"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

In a period when the shortage of servants--the "servant problem"--was a nationally discussed dilemma, Wharton acknowledged the importance of servants to maintaining an upper-class lifestyle. Thus, she often depicts servants as overwhelmingly important to the upper classes. For instance, in the story "A Cup of Cold Water," an upper-class woman is helpless without a servant, so helpless that, when confronted by a smoking lamp, she is "obliged to ring for a servant because she did not know how to put it out" (153). In another story, "His Father's Son," servants play a different role: a father is so vain that whenever he sees his socially prominent son's name in the society column, he leaves the open paper "on the breakfast table to the perusal of a hired girl cosmopolitan enough to do it justice" (37). These two examples reveal a few of the ways in which servants supported their employers. Although Wharton is more than a little sarcastic in these incidents, they still reveal her understanding that members of the upper class were dependent upon those who served them.

Nowhere is upper-class dependence on servants more apparent than in Wharton's ghost story "The Lady's Maid's Bell," which depicts the relationship between a maid and the high-strung lady for whom she works. Since this story is told entirely from the perspective of the maid, Alice Hartley, it allows Wharton to look critically at the system of domestic servitude and its attendant evils. Interestingly enough, Wharton, rather than favoring the upper classes, favors Hartley, creating a positive picture of her and a negative picture of her life as a servant.

In this story, Wharton gives close attention to the difficulties in the life of a maid; for example, Alice begins the story, commenting,

   It was autumn after I had the typhoid. I'd been three months in hospital,
   and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three
   ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone,
   and after I'd boarded for two months, hanging about the employment
   agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable,
   I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn't made me fatter.... (457)

Alice is talking about the very real problems facing a maid in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Through Alice, Wharton begins to probe the disparities between women from different social milieus.

Alice finally goes to work at an old house in the country in order to care for "nervous, vaporish" Mrs. Brympton (457). Despite ill health, she is a kind and considerate employer; she fits neatly into one of the stereotypes about employers that existed at the turn of the century: "Servants were portrayed as either loyal saints or devious rascals, employers as benevolent guardians or ill-natured tyrants" (Sutherland 23). Mrs. Brympton is clearly benevolent, but there this stereotype breaks down because she is not much of a guardian; actually, throughout much of the story, Alice will have to be a guardian for her mistress. Nor is this a new pattern for Mrs. Brympton. Alice is informed that her employer lost her former maid last spring, a woman who "had been with her twenty years and worshipped the ground she walked on" (457). The former maid, Emma Saxon, was more than a servant to her mistress, Alice is informed; she was a friend, and Mrs. Brympton misses her terribly. Here, readers see the many different emotional and psychological roles that maids were made to perform; as Katzman comments, "many mistresses hired servants to fulfill psychological needs independent of the work involved. Mistresses might seek companionship, a loving relationship, or a surrogate daughter in a young girl ... Whatever the relationship, it was not an equal one, and mistresses rarely offered chances for mutual fulfillment" (270).