The mistress-maid binary has provided an inexhaustible source of thematic content in narrative fiction as well as in visual art, drama and film. Narratives that deal with the relation between mistress and maid include those of Sarai and Hagar, Rachel and Bilhah, Leah and Zilpah in Genesis 16:1-16, 21:1-21 and 30:1-13; Camilla and her maid Leonela in the “Novel of a Curious Impertinent” in Part I of Don Quixote (1605); Roxana and her maid Amy in Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Arabella and Lucy in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752); Lady Delacour and her maid Marriott in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801); Cathy and Ellen Dean in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Lady Dedlock and Hortense in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853); Margaret Hale and her maid Dixon in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855); Lucy Graham (Lady Audley) and her maid Phoebe Marks in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1860); the Misses Leaf and their maid Elizabeth Hand in Dinah Craik’s Mistress and Maid (1864); Mrs Transome and her waiting woman Denner in George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866); Mme Aubain and her live-in maid-of-all-work Félicité in Flaubert’s short story “Un Coeur Simple” in Trois Contes (1874); Miserrimus Dexter’s “Mistress and Maid” in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875); Esther and her various mistresses in George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894); the mistress and her maid Ellen in Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Lady’s Maid” (1906); Miss Mathilde, Mrs Lehntman and Anna, and Mrs Haydon and Lena in Gertrude Stein’s “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” in Three Lives (1909); mistress and maid in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Manservant and Maidservant (1934); the South African mistress Mrs Plum and her African maid Karabo in Ezekiel Mphahlele’s novella “Mrs Plum” in In Corner B (1967); Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); Serena and Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Miss Leefolt and Aibileen in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009), and blind Agnes and her illiterate Zambian maid Grace in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019).

“Mistress and maid” is thus a perennial theme in Western literature. Its fascination has shown little sign of fading as a result of social changes that have undermined its empirical relevance. Its recurrence in fictional narratives can, however, be attributed to the continued existence of a class hierarchy, conservative nostalgia, a consuming interest in the “bygone world” of upper-class Victorian and Edwardian society, or a structured binary that lends itself to deconstruction. A further consideration is the way in which the mistress-maid binary problematises or at least ambiguates some of the founding ideas of feminism.

What is the appeal of this perennial theme? What has made “mistress and maid” such a fertile topic for narrative as well as visual, dramatic and cinematic representation?

It has five recurring elements. The first is an interior domestic space that sets limits to the representation. It figures a woman’s social confinement, such as a kitchen, bedroom, parlour, drawing-room, boudoir or nursery, or a dressing-table at which the mistress sits before her mirror, attended to by her maidservant, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona or Pope’s Belinda This interior space or sedes becomes a woman’s place, and the sense of confinement adds intimacy and intensity to the mistress-maid encounter. The second element is a shared gender identity, which ought to bond the two women in their relation to men, but which can lead to sexual tension and a jealous antagonism on the part of the mistress if the maid is young and pretty. The third element is inequality, a wide disparity of class and power that keeps mistress and maid socially distant in a closed space, a disparity that is exacerbated if the maid resents her workload and poor remuneration. This makes for action rather than stasis, narration rather than description, a dynamic power struggle rather than a balanced partnership. (In visual representations of mistress and maid, such as Vermeer’s The Love Letter, a narrative element is implied in visual details.) The fourth element is the maid’s action, such as bringing an item – a robe, a letter, a drink, food, a key, smelling salts, a bouquet of flowers or an item of jewellery – to her relatively passive mistress, or performing a chore such as rummaging in a trunk, dusting furniture, lighting a fire, or attending to her mistress’s person, dressing or undressing her, applying cosmetics or dressing her hair – all of which highlight the maid’s dutiful activity and the mistress’s privileged inactivity. The fifth element is the maid’s expected reticence and the mistress’s free loquacity. (A talkative maid like Annette in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho challenges this class norm.) These five elements heighten the tension between physical proximity and social distance, bondedness and separateness, domination and subordination in a confined domestic setting.

For feminist critics the mistress-maid relation is necessarily closer than that between master and man. Whereas men aggressively compete with other men, women form alliances with other women. Acts of solidarity across the class divide in the sphere of domestic service (as in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help) lead, in feminist theory, to the concept of sisterhood. Sisterhood opposes the Angel-in-the-House stereotype, the notion that a Victorian middle-class woman has to be idle in order to keep her class (or “caste”) identity (Patricia Branca). The female intimacy that creates “sisterhood” can, however, become a power struggle because of their physical closeness and shared gender identity. When, for example, the maid is a surrogate (as in Genesis, in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), or a midwife, wet nurse, nanny or governess who performs maternal functions, highly-charged issues such as sex, childbirth, breastfeeding and childcare are involved. Out of these a divisive family drama may unfold that has psychological, sexual, social and political implications. These at times can become complicated by notions of legitimacy, identity and nationhood, as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Pirandello’s La Balia and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. From this we can see that “mistress and maid”, though a simple binary, has considerable thematic potential.

As a fictional form, the servant’s narrative exposes from a “bottom-up” viewpoint what goes on in upper-class houses. The secret lives of the rich in their inviolable private spaces are thus made public. As Bakhtin says, “Servants are the most privileged witnesses to private life” (125). The private is made public by the unobtrusive presence of a maid. In Octave Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (1900), Célestine, the astute, worldly-wise maid, writes in her diary that women like her mistress, who has “a dirty character and a wicked heart”, are “pink on the surface” but “inside they are rotten”, and that having heard and seen the confessed weaknesses and sexual perversions of her employers, she now writes on behalf of and to her fellow servants that to “collect these confessions, to classify them, to label them in our memory, for use as a terrible weapon on the day of settlement, is one of the great and intense joys of our calling, and the most precious revenge for our humiliations” (archive.org/stream/cu3192…0730_djvu.txt).

Rising from servitude or sideways mobility?

The anonymous Life of Long Meg of Westminster (1620), a semi-fictional narrative of the life of Long Meg, a serving wench in a hostel run by an enterprising hostess, marks the beginning of the literary servant’s transformation from a comic figure into a feeling subject. Serving a liberal mistress, she shows an indomitable spirit in her campaign against lawless behaviour, injustice, and the corrupt, sexist attitudes of parasitic gentlemen and arrogant male bullies. The “good lusty wench” (Mish, 261) serves her victualling-house hostess well. It is therefore no surprise when she rises from the humble position of a serving-maid to a married employer who keeps her own lodging house and employs her own maid. The theme of rising from servitude has, however, little basis in historical fact. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, says Peter Laslett, service in Western Europe “was a stage in the life cycle for large numbers of people”. Lifelong retainers in noble houses gave way to life-cycle servants, young “sexually mature persons waiting to be married” (259). Upward mobility in the early eighteenth century was possible for a few upper servants, but sideways mobility was more common. It was the temporary contract that allowed the picaresque heroine of a novel such as Moll Flanders to serve as a maid in her lady’s chamber and from there to move on. “Improvement” meant acquiring literacy, or a level of literacy and practical skill above one’s station. Nicholas Hudson debunks “upwardly mobile fantasies” in this period, pointing out that, in spite of the reception of Richardson’s ground-breaking novel Pamela (1740), the author was not in favour of social climbing, and that “never again in a popular or respected eighteenth-century novel (or, for that matter, in any eighteenth-century novel that I have found) would a servant or base-born heroine jump up the social ladder” (585).

In fact, Pamela’s rise in status occurs before she becomes Mr B.’s linen maid. The daughter of poor parents, she is taken at the age of 11 or 12 into the “family” of a high-class household and employed as Lady B’s waiting-maid. By the time she is fifteen, she has moved several rungs up the ladder from her parents’ poverty, having benefited from three years of “improvement” under her liberal-minded mistress. Pamela writes to her parents: “as my Lady’s Goodness had put me to write and cast Accompts, and made me a little expert at my Needle, and other Qualifications above my Degree, it would have been no easy Matter to find a Place that your poor Pamela was fit for” (11). A lady’s maid or waiting-maid who served a genteel mistress enjoyed more privileges than the average domestic servant, with time to read or sew and indulge in leisure activities. (Pamela even plays the harpsichord.) Because a lady’s maid “appeared to have the ear of her mistress she was often subject to jealousy from her peers” (A Day in the Life). In Richardson’s novel it is only Jane the cook who is jealous. Pamela has served a lady whose infatuated son cannot grasp the nature of the bond established between mistress and maid, whether in terms of Pamela’s “Virtue” (inculcated by pious parents but also by the feudal idea of “chastity”), or belief in her self-worth and spiritual equality with social superiors: “O Sir! my soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave!” (158)

Early on, Mr B observes that Pamela is a good learner: “you write a very pretty Hand, and spell tolerably too. I see my good Mother’s Care in your Learning has not been thrown away upon you. My Mother used to say, you lov’d reading; you may look into any of her Books to improve yourself, so you take care of them” (13). Mr B is not averse to the young girl’s “improvement”, but when, instead of passing her on to his sister Lady Davers as a waiting-maid, he makes her his linen maid (a demotion) and proceeds to regard her as his sexual prey, he is surprised by her resistance. (Bridget Hill notes that this was a period when most masters and their sons regarded maidservants as sexually available [49].) Mr B has conveniently forgotten or ignores the fact that his mother had taught Pamela to be genteel. Innately intelligent, her three years of liberal education have made her literate, numerate, well-read and morally secure, a prodigious letter-writer who can expose his behaviour to the outside world, frustrate his advances, defend her “virtue” and challenge his reputation. They meet twice in, of all places, the “Closet” in “my late Lady’s Dressing-room”, a closed female space where it was the business of the lady’s maid “to dress, re-dress, and undress her lady” (Adams, 237). On the first occasion the master inappropriately if not scandalously enters this gendered domestic space and takes a letter from her bosom; on the second, a verbal contest ensues which the maid wins. Trained to be independent, socially astute and linguistically versatile by a progressive mistress, Pamela’s acquired gentility arms her against seduction: she never forgets what her mistress taught her. Mr B cannot accept this abnormal reality, the outcome of a new kind of mistress-maid relationship. After she falls on her knees he calls her “a strange Girl” (38), and even Mrs Jervis, forgetting who taught Pamela to be educated and morally articulate, asks: “Where gottest thou all thy Knowledge, thy good Notions, at these years?” (39)

Liberal pathos

Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story “The Manchester Marriage” (1858) is a classic illustration of liberal pathos. It centres on “willing, faithful Norah” (101), an old nurse and housemaid who lives and vicariously identifies with the trials and fortunes of her mistress Alice Openshaw, Alice’s crippled daughter, and Alice’s two husbands. During a crisis in which she is suspected of a theft, Norah’s state of mind is presented in a hesitant, free indirect style that reveals little except the simplest of responses: “In that house she would not stay. That was all she knew or was clear about. She would not even see the children again, for fear it should weaken her” (125). Happily the mystery of the theft is cleared up, the marriage issue is resolved, mistress and maid are once more reunited, and Mr Openshaw, Norah’s accuser, asks for forgiveness. Norah remains an emblem of selfless service, a true servant of the Lord. We catch a glimpse of the horrors of exclusion, but the bond between mistress and maid, master and servant is sealed with reconciliation and confession.

A more subtle, ironic endorsement of the mistress-maid bond, where mutual sympathy reaches across the class gulf without erasing it, occurs in George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866). Mrs Transome, the imperious lady of the house, looks for sympathy from her housekeeper and lady’s maid Denner, who fully accepts her subordinate status:

“I believe you are the creature in the world that loves me best, Denner; yet you will never understand what I suffered. It’s no use telling you. There’s no folly in you and no heartache. You are made of iron. You have never had any trouble.
“I’ve had some of your trouble, madam.”
“Yes, you good thing. But as a sick-nurse, that never caught the fever. You never even had a child.” (487)

As a woman Denner feels for her mistress, but class – as well as the “ableism” of the maid towards a lady prone to weakness and sickness (also evident in Emily Brontë’s Ellen Dean) – divides them. The mistress, hoping for sympathy, exclaims: “What is the use of a woman’s will? …God was cruel when he made woman” (488). This provokes the narrative comment: “Denner was used to such outbursts as this. Her mistress’s rhetoric and temper belonged to her superior rank, her grand person, and her piercing black eyes” (Ibid.). As Mrs Transome sits with marble immobility in front of her dressing mirror, “the dishevelled Hecuba-like woman” morphs into a “majestic lady in costume” (489), a daily act of transformation that makes the submissive maid indispensable, ironically showing how members of the ruling class depend on servants to construct their public image and cloak evil in glamorous allure.

Living a pinched, narrow, circumscribed existence with an unsympathetic mistress, the simple-hearted maid heralds in her reticence and confinement a literary condensation that becomes the definitive mode of the modern short story as an art form in such works as Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple (1874). Here compression is also oppression. The ascetic style (which influenced the “scrupulous meanness” of Joyce’s style in Dubliners) suits the main character and the story’s theme. Several images show the illiterate, self-sacrificing Félicité as a wooden figure working like an automaton (“une femme en bois, fonctionnant d’une manière automatique”) (9), collecting bread crumbs from the table with the tip of her finger, or leaning over M. Bourais’s atlas and asking him to show her the house where Victor lives. By initially disregarding her as a person who has feelings like herself, Mme Aubain represents the cold indifference of bourgeois society. Félicité is filled with despair when her nephew Victor goes to sea, but keeps quiet until Mme Aubain tells her she has received no news for four days of her daughter Virginie, who is in delicate health. Félicité shares her emotional burden with her mistress:

- Moi, Madame, voilà six mois que je n’en ai reçu!...
- De qui donc?...
La servante réplique doucement:
- Mais...de mon neveu!
- Ah! votre neveu!
Et, haussant les épaules, Mme Aubain reprit sa promenade, ce qui voulait dire: « Je n’y pensais pas!...Au surplus, je m’en moque! un mousse, un gueux, belle affaire!...tandis que ma fille...Songez donc!... »
Félicité, bien que nourris dans la rudesse, fut indignée contre Madame, puis oublia.
Il lui paraissait tout simple de perdre la tête à l’occasion de la petite.
Les deux enfants avaient une importance égale; un lien de son coeur les unissait, et leurs destinées devaient être la même.

[“As for me, Madame, it’s six months since I received any.”
“From whom?”
The servant replied softly:
“But...from my nephew.”
“Ah, your nephew!”
Then, shrugging her shoulders, Mme Aubain resumed her walk, as if to say: “I wasn’t thinking of that! ...Besides, what do I care? A cabin boy, a pauper! A fine state of affairs! As for my daughter... Just think of that!”
Félicité, although brought up in a harsh environment, was indignant against Madame, then forgot about it.
To her it seemed quite natural to lose one’s head over the little girl.
The two children were of equal importance; in her heart they were one, and their fate had to be the same.]

In the maid’s trusting heart the two children have equal importance, but her naïve faith, like the liberal pathos that resolves awkward contradictions, has scant basis in reality.

Against this, the story reveals an undercurrent of resistance that is psychoanalytically and symbolically displaced. The anger Félicité feels towards her sister and brother-in-law is hidden from her mistress, yet it stems from Madame’s snobbish disapproval which the maid, emulating her mistress, has internalised. After her angry outburst on hearing the news of Victor’s death, however, Félicité beats clothes on the bank of the stream with “strong blows” (“coups forts”) that can be heard in neighbouring gardens. The maid’s simple heart secretes strong, even violent emotions. If, at this deep level, resentment over her forced retreat from a wider world of freedom and happiness, a retreat imposed on her by Madame, is the cause of her anger, and if this loss of freedom (symbolised in Victor’s death) causes a demonic “other” to lurk in her servant’s heart, her heart is no longer “simple”. A carnivalesque symbol is now introduced. Madame’s bright, noisy parrot Loulou is a present from a black servant whom Félicité associates with Havana, a “country” of exotic indolence and indulgence “où l’on ne fait pas autre chose que de fumer, et Victor circulait parmi les nègres dans un nuage de tabac” (39) [“‘...where people did nothing but smoke, and Victor mixed with negroes in a cloud of tobacco”]. A scene of captive bondage and fugitive freedom (which would have shocked Madame Aubain) lies in the metonymic link between a Normandy maid-of-all-work and former American slaves. Loulou’s antics ridicule the closed minds of her mistress’s petty-bourgeois circle of friends. He does not answer to “Jacquot” (even though “all parrots are called Jacquot”); he drowns their conversation by striking the window-panes with his wings; he terrorises M. Bourais, the outwardly respectable lawyer who turns out to be a cheating rogue; he tries to peck the nasty butcher-boy, and he is finally emancipated by Félicité, who takes off his chain (a contiguous link with the black servant) and lets him walk all over her mistress’s house. Then he flies away. With the story’s bleak ending, however, the maid’s sense of injustice and desire for freedom are muffled by liberal pathos at a time of defeat following the Prussian invasion of France and the crushing of the Paris Commune by state violence.

When a female servant is trapped in a doomed social order, a pessimistic pathos takes over. In Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Lady’s Maid” (1906) the servant narrator tells the story of her life in a compressed monologue. As in the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, the reader realises what, in her blind trust, the servant cannot see. Ellen’s early loss of parental love has nursed a child-like attachment to her mistress as a surrogate parent, instilling a sense of duty which, as in Joyce’s short story “Eveline”, has curbed the impulse to live for herself, marry, and enjoy life as a free agent. Ellen’s predicament, the truth of which she evades, is Chekhovian. All she knows is service. If the household crumbles she will be without a home or employment, so she clings on in the hope that it will survive. Her account shows us the truth she has not yet woken up to: namely, that it was her mistress’s emotional blackmail that made her reject her suitor. Only partly acknowledging her dreams, desires and regrets, Ellen shows how puritan repression (evident in another of Mansfield’s stories, “The Little Governess”) induces a willing servant to forego personal happiness for a life of service which, in the end, leaves the victim worse off than before. The ideology of service legitimates a system which, once it has sucked them dry, spits out working people as unemployable leftovers (a theme also explored in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day).

Oppression and resistance

In “The Free-Servant” (1839) by W. J. Linton, a ploughman condemned “to hard labour without hope of improvement, for the term of his natural life” (162) has a first-born daughter who dutifully nurses the baby, takes her father his dinner and keeps the house in order. Poverty, however, compels him to send her into domestic service at the age of fifteen to serve a slave-driving mistress.

It was a hard thing to part from home and all who were loved and loving, to go among strangers, to be alone – for her mistress allowed no “followers”, thinking servants had not the same affections as others, or, if they did wish to see their friends, there was no time; and to work like a mill-horse – but that she did not think of – in fact, to sell herself for five pounds a year. (Ibid.)

In a market economy she is free to sell her labour power for “five pounds a year”, serving a mistress who, unlike Pamela’s kind Lady, cuts her off from family, friends and a future.

All three Brontë sisters knew drudgery as pupil teachers or governesses. Charlotte and Emily laboured at Miss Wooler’s school from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. with a half-hour break for exercise. In May 1839 Charlotte worked as a “nursery governess” for Mrs Sidgwick, whose children were ungovernable. She wrote to Emily:

I said in my last letter that Mrs. Sidgwick did not know me. I now begin to find that she does not intend to know me, that she cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me… I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil. (Gérin, 144-5)

The mistress-maid antagonism invoked here is found, however, not in Jane Eyre (1847) but in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), where the mistress’s ungovernable children hide their bad side from their mother, obliging the harassed servant to show patience and restraint. In Jane Eyre Charlotte’s heroine is oppressed not as an exploited seamstress, but as an orphan ruled by an unfeeling aunt. Ironically, in view of Agnes Grey, Jane plays the part of an unruly child who frustrates the maid, and what sparks her rebellion is the tedium of school work. In Wuthering Heights (1847) the conflict between mistress and maid erupts when Mrs Dean observes how Catherine Earnshaw has been moulded by the Lintons into a fine young lady whose fingers, Mrs Dean notices with a servant’s eye, are “wonderfully whitened with doing nothing, and staying in doors” (54). After she has her arm pinched and is slapped by her young mistress, who wants her out of the way so she can be alone with Edgar, Mrs Dean is no longer the sympathetic confidante, conceiving a longstanding dislike for her mistress.

Resistance characterises the heroine of George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), “one of the many London girls to whom rest, not to say pleasure, is unknown, and who, if they should sit down for a few moments, hear the mistress’s voice, crying: ‘Now, Eliza, have you nothing to do, that you are sitting there idle?’” (25) Although she has some of Félicité’s traits, Esther is a “fallen” woman with a baby and serves various mistresses. Conceived by Moore in a period of emerging working-class militancy, she is not spiritually crushed but grows in awareness, makes conscious decisions, and has the courage to resist. In one episode she works as a wet-nurse for a Mrs Rivers, leaving her own baby boy with a Mrs Spires. When Mrs Spires reports that her baby is sick, Esther defies her mistress by going to see her own baby and is dismissed, risking the workhouse by rescuing her son from the evil “baby farmer” who, she learns, makes money by getting rid of unwanted babies. Esther fails to climb out of poverty, yet she never falls into the abyss. At the moment when the abyss yawns there is always a good mistress, or good luck, or Esther’s own survival instinct, to pull her back.

In giving Esther assertive qualities in pitiable circumstances, Moore seeks to resolve the tension between pathos and resistance. The narrator comments: “Hers is a heroic adventure if one considers it – a mother’s fight for the life of her child against all the forces that civilization arrays against the lowly and the illegitimate” (159). She has stood up to the slave-driving religious hypocrite Mrs Bingley, and with her fourth mistress the life/pattern dualism is invoked as Miss Rice’s thoughts go back “to the novel she was writing, so pale and conventional did it seem compared with this rough page torn out of life” (226). This “life” is the maid’s working-class energy and rebellious spirit in a nation weighed down by bourgeois conventions. Yet Esther’s life is still patterned by the literary structure of the late-Victorian middle-class novel. At the end she returns to quiet happiness with the good Mrs Barfield, her sister in religion: “in that dim room of little green sofas, bookless shelves, and bird-cages, the women – mistress and maid – sealed the bond of a friendship which was to last for life” (30). Here the pathos of reconciliation in a lower-middle-class domestic setting figures a gradual rather than a sudden change for a better world.

Partners in crime

There is a recurring pattern in the fictional mistress-maid relationship where mistress and maid share an immoral or criminal intent. Between Camilla and her maid Leonela in Cervantes’ “Novel of a Curious Impertinent” (1605), Roxana and her maid Amy in Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Lady Dedlock and her maid Hortense in Bleak House (1854), and Lady Audley and Phoebe Marks in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), a sinister affinity between mistress and maid creates an ill-fated bond. Leonela persuades her mistress to commit adultery, while Amy and her mistress update the story of Jacob, Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah with salacious, even pornographic scenes.

If the mistress turns whore, so must the maid. When Roxana enjoys life as the kept mistress of a prince, her maid Amy sleeps with the prince’s gentleman. Roxana narrates: “she told me all freely…that like Mistress, like Maid...when his Lord and I were together above [why] might not they do the same thing below, that we did above?” (83) This “mirror” theme also occurs in Cervantes’ “Novel of a Curious Impertinent”. In the opening action of Roxana, Amy persuades her mistress to sleep with their landlord. Later Roxana, still childless, persuades her maid to do likewise. Projecting her alter ego onto her maid, Roxana sees Amy as “a Viper, and Engine of the Devil” (38), her “familiar”. Amy’s role, says John Mullan, “is to have the thoughts that her mistress cannot have allowed herself to entertain” (Defoe, xxii-xxiii). Terry Castle reads Amy as a projection of Roxana’s desires: “Amy is the secret sharer in Roxana’s life: she acts out her mistress’s fantasies, she accepts the functions Roxana projects, both consciously and unconsciously, onto her” (83-4). Towards the end of the novel Amy divines her mistress’s wish to kill her estranged daughter to prevent her own scandalous history from being revealed. Amy impersonates her mistress to deceive the daughter, and seems to carry out the murder.

In the Genesis stories of Hagar and Sarai, Bilhar and Rachel, a female surrogate preserves a royal lineage. In Defoe the motive is economic: Amy offers herself as a sexual surrogate to a landlord who allows the two women to stay in his house rent-free. In the process the mistress-maid bond takes on a lesbian intimacy, the maid anticipating the excitement of seeing her mistress couple with the gentleman while the titillating prospect of an unbiblical threesome draws near. The reaction is inevitable: blame for the sinful act is placed on the servant, and Amy is cast as the first in a long line of criminal servants. Her fanatical loyalty to Roxana leads to an attempt to steal her identity. The Biblical story with its genealogical imperative has been twisted out of shape. To give Jacob a child, Rachel must use her handmaid Bilhah, but in Defoe the worldly maidservant urges her mistress to perform the act before she does: “Law, Madam, says Amy, what have you been doing? why you have been Marry’d a Year and a half, I warrant you, Master wou’d have got me with-Child twice in that time” (Defoe, 83-4). It is now the mistress who, like Rachel, compels the maid to lie with her master, and in one of the most lascivious scenes in classic English fiction Roxana turns Rachel into a bawd, Jacob into a debauchee, and Bilhah into a whore.

In Bleak House (1853) mistress and maid share a murderous passion. Hortense “reveals the passions and resentments which her employer Lady Dedlock’s façade of boredom and reserve successfully conceals” (Trodd, 63). Hortense kills Tulkinghorn, the man whom Lady Dedlock has “often, often, often” wanted dead and then, as Inspector Bucket explains, the French maid tries to “throw the murder on her Ladyship” (Dickens, 909, 889). Before her flight in shame and disgrace, Lady Dedlock reflects on her “enemy” – Tulkinghorn – and “shudders as if the hangman’s hands were at her neck... If she really were the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment, more intense” (Dickens, 910). The combustible maid is driven to act by her all-too-visible French pride and rage for the way her mistress humiliated her by dismissing her in favour of the pretty Rosa. She wants Lady Dedlock to hang for the murder which the latter should have committed. A “very neat She-Wolf imperfectly tamed” (191), with passions the English stifle or deny, Hortense has been in her lady’s service five years, but their formal relationship is about to end when her Lady sees “her own brooding face” (implying guilt) in the dressing mirror, projecting this face onto her maid’s unpleasant physiognomy, which Lady Dedlock ironically calls her “beauty” (196). Later, in a symbolic reversal of her rise from a captain’s woman to an aristocrat’s wife, and guided by Jo the crossing sweeper, Lady Dedlock wears her maid’s dress as a disguise to visit Captain Hawdon’s grave in Tom All Alone’s. The episode figures a social descent that mirrors that of Hortense who, dismissed by Lady Dedlock, walks barefoot through the wet grass, observed by Esther Summerson when “pretty” Rosa (substitute for the daughter her Ladyship thinks is dead?) is taken as her new lady’s maid in the carriage after the storm.

Like Lady Dedlock, who has to hide her past liaison, the mistress in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) has concealed her shameful past, but her lady’s maid Phoebe Marks uncovers it and uses it to blackmail her. The intrusive narrator comments:

There were sympathies between her and this girl, who was like herself inwardly and outwardly – like herself, selfish, cold, and cruel, eager for her own advancement, and greedy of opulence and elegance, angry with the lot that had been cast her, and weary of dull dependence. (Braddon, 255)

Unlike Lady Dedlock, Lady Audley exceeds her maid in wickedness. Driven by a demonic force, she burns down the inn to kill her investigating nemesis Robert Audley, and deceives her maid who, when she has served her purpose, is cast off. Disguised as an Angel in the House, this drunken lieutenant’s daughter, a former governess and a skilled impersonator, is a demon far worse than her blackmailing servant.

The African maid

In their study of domestic service in South Africa, Whisson and Weil analyse how the Cape Coloured female domestic servant became “the basis for the stereotype that whites possess of non-whites, the initial, intimate experience of ‘race relations’ for the white child” (45). In Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) the boy-narrator’s mother thinks it a good move for her Coloured maid Doreen to send her son to a school away from Coloured areas. She wants a maid who has broken with her social group in order to be accepted in the white world, yet who “knows her place” and has no ambition to be treated as an equal. The white mistress employs a maid whose language and culture are outside her own experience: after thirty years of service she doesn’t even know her maid’s surname.

The mistress in Es’kia Mphahlele’s short story “Mrs Plum” (1967) is a progressive white liberal, and the first-person narrator is her “kitchen girl” Karabo whose motive in writing, like that of Mirbeau’s Célestine, is to lift the lid on the private lives of her mistress and her mistress’s daughter Kate. In one of her peep-shows Karabo sees Kate with her boyfriend through a crack in the door: “I saw him lift up Kate’s dress and her white-white legs begin to tremble and – oh I am afraid to say more, my heart was beating hard” (Mphahlele, 190). The writing with its shifts in tense and the “oh” evoke the speech of an African servant who participates in what she describes. Lesibana Jacobus Rafapa observes that Karabo tells her story to her friend, not to a white readership, and that having been taught English by Mrs Plum she “does not go beyond the interlanguage stage”: the “deep structure of the mother tongue underlies the surface diction of English”, while instances of Sotho syntactic structure…permeate the entire short story”, so the language and style are “symbolic of Karabo’s resistance to unmediated cultural assimilation” (Rafapa, 129).

Karabo hears Lilian Ngoyi say that a “master and a servant can never be friends”. But Lilian also says that whites should join black-led organisations: “‘For those who have begun and are joining us with both feet in our house, we can only say Welcome!’” (Mphahlele, 174, 175). The phrase “our house” moves us from the white master’s house to the house of “the people”, from Egyptian bondage to the house of Israel. But Mrs Plum’s house is not a house of bondage. Instead it is too free. Karabo admits:

I was not easy at all. I was ashamed and I felt that a white person’s house was not the place for me to look happy in front of other black people while the white man looked on. (183)

The issue boils down to white people’s personal hygiene and sexual habits. “Personal” matters are of public concern, and Madam becomes “the other”: “Every time I thought of Madam, she became more and more like a dark forest which one fears to enter, and which one will never know” (184). The anti-racism of white liberals is skin-deep. Karabo comes to reject white values, white bodies, and above all, whites’ dirty habits:

Dick was cleaning the bath. I stood at the door and looked at him cleaning the dirt out of the bath, dirt from Madam’s body. Sies! I said aloud. To myself I said, Why cannot people wash the dirt of their own bodies out of the bath? (194)

Her revulsion comes to a climax when she peeps through a keyhole and sees Madam committing bestiality with her pet dog Malan, after which Mrs Plum’s liberalism plummets. She refuses to give Karabo unpaid leave, and the two part company. Mrs Plum, the woman who went to jail to oppose the pass laws, was a madam who “loved dogs and Africans”, in that order.

Another rejection of white baaskap and its sexual implications is Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1990). Jezile hears herself being called “Annie” by her employer Mrs Potgieter.

“Annie...me?” Jezile felt emptied of herself. “What’s wrong with Jezile, I wonder?” she thought to herself. Later that afternoon, Mrs Potgieter told Jezile to call her “Nonna”. “Nonna” was the generic name for most Afrikaaner women employers, just like “Annie” was one of the several generic names for female black servants. (201)

Whereas Mphahlele represents the illiterate maid speaking and thinking in her own idiom, in Ngcobo the maid’s subjectivity is inscribed within the dominant linguistic discourse (“Jezile felt emptied of herself”). A more tragic warning to young African women enticed by white employers is Sembène Ousmane’s “The Promised Land”, also a film, first published in Voltaique (1962), translated as Tribal Scars (1974). In a third-person narrative with internal focalisation, Diouana is enticed to leave her native Senegal and go with Madame to France, the “Promised Land”, only to realise that Madame has calculated on keeping her as the kind of workhorse she could never obtain in France. Instead of being led into Canaan, Diouana is taken to Babylon and commits suicide. Finally, in African narrative texts that portray an African mistress and an African maid, the racial conflict between coloniser and colonised gives way to a class antagonism. This is subtly handled in the portrayal of the Zambian mistress, Mama T, and her long-suffering Zimbabwean maid Sissy, who plays a maternal, peace-making role in Ellen Banda-Aaku’s novel Patchwork (see Crehan, 2020).

References

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Citation: Crehan, Stewart. "The mistress and maid figures in European literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 January 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19650, accessed 31 October 2024.]

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