Maid and Mistress: Feminine Solidarity and Class Difference in Five Nineteenth-Century French Texts.

Inspired by reading Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie (1883) to write a history of the relationships of mistresses and maids in French fiction, Susan Yates has examined five examples of French realist fiction, including Une Vie, Balzac's Eugenie Grandet (1833), Goncourt brothers' Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Flaubert's Un Coeur simple (1877), and Zola's Pot-Bouille (1882). Yates argues that these cross-class relationships not only are important to understanding nineteenth-century social discourse on domestic servants but that the maidservant may represent something far closer to the modern female experience than many of us acknowledge.

Never truly the subject of any of these novels, the servant is nevertheless a central motif throughout these and many other nineteenth-century novels. Yates divides the literary portraits of servants into two categories which also reflect the roles and images of the nineteenth century woman: the perfect servant is the perle, worth her weight in gold to her employer, she is humble yet extraordinarily faithful and hardworking. At times she seems more animal-like than human with the loyal dedication of a domestic pet and the stamina of a beast of burden. The texts featuring the perle tend to deny the reality of class. The image of the dedicated all-suffering servant appeals to the myth of a simpler time before human relationships were exploited merely for profit.

The second category of images is the souillon, that is, the servant as the source of moral and social pollution in the middle class family. The maid, like the prostitute, "is associated in the most fundamental way with the imagery of the expulsion of filth." Dealing with the wastes of daily life, the servant is identified particularly with illicit sexuality--the woman who is souillee or soiled, the slut. The image of the souillon thus denotes the uneasiness of the middle classes toward the urban lower classes, which both literary and social historians have already noted, and the anxiety about crime. Yates notes as an excellent example of this theme Maupassant's Rose about a young noblewoman whose personal maid is arrested by the police as an escaped murderer. The maid who had been so treasured by her mistress and with whom the noblewoman shared the most intimate contact was in fact a man, a rapist and murderer in disguise. There could be no clearer illustration of the theme of the servant as potential enemy, poised to release her "repressed sexual and criminal impulses."

Some of the texts chosen by Yates have been analyzed by previous literary critics like Naomi Schor in Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (1985) and a growing number of social historians like Anne-Martin Fugier in La Place des bonnes (1979) and La Bourgeoise (1983). Yet Yates' insights are instructive and her thesis very well-argued. The cross-class relationships of mistresses and servants which Yates explores are crucial to an understanding of nineteenth-century society. Yates is very persuasive that this literary representation of the interdependency of servant and mistress presents "Woman as the second sex: an underclass in a male-dominated hierarchy."

This is a valuable study which brings together a reasoned analysis of the literary texts with a good understanding of social history. While the male's domination of society is reflected in his holding the public stage and marking his progress toward goals, a female's subjugation is emphasized by her experience "in the predetermined and unchanging cyclical time of home and church." Yates' analysis is less satisfying to a social historian in her conclusions about the circularity of the five major texts and her insistence upon their relevance to the historical experience. Both mistresses and servants lived lives, suggests Yates, as "a timeless remembrance of love lost."

In emphasizing her texts' circularity, Yates tends to flatten the historical changes which transformed Balzac's Paris of the 1820s into Maupassant's Paris of the late Second Empire and Third Republic. By the era of Zola and Maupassant, the period of the most intense urbanization of Paris had already ended, France's economy was undergoing a deep depression and a complete transformation of the working life of the population. As both Zola and Maupassant were well-aware, the "woman question"--the status of roles of women in society--was being heatedly debated in the context of a wide variety of social issues including depopulation, divorce, and child abandonment. While literary tropes impose important similarities upon Yates' chosen texts, these "realist" works also exhibit significant differences. Yates' accomplishments in representing the centrality of the female cross-class relationship to nineteenth-century society should be applauded, but a social historian would prefer a more nuanced analysis of the changes over time.

Theresa McBride Holy Cross College