‘A Little Strain with Servants’: Gender, Modernity and Domesticity in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Celia Fremlin's the Seven Chars of Chelsea

Abstract

Discusses the servant-mistress relationship in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca as well as Celia Fremlin's The Seven Chars of Chelsea which is part social survey and part imaginative recreation of the world of domestic service. Juxtaposition of the methods of Mass Observation and documentary realism to fictional narratives; Production of a quasi-socialist and quasi-Freudian reading of the relations between women; Construction of relations between women through the system of domestic service