Bloody servants

Works of art, be it paintings, fiction, play, poems, films, that are based on servants and explore the master-servant relationship of power in any society, interest me.

Murderous servants fascinate me because my study of servitude tells me that its a condition that at one point or the other (even when servitude is socially sanctioned) is bound to beget violence. I'm eager to read Jean Genet's The Maids, a play about two murderous maids who kill their mistress primarily because the play looks at the imbalance of power between master and servant and decides that its unsustainable.

The play is based on a real-life murder (famously known in the media as the Papin case) of an affluent mistress and her adult daughter by two domestic helps in Depression-era France. 

There are, I hear, scenes in the play, where the two maids, both sisters, role play their mistress when she is away. The mistress is very rich and very callous and can't tell one maid from the other. The maids fiercely hate her. When the mistress goes out (which she does frequently), the maids go to play a sinister game where one sister dresses up as the mistress and the other gruesomely murders her or tortures her. They act out their fantasies this way.

One needs to understand this lurid desire on the part of the maids not as psychopathy, but as the innate condition, I believe of subjugation.

When subjugated and shorn of freedom, the human instinct is to lash out in very many ways.

In the Caribbean the slaves had institutionalized this practice of staging strange plays at night, after a days back-breaking labor on the sugarcane plantations. In these plays some would dress up as the masters and others would be themselves--the servants, that is, with the difference that they would be empowered enough to kill the masters. The ritual castration of masters was essential for the indentured servants; it kept their rage in check. So the masters connived.

Connivance is absent in Genet's play as connivance comes from understanding. The mistress is a rich, flaky girl, who hasn't a fibre of nuance or political suaveness in her being. The end result is consequently bloody.

Manic Maids

Jean Genet's The Maids is an eerie play.

Genet wrote the play in 1947.

The play is being currently staged on Broadway (at the Red Bull Theatre) and an apt one-line teaser for the play goes thus: "When the Madam's away, the maids play..."

And what a play the maids play! The description of Genet's play-within-the-play is as follows:

Claire and Solange are maids, sick to the gullet of being scuffed under the heels of their lady mistress. In a twisted evening of power-shifting role play, the two girls bite and scratch at one another in a vicious struggle to the top – a ritualistic tug-of-war which must finally end in silence or in sacrifice.

A turbulent exploration of the games we play, this classic French play was written by Jean Genet, a controversial figure whose work was subsequently banned in Australia and elsewhere around the world. Considered by many to be his finest and most monstrous creations, Genet’s naughty maids allow him to aim the barrel at class, criminality, sex and power.

The ritualistic game that the maids of the upper-class French socialite play, allow the humiliated and the subordinated of society to exorcise the ghosts of these burdens. The exorcism rituals are reminiscent of the "games" slaves used to play, especially in Francophone colonies of the Caribbean Island, like Haiti. The slaves, it is said, would suffer abjection throughout the day and at night, the off-duty servants would role-play. Some would play masters while others would play the slaves and the former would subject the latter to the horrors that they themselves would be subjected to in real life. This was a survival kit for the slaves. Pent-up anger and a pervasive sense of powerlessness is best expended in play.