The Nineteenth-Century Social Imaginary of the Rebellious Maidservant

Abstract

This thesis argues that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie created and reproduced a ‘social imaginary’ of the figure of the rebellious female servant: a socio-cultural construct that is created and understood through elements of nineteenth-century literary and non-literary discourses. I argue that it is thanks to the identification and analysis of a new nineteenth-century literary subgenre that I label le roman de la servante that we can recognize and study the workings of this interconnected network of discourses. In its most schematic form, le roman de la servante is a corpus of literary texts foregrounding a rebellious maidservant as literary protagonist in its own right. It includes works by Stendhal, Balzac, the Goncourts, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Maupassant, Zola, Mirbeau and Léon Frapié. The nineteenth-century authors whose works make up my corpus of texts initially represent a fictional maidservant heroine who implements different strategies of revolt against her bourgeois masters and mistresses in order to escape her oppressive situation as a servant and obtain a sense of power and freedom. I identify and analyse these strategies of revolt through Georges Didi-Huberman’s recent theory of soulèvements, as outlined in his recent study Désirer désobéir: Ce qui nous soulève I (2019). These methods of revolt through the maidservant’s appearance, voice and thoughts consequently allow female servant characters to reverse the prevailing power dynamics between servants and their masters and mistresses, as well as between men and women. I then combine this theory of soulèvements with a third-wave feminist reading of nineteenth-century fictional representations of female freedom in order to argue that it is through soulèvements that maidservant protagonists are only able to gain a ‘sense’ of freedom, and therefore happiness, from their oppressive situations. In the process, I demonstrate how the social imaginary limits the representation of the fictional maidservant’s agency in their respective plots whilst simultaneously restricting the male author’s freedom in his representation of the fictional female servant’s revolt to a reproduction of the stereotypes and prejudices that surrounded her. The figure ultimately remains part of a masculine fantasy about subservient female figures, despite any limited amount of freedom she achieves. The fictional servants in le roman de la servante therefore can never fully transcend their roles as servants: they are either punished or remain subservient to the male characters. The social imaginary of the rebellious maidservant serves as a new category through which the representation of the female servant in the nineteenth-century French novel and short story can be understood insofar as it deepens our understanding how the bourgeoisie’s fragile class position, alongside their collective, misogynistic stereotypes and prejudices concerning categories of class, race and gender, had imagined the female servant as a potential thief, spy and a gossip; a possible temptress with the capacity to corrupt men and children alike; a probable contagion of (sexual) diseases and even a dangerous threat to the bourgeois family.