Anarchism as Fiction in Mirbeau's Le Journal D'Une Femme De Chambre

The undefinability of the servant and of the ideology motivating her portray­
al in Mirbeau's fiction suggests that it was only the antagonism born of social dis­
parities, only the contact between rich and poor, that enabled the maid to come
into existence as the object of Mirbeau's humanitarian sentiments. "Don Juan de
l'idéal," as he was dubbed by friend Georges Rodenbach,³ Mirbeau, like many
anarchist sympathizers, focused more on demolishing the existing state order
than on designing blueprints for a more fraternal world. Symptoms of the disease
of social inequality that supported them, texts and maids were produced by the
evils they served and undermined. Mirbeau himself was skeptical about the
future possibility of worker associations unencumbered by government bureau­
cracy and so contented himself with diagnosing the social ills for which he
offered no cure. In Mirbeau's writings, there is no syndicalism, no image of a sys­
tem of industrial worker federations. Vociferative and confrontational, le Grand
Engueuler required adversaries to excoriate and enemies to battle, making his ide­
ological belligerence an essential part of an anarchist outlook which, as Reginald
Carr affirms, was "as much a part of him as his tendency to exaggeration and his
naive enthusiasm."⁴

Through the intermediary of his protagonist, Célestine, Mirbeau problematizes
the existence of those unexploited by politicians and generals, those unsodomized
by Jesuit educators. Positing the pre-literary ideal of the man who does not vote
or go to war, Mirbeau concludes that the one who is content is also inexpressible.
Already in "Le Jardin des supplices" ( 1899 ), Mirbeau had exposed the myth of nature
as the fabrication of an increasingly industrialized European male society. As this
paper argues, Mirbeau goes further in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre to ques­
tion the viability of individuals in an extra-social state, showing them to be anoth­
er futile premise, a chimera whose sole attribute is to frustrate efforts to apprehend
them. There are no peasants or aristocrats in Mirbeau except those articulated as
projections of their hostile counterparts. As long as one devours the other, assim­
ilating the worker into the discourse of capitalism or the capitalist into the dis­
course of socialism, anarchism offers itself as the voice that proclaims the libera­
tion of the individual. But with a guarantee of the inviolability of personal rights
comes an end to the advocacy writing of which Mirbeau was an exemplar. The
attainment of Mirbeau's political goals thus would bring his authorial obsoles­
cence, since literature was the product of the class conflicts he deplored.

From this standpoint, anarchism itself is produced ...