The Diary of a Chambermaid (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Diary of a Chambermaid (French: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre) is a 1900 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau, published during the Dreyfus Affair. First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891-2, Mirbeau’s novel was reworked and polished before appearing in the Dreyfusard journal La Revue blanche in 1900.
Plot
The novel presents itself as the diary of Mademoiselle Célestine R., a chambermaid. Her first employer fetishizes her boots, and she later discovers the elderly man dead, with one of her boots stuffed into his mouth. Later on, Célestine becomes the maid of a bourgeois couple and is perfectly aware that she is entangled in the power struggles of their marriage. Célestine ends by marrying capitaine Mauger.
Commentary
Octave Mirbeau, libertarian writer, denounces domestic service as a modern form of slavery, and exposes the unsavoury secrets of the bourgeoisie. Told from the perspective of the chambermaid Célestine, Mirbeau’s story undresses the members of high society of their superficial probity, revealing them in the undergarments of their moral flaws: their hypocrisy and perversions. However, Mirbeau offers no sentimentalized image of the underclass, as servants exploited by their masters are ideologically alienated themselves.
With its fractured exposition, its temporal dislocations, its clashing styles, and varying forms, Mirbeau’s novel breaks with the conventions of the realistic novel and reliquishes all claims to documentary objectiviity and narrative linearity.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The novel has been very freely adapted for cinema twice: once in 1946 by Jean Renoir, English speaking, starring Paulette Goddard, and also in 1964 by Luis Buñuel, starring Jeanne Moreau, Georges Géret and Michel Piccoli (see: Diary of a Chambermaid (film)).
It was also made into a play by Andre Heuse, Andre de Lorde, and Thielly Nores. Plenty of theatrical adaptations have been made during the last 20 years, in French, but also in Italian, English, Spanish, Dutch and German.
