Amina Cain on Authenticity and The Maids

Amina Cain writes about Jean Genet's play, The Maids, for Paris Review Daily. "It feels as if this is what the end of fantasy looks like, if you follow it as far as it can possibly go," writes Cain, author of Indelicacy (FSG). "And if the fantasy is as filled with bitterness and rage as the sisters are, then it feels like it will explode." More:

In the past year I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea of authenticity. This is partly because I feel at times I have lost sight of my authentic self, and I want more than anything to come close to it again. For me, authenticity means that how I act and what I say, and how I actually feel around others, are aligned, that I am connected to myself and to another person at the same time. I want my writing to be authentic, too, for every sentence to reach toward honesty and meaning. Genet manages in The Maids to come up to the very edge of this, in that nothing is held back, everything is expressed, everything breaks the surface and is free. This is especially true within the sisters’ performance, what they call “the ceremony,” in which they take turns playing each other, and Madame, and play at cruelty and revenge. Because of this sense of freedom, this reach toward liberty, the play feels oddly clean, satisfying.

But when one sister overpowers the other, an already unsettling situation gets even darker. It doesn’t seem that it could. It is painful to hear the insults the sisters hurl at each other. They understand all too well how they are seen by society, with what distaste, disgust, even. Claire yells at Solange: “A vile and odious breed, I loathe them. They’re not of the human race. Servants ooze. They’re a foul effluvium drifting through our rooms and hallways, seeping into us, entering our mouths, corrupting us.”

Read on at Paris Review Daily.