When slave girls rebel, boss ladies watch out! In literature as in life, the revenge of a female underling on a female superior can be a messy business - with limbs, eyeballs, breasts, and other detachable body parts left dripping in gore around the house. A variety of situations may propel such fury. In Euripides' Electra, Western civilisation's mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra's doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of her daughter's. At other times it's a matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who's had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the notorious Papin sisters - real-life models for the homicidal domestics in Genet's The Maids - disembowelled their bourgeois mistress and her daughter in a fit of bestial frenzy after the unfortunate Mme Lancelin complained once too often about a blown fuse on her electric iron.

LRB 15 April 1999 | PDF Download