SOURCE: Running-Johnson, Cynthia. “Genet's ‘Excessive’ Double: Reading Les Bonnes through Irigaray and Cixous.” French Review 63, no. 6 (May 1990): 959-66.

In the following essay, Running-Johnson examines Genet's use of the principle of duality throughout The Maids, incorporating Luce Irigaray's and Hélène Cixous's feminist interpretations of the work.

Critics discussing Jean Genet have named the configuration of the double as one of the major elements of his work. They have examined the form as it appears in the relationships between characters, in the dual narrative structures of his writing, and in the thematic organization of his texts, with their paradoxical pairing of good and evil, masculine and feminine, and illusion and reality. Certain writers—Jean-Paul Sartre, and critics Richard Coe and Jean-Marie Magnan—have linked the form to existential theory. Others, including Lewis Cetta and Robert Hauptman, have examined it from a more specifically psychological perspective. Sociological approaches such...