"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

Although she finds the other servants "a pleasant-spoken set" (459) and is pleased by the gentle, good-natured Mrs. Brympton, Alice is bewildered to discover that her mistress will not ring the bell in her bedroom and instead insists on having a maid fetch Alice when she is needed. She also thinks it "queer" that her fellow servant, Agnes, appears to know nothing about a mysterious woman whom Alice encounters in the house. Alice reasons, "she must have been a friend of the cook's, or of one of the other women servants; perhaps she had come down from town for a night's visit, and the servants wanted to keep it secret. Some ladies are very stiff about having their servants' friends in the house overnight" (460). Alice is even more chilled to discover that the vacant room across from hers was Emma Saxon's and that the room has been closed since her death.

After she has been at Brampton for a short while, Alice meets her master, "a big fair bull-necked man, with a red face and little bad-tempered blue eyes" (461). Mr. Brympton's reaction to Alice is revealing of his character:

   He swung about when I came in, and looked me over in a trice. I knew what
   the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former
   places. Then he turned his back on me, and went on talking to his wife; and
   I knew what that meant, too. I was not the kind of morsel he was after. The
   typhoid had served me well enough in one way.... (461)

This passage reveals that this is as much a story about relationships between servants and employers as it is a ghost story. Wharton uses this short story to reveal some of the hidden secrets of domestic service, like the many cases in which women servants become the subject of unwanted sexual advances.

Wharton also destabilizes the upper-class perception that employers are always superior to their employees. Throughout this story, the servants are depicted as more perceptive than their employers. For instance, the servants, when they hear that their master is coming home, are less than pleased: "It was plain that nobody loved him below stairs" (461). The servants' reaction foreshadows Alice's discovery that he is a brutish, drunken lout. The servants react very differently to Mr. Ranford, a neighbor who is often found at the house, reading to Mrs. Brympton: "The servants all liked him, and perhaps that's more of a compliment than the masters suspect. He had a friendly word for every one of us ..." (462). The servants are shown to be more knowledgeable than their employers; it is another maid who informs Alice about the true state of affairs at the Brympton house, telling her that she won't last three months, as Mrs. Brympton has already gone through four maids in half a year. By adopting the viewpoint of servants, Wharton is able to provide an outsider's perspective on life among the upper classes. Such a narrative perspective is useful because it allows the author to explore the relationships between classes and to question upper-class assumptions about members of the working class.