The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays [Paperback]

Jean Genet (Author), Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 1994

The two plays collected in this volume represent Genet’s first attempts to analyze the mores of a bourgeois society he had previously been content simply to vilify.

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Revised edition (February 16, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080215056X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802150561
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #56 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > Continental European

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Horrific , violent existentialism at its most absurd., September 6, 2000

By 

John McCormack (Mahopac, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays (Paperback)

Genet based 'The Maids' on an actual event, one he felt a certain kin-ship with. In 1933 french police found Madame Lancelin and her daughter face down, in their living room, utterly mutilated. The eyes had disappeared, all teeth had been knocked out, fragments of bone and flesh were strewn about the floor, walls covered in blood. Upstairs the two servant-maids, the Papin sisters, were found naked, huddled together in one of two single beds. Immediately they confessed. Immediately, also, the papers picked up the story. The public was facinated how these two soft-spoken, mild-mannered girls, without provocation could have acted with such wild brutality. Senseless, irrational violence - Genet's speciality. He uses this story as a means to attack conformaty. A massive revolt against obedience, servitude, and the upperclass. A bloody triumph of individuality . Like other of Genet's works, it primaraly is concerned with Man's free will, or lack there-of. It is an existential story , revealing the darker sides of freedom, and the horror of the responsibility that comes with it. A tale worthy of Genet's genious. Exellent translation. Fans of Genet should also Check out Octave Mirbeau.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 stars for 'the Maids', October 6, 2004

By 

Stalwart Kreinblaster "SK2008" (Xanadu) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays (Paperback)

I have not read 'Deathwatch' yet but the'Maids' lived up to what I was expecting from Genet. To learn more about Genet, I would highly recommend his biography by Edmund White - this is one of the best biographies I have read.
The 'Maids' is a play in one act with three charactors. Within this act Genet captures the role-playing of the classes of society rather brilliantly. He does not capitalize on the brutality of the actual case of murder (it is based on an actual murder) but looks instead at the motivations for doing it. There is a film adaptation of the story called 'Murderous Maids' which is pretty good but focuses mainly on the act of murder - and throws in a lesbian twist.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mirror And Its Reality, March 2, 2010

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays (Paperback)

There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the "real" revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his autobiographical "Our Lady Of The Flowers" details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen "street" milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred "street" smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life's seamy side. His play "The Maids" was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).

Fortunately, by the time that I got around to then reading (and seeing) such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Otherwise, I would not have appreciated this play as either a perverse form of class struggle (the story line centers on the plot of two interchangeable maids, sisters, although the performance that I saw had the two maids played by men) to "murder" their mistress. Or as a ritualistic sadomasochistic sexual exercise. Either way this play still holds up today as a very well thought through literary effort, at a time when seemingly every offbeat sexual expression has been ground to bits through banal exploitation. See this one, the next time it is revived, if you get a change. In the meantime read the text.