The Maids: Artifice, Performativity, and Society

“Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.”—William Blake

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Jean Genet is the quintessential Outsider. Born to a prostitute and raised in foster care and the Mettray Penal Colony (a kind of ‘reform school’ for boys), Genet traveled around Europe as a young man, engaging in petty theft, smuggling, and homosexual prostitution, and serving time in prisons here and there as a result. He was eventually condemned to a life sentence in France, but Jean Cocteau and a group of artists and writers intervened after reading the novel Genet had completed in prison (Our Lady of the Flowers, which is totally brilliant in case you’re interested). In court, Cocteau compared Genet to Rimbaud and proclaimed Genet one of France’s greatest writers. Genet was pardoned and never returned to prison. Thereafter, it was through art and political activism that Genet lived out his role of Outsider—analyzing and critiquing bourgeois society and its mores, and championing the rights of the oppressed (Palestinians, African-Americans, immigrants, prisoners, etc.). His work is incendiary, subversive, and revolutionary--a critique of normative society and the inherently oppressive structures it engenders.

Genet’s work exposes bourgeois society as structure and Artifice—a play of forms. Even Good and Evil are construed artificially by its workings, and depend upon the degree to which an individual does or does not conform to its oppressive standards. If conformism to society’s Artifice is Goodness, then Goodness will always breed its opposite in those it oppresses and relegates to the status of Other, of Outsider. It is at the level of Artifice that Genet works, then, in order to expose society’s Artifice for what it is. Like Picasso, his art is a lie which tells the truth.

The Maids opens on a (deliberately confusing) scene which, on the level of appearance, involves a mistress and her maid engaged in a power-struggle as the maid helps the mistress dress for the evening. Both seem mutually dependent on one another, and waffle between expressions of feigned tenderness and violent hatred. At a point, the mistress and the maid’s hands touch and the mistress revolts; the maid exclaims, “Limits, boundaries, Madame. Frontiers are not conventions but laws. Here, my hands; there, your shore—“ (42). The irony is that exactly the opposite is true, of course: frontiers are conventions, not “laws.” It is convention, not “law” that makes the mistress recoil in disgust at touching her maid’s hands. It is Artifice and not Nature that breeds social inequality, oppression, and makes certain individuals objects of admiration while others become objects of disgust.

This point hits home when, after more struggle and insults, an alarm clock rings and we realize that everything just witnessed was pure Artifice, a play-within-a-play: the “mistress” and her “maid” are in fact both maids. They are sisters—Solange and Claire—and not only had they been playing mistress and maid, they had been playing one another as well. They return to their normal(ized) states, and in the course of the action we discover the sisters have framed their lover’s mistress and had him thrown in prison, and that they mean to kill their Madame as well.

But they can never kill their Madame, even while play-acting. Their vengeance is always frustrated, even in their imaginations, because they love their Madame (meaning, they want to become her inasmuch as she is superior to them) as much as they hate her (for being superior to them and making them subservient). When the actual Madame appears onstage, she seems kind, benevolent, and “Good”, and the sisters seem to be happy in her presence even while they attempt to make her drink tea that has been poisoned with phenobarbital. The Madame’s oppressive “Goodness” produces the sisters’ impotent “Evil”: they don’t succeed at killing her, of course, and in the end, after the Madame has gone to join her lover, the sisters’ play-acting resumes. It is Claire who eventually drinks the poisoned tea while pretending to be the mistress, while Solange, playing the part of the maid, delivers the final speech, ending on the ironic note, “We [maids] are beautiful, joyous, drunk, and free.”

But Claire is dead by her own hand and Solange will most likely be executed. The sisters’ internalized self-disgust expresses itself as a will to vengeance and Evil, and ultimately as self-destruction. Their Madame will continue to be “beautiful and rich,” to exploit the lives of other maids for her own comfort, to derive her superiority from the inferiority of others. Not one character in Genet’s play is existentially free; not one has an existence beyond the parts or roles each performs in the oppressive theater of bourgeois society. They are all are pure Artifice, derivable from the ultimate Artifice which is the oppressive social structure to which they belong.

There’s so much more to write about the existential themes of the play, but I’ll turn a moment to Genet’s subversive use of narrative itself, which also depends on Artifice. Conventional narrative is meant to suspend disbelief so that its audience can imaginatively enter into the “real” of its action. However, Genet’s narrative endlessly de-realizes itself and exposes itself as artificial: at no time during the play do we forget we’re watching a performance because *every* role is a performance, a play-within-a-play. (Genet’s stage notes even require all the women’s parts to be played by men, so that even femininity is revealed as performative, not intrinsic.) By calling attention to Artifice at all its levels, Genet’s play becomes, for me, a sort of ritual exorcism of social conditioning: anything and everything naturalized by social norms become de-naturalized, even narrative itself. By observing the Artifice of the play, and by means of it, the Artifice of society, the reader becomes an Outsider to both, and it is only then that s/he can gain perspective enough to be able to critique otherwise “naturalized” social evils.

Some questions:

What did you all make of the language of the play itself? Genet’s language in this play and elsewhere is pretty incomparably beautiful, but also chilling in the way it aestheticizes violence/horror/disgust/etc. What do you all make of this?

I didn’t touch on this point, but in Genet’s work a common motif is the equation of saint and criminal. At base, they seem to be one and the same. (Claire prays to God for help while trying to kill Madame, Solange mentions the “eternal couple” of saint and criminal. And of course I have to mention, Sartre would eventually write a monumental study of Genet himself, entitled Saint Genet.) What valences does this coupling/doubling have?

As always, feel free to bring up anything that you want, of course. There’s so much more to discuss and think about in this play that I didn’t even mention…