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 Open access under:
CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Echo

Edited by Hannah McIntyre and Hayley O'Kell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 15

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This paper argues that Leïla Slimani’s novel, Chanson douce (2016), recontextualizes and renews a nineteenth-century French discourse surrounding the literary figure of the feared and rebellious maidservant through the representation of her twenty-first-century avatar: the nanny. By analysing how Slimani’s nanny figure echoes the strategies of revolt used by vengeful maidservant protagonists in nineteenth-century novels, notably Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), I propose that Chanson douce transforms a discourse that characterizes a genre of nineteenth-century French literature: le roman de la servante (the servant novel). Writers of this genre posit a maidservant protagonist who revolts, seeks revenge and often has a hidden, double life. Fictions in this genre, as shown through Mirbeau’s novel, act as performative texts: they embody and exacerbate the century’s discourse around the feared, rebellious maidservant. By applying Georges Didi-Huberman’s four categories of revolt to Slimani’s protagonist, I investigate how the strategies of revolt implemented by dubious maidservants in nineteenth-century texts, are turned, in the twenty-first century, against the modern employer.

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