![]() It feels as if this is what the end of fantasy looks like, if you follow it as far as it can possibly go. ![]() They are free then to do as they like, and the desire for another reality, and the level to which they pitch that desire, drives them into an electrifying realm of fantasy and performance. ![]() In their roles as maids in the rooms of Madame’s high-class apartment, Solange and Claire become unhinged, especially when they are there alone. More recently, I’ve been thinking, too, about its mad circling of artificiality and authenticity, two sides of the same coin. When I first read The Maids, I wasn’t interested in the idea of murder but in Genet’s highly charged representation of the two sisters, their crazed relationship to each other, as well as to their “Madame,” and in the depiction of class warfare in a domestic space. I’ve never seen the play performed, though I’ve watched the film version from 1975, directed by Christopher Miles. First performed in Paris in 1947, the play is loosely based on the story of the infamous Papin sisters, who murdered their employer in 1933 in Le Mans, France. When I was writing my novel Indelicacy, I felt myself in conversation with Jean Genet’s play The Maids. ![]() Here, Amina Cain revisits Jean Genet’s The Maids. Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. ![]()
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