Analysis Of Jean Genet's Les Bonnes And Deathwatch

Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes, in english: The Maids, is a timeless piece about servitude, fantasy and murder. A man in and out of jail, Genet wrote his first poem and novel behind bars, eventually escaping a life sentence thanks to a petition to the french president backed by prominent names such as John Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Jean Paul Sartre[], who wrote an invaluable and insightful introduction to Genet’s plays Les Bonnes and Deathwatch which this essay uses to analyse Les Bonnes. It is not fair to instantaneously say that simply because there is an all female cast that the text lends itself to a feminist reading, obversely, one cannot propose that because we are only presented with a single gender onstage that the playwright is necessarily making a commentary on that gender. …show more content…
Not only does this part of the play lean heavily on the western patriarchal notion that women are incapable of committing a crime unaided and uncomplicated[] but it also upholds the stereotype that women are nonviolent[]. Not to mention the two character’s roles are domestic servants, further playing into the cultural norm that it is prevalently women that take on these positions[]. Genet then completely flips this on it’s head in the final scene when, in the climax of the play, the sisters finally manage to carry out the ritual to it’s finale, resulting in the suicide, or murder depending how you define it, of Claire through the poisoned cup of tea. This act of violence which closes the play completely overthrows the previously stated cultural norms of women. Genet proposes a narrative that subverts the discourse of femininity by bringing forth women who do commit acts of violence, further establishing the play as a dispute to the