PARTISAN REVIEW
213
self-disdain, refer to themselves as each other's "bad smell," he is
describing a social and psychological phenomenon. His mature plays
are studies in what one might call the colonial or feminine mentality
of interiorized oppression which must conquer itself before it can
be free.
The maids fail. Weighted down with self-hatred, their fav–
orite game is really not to play at murdering their mistress, but
to play at being her. The second game is so much more exciting
they never get around to the first. In the end, Claire, the more gentle
and Divine-like of the two, drinks poison so that the more craven
and "masculine" maid Solange, may pretend to a murder, enjoy the
guillotine and relish a tabloid notoriety. The play's raw material
was the case of the Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who killed their
mistress and her daughter at Le Mans in 1933, capturing the popular
imagination in their gory wake. Genet has made extensive changes
in his treatment of the events, underlining the futility of the insur–
rection by leaving the employers untouched, and eliminating the
daughter to add Monsieur, Madame's lover, the Man at the pinnacle
of the hierarchy, who never appears, although he
is
referred to con–
tinuously, and exerts enormous authority over all three women from
off stage. Madame claims to
be
his slave, and when the maids try to
get him arrested by writing letters to the police, Madame rejoices in
the melodramatic prospect of following him to Siberia.
The Maids
is a study of female jealousy and resentment at ser–
vile status. "Filth does not love filth," Solange proposes, explaining
why it is impossible for the maids to rebel or take concerted action
together. "When slaves love one another, it's not love," despising
themselves, they despise each other, and there can be no solidarity
between them, for like all well-trained women, they do not identify
with each other but with males or with the rich like Madame.
This
is why Genet stresses that the maids are proletariat as well as feminine,
their immediate enemy their bourgeois mistress. Not until
The Screens
does Genet's identification with purely feminine circumstances clearly
and decisively emerge.
Madame herself is kind, with the kindness of the comfortable
middle class who can afford good manners. (To a lady who con–
gratulated herself on giving her maid her discarded dresses, Genet
quietly replied, "How nice, and does she give you hers?") But the
maids, playing at being mistress to each other, are not nice. Outcasts
