It is easy to suppose that the greatest authors of the 19th century have all already been discovered. Especially when it comes to French literature, one notices the same names come up over and over again. Yet for every Balzac, Flaubert or Zola, there is at least one author who has been forgotten by history, brushed aside, and reduced to a footnote. That need not mean that these authors don’t have compelling stories to tell which are still relevant to this day.
A good example of this is Octave Mirbeau. The French journalist was a prolific writer and at the centre of Parisian intellectual life. As an art critic, he was an early supporter of Van Gogh’s and good friends with the likes of Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. Some of his plays, like Les affaires sont les affaires, were highly successful at the time and are still performed by the Comédie Française today. In 1900, he released his fifth novel, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, which instantly became an example of the notorious ‘succès de scandal’ genre. Nonetheless, Mirbeau’s extensive work has largely been forgotten over the past 100 years.
It was not until the 1980s and the onset of second wave feminism that Mirbeau and his substantial literary oeuvre began to gain some recognition. But still, even to this day, Mirbeau is rarely talked about, despite having been admired by many peers, including Tolstoy. His books, although in print, are rarely on offer in bookstores. This, to me, is scandalous, because the quality of Mirbeau’s work rivals that of any of his contemporaries. His Journal of a Chambermaid in particular is one of the greatest novels of its time. Its humour and social criticism are as relevant today as they were 125 years ago.
Its narrative centres around Célestine, a witty young woman who works as a domestic servant in the household of the Lanlaire family. In her diary, she records the idiosyncrasies of her bourgeois employers as well as of the people around her. She is the constant object of male desire, yet she is able to use this to her own advantage. The resulting image is that of a sexually empowered and independent woman. In the end, she escapes her position as a chambermaid by going to Cherbourg with the brutish gardener Joseph, a bittersweet end at a time when social mobility was out of reach for many domestic servants.
If the novel is so good, why has nobody heard of it? I believe this has to do with the way that we perceive literature today. People like to place authors within a literary canon that is subdivided into movements. It is easy to label Balzac a ‘Realist’, Zola a ‘Naturalist’ or Hugo a ‘Romantic’. Yet when it comes to Mirbeau, none of these labels easily fit. He stands out from the Symbolist and Decadent currents popular during his time, and this inability to place Mirbeau within the literary landscape has contributed to his disappearance from textbooks and literary journals.
However, there are other elements that make the novel unconventional and subsequently less attractive in the eyes of some literary critics. On the one hand, Mirbeau’s characters in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre are mostly caricatures who, through exaggeration, enable Mirbeau to introduce both humour into the story and underline his political commentary. On the other hand, the novel’s plot focuses on an independent working class woman who, whilst very critical of the people around her, has insight limited to her immediate environment rather than society as a whole. The novel’s detractors have thus sometimes argued out of pure prejudice against a book whose female narrator makes them uncomfortable.
I would advise everyone to pick up a copy, if they can. Especially those who have access to the French original, who will find it to be both an entertaining and eye opening read. We live at a time in which people are rediscovering voices from the past previously misunderstood or silenced. The best way to support such authors is to read their works. Who knows how many lost Balzacs or Zolas we might uncover in the process.
