SOURCE: Day, Gary. “Artaud and Genet's The Maids: Like Father, Like Son?” In Twentieth-Century European Drama edited by Brian Docherty, pp. 146-61. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Day considers the influence of Antonin Artaud on Genet with regard to The Maids.

At least two commentators have claimed that Antonin Artaud was an important influence on Jean Genet. Ronald Harwood says this influence was ‘enormous’¹ while John Russell Taylor classifies Genet as a ‘follower’² of Artaud. Such views represent the received wisdom and, like all received wisdom, it needs to be questioned. The purpose of this essay is to examine the influence of Artaud on Genet with reference to The Maids,³ and then to consider examples of other approaches to the play before finally problematising the whole question of ‘influence’ as a way of making sense of a text, especially when that text is a...