"Loyal saints or devious rascals": domestic servants in Edith Wharton's stories "The Lady's Maid's Bell" and "All Souls'"

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Sherrie A. Inness

This intense dislike of service by working-class men and women must be remembered when one turns to Wharton's fiction, since it helps to explain the hatred that servants sometimes display in her stories toward members of the upper classes whom they served.

Anger was only to be expected at times from servants because they were caught in an economic system in which they were very much the inferiors: "Nearly all employers believed in their servants' inferiority--social, intellectual, and otherwise ... If employers had once regarded servants as social equals, or if servants had once assumed such equality, the spell would have been broken, the system proved a fraud" (Sutherland 27). Wharton herself sometimes fell into the trap of portraying servants as inferiors. For instance, in her story "Afterward" the central character, Mary Boyne, has an inept parlor maid, with whom it was a "matter of principle ... never to answer more than one question at a time" (166). Another incompetent servant appears in this story in the character of the kitchen maid, from whom Mrs. Boyne is having difficulties eliciting information about the appearance of a strange visitor, even when she asks the servant point-blank what he looked like:

   But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear
   that the limit of the kitchen maid's endurance had been reached. The
   obligation of going to the front door to "show in" a visitor was in itself
   so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had thrown her
   faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer out, after
   various panting efforts: "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you might
   say--" (169)

Wharton's fiction reflects prevailing turn-of-the-century attitudes about servants being lazy and lacking intelligence. For instance, in "The Day of the Funeral," the story's central character disparages a maid as "the fool of a maid" (671), who usually made one "rip out the bell before she disturbed herself" (671). In Wharton's "The Temperate Zone," maids are depicted as rude when a confrontation occurs between a gentleman and a "curt parlor-maid" (449). In her story "The Young Gentlemen," the stereotype that maids are untrustworthy is perpetuated when a maid disobeys her master's orders, and he assumes "she was bribed" (393). All of these negative stereotypes about the behavior of servants were widely held at the turn of the century. Wharton did not escape the influence of such stereotypical imagery, as is seen in a letter she wrote a friend, Daisy Chanler, about Wharton's ill maid, Elise: "She herself thinks she is a total & permanent wreck, & it is quite impossible to make her understand that there is no organic trouble, but only a temporary physiological disturbance. The servant class can never grasp anything like that--if they could ... they wouldn't be servants, but presidents & prime ministers" (qtd. in Dwight 229).

Yet, I would caution that it is too simple to understand her writings as only perpetuating stereotypical notions about the nature of servants. Sometimes she also uses her fiction as a textual space in which to critique the status quo of relationships between servants and their employers. For instance, "The Young Gentleman" creates a critical image of an overly suspicious employer who assumes his servants are dishonest, which is not indeed true. These very different aspects of how Wharton depicts servants reveal the ambivalent location of servants and their place in the turn-of-the-century household. If, on one hand, she sometimes capitulates to current stereotypical notions about the behavior of servants, on the other hand, she also shows that servants are often abused in their relationships with masters and mistresses and deserve a voice.