virtue (call it Valhalla Syndrome).

The Cleveland Review of Books Volume 2.1 Print Edition

For would-be elite people of color, the drive for assimilation is understandable. Under social progressivism’s own logic, we live in an unfairly white-dominated society where white people occupy the most desirable stations in life. Wouldn’t equality require a redistribution of those powers and privileges? And what good would it do anyone to tear down a perfectly beautiful and well-constructed house in a spiteful rage? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to evict the owners—or at least just the ones you don’t like—and take their place?

But if we are to uphold the righteousness of upward assimilation, there is the unsettling question of who gets left behind and what it bodes for our understanding of racial solidarity. Though race is a central theme in all these novels, the protagonists are either disconnected from their communities, or, worse, do not want to associate with them. For Willa and Jane, their mixed-race backgrounds make them feel alienated and even discriminated against in their respective Chinese and Korean American communities. It is only when they remove themselves from these environments that they are able to self-actualize. Emira has some Black female friends, but she is more of an adrift loner, as is Edie. All of their racial identities are highly individualized and defined by their personal experiences with elite white people.

If racial progress is centered on the trials and tribulations of women of color as they make their social ascent, where do men of color—especially peer-aged men of color—feature, if at all? In these novels, men of the same race and age as the protagonists are mostly irrelevant. Edie recalls losing her virginity to a mixed-race Black/Asian man in her teenage years, and Jane dates a Korean man during her sojourn in Korea. But the former is chalked up to youthful indiscretion, and the latter is doomed from the start since Jane’s heart belongs to Ed. What does this say of the shared interests of women and men of color? Would solidarity mean staying out of each others’ way as they make the climb towards assimilation? If so, we should at least be more honest about it. But no one wants to do that, since revolution sounds cooler and nobler than assimilation.

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2. “You Know What I Say About Men Who F--- Asian Women?” by Elaine Hsieh Chou | Vanity Fair