Teach Your Foreign Maid Some Manners!

I think that de-education (including losing one's manners and cultured speech) is an important element of lady-to-maid stories. I've read countless pages on Victorian-era etiquette and working-class dialect to make Lady Georgina's transformation into a low-class servant in Her Most Remarkable Performance as believable as possible.

As I am working on a Molly Saga expansion/sequel/prequel all in one, I've come across an interesting site for a Filipina maid agency that offers some eye-opening advice on how to teach one's maid to behave. The page is called Teaching Your Filipina Maid Good Manners and Right Conduct. So far so good. After all, it stands to reason that a Filipina maid may not be accustomed to some of the customs of a family that she works for. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that many of the maids did not attend a finishing school and will have trouble with their spoons and forks at a Buckingham Palace dinner, but the list of "donts" is so extensive (and probably excessive - "say sorry and thank you when applicable", really?) I couldn't help but imagine a heroine of a lady-to-maid story gradually (and deliberately) learning all these bad habits from her maid friends to fit in better.

Needless to say, the wonderful world of political correctness is yet to reach the warm shores of South-East Asia, so please don't be shocked but some of the suggestions that even writers of 19th century manners books did not include as too obvious. Here's the 20-point list for your enjoyment. I know I'd be using some of it for my upcoming story!

In Cap and Apron: A Real Story of Going Undercover as a Victorian Maid

It is no secret that Victorians were fascinated by domestic servants. It was a forbidden, yet incredibly appealing world that was studied and observed by the upper classes much like the ethnographers in the period were studying native tribes in Africa or the Americas. And just like the best way to understand a foreign culture was working in the field, often for an extended period of time and, not infriquently, completely going native and embracing that culture as your own, the best way to undersand what it meant to be a servant was becoming one, joining the working classes.

One such student of the working classes was Elizabeth L. Banks, an American journalist, who spent most of her adult life in England. She wrote extensively on lives of poor women - maids, washerwomen, street sweeps, flower girls - and built her career as a critic of Victorian-era British class society. Her method was going undercover among the low classes to investigate their living conditions, habits and opinions, creating a sensation in 1890s London as one of the pioneers of stunt journalism. Her adventures in disguise often led to hilarious, clash-of-cultures results, but also offered a unique look into the lives of the late Victorian working classes. Banks first published her detailed accout of life as a domestic servant, appropriately called In Cap and Apron, in the Weekly Sun in 1893. It was republished in full the following year as part of her collection titled  Campaigns of curiosity, which also included her impersonating an American heiress seeking to marry an English lord and a Covent Garden flower girl.

Finally A Guide to Becoming a Perfect Maid!

As I've stated before, I am a big fan of Victorian-era etiquette and household management manuals. There are many such books that can be found online and some of them allow us to understand better what life was really like for a servant back in the day. And I am not even talking about the many daunting duties performed without the help of modern appliances such as a vacuum cleaner or a diswasher. There existed a great divide between a mistress and her maid - in manners, in speech, in dress, in life aspirations - and these guidebooks often played an important role in securing these divisions by making sure that each side was fully aware of their different stations in life and acted accordingly.

There is no shortage of books addressed to the lady or the housekeeper, but a book whose primary reader is supposed to be a maid is hard to find. It was therefore with great pleasure that I discovered this 1859 gem titled "The servant's behaviour book or hints on manners and dress for maid servants in small households". The author, "Mrs. Motherly", refers to her readers throughout as "my dear girls", leaving little doubt that the book is addressed to a young woman aspiring to become a good maidservant. Upon reading the book and remembering its many lessons a girl will emerge as a "well-behaved and agreeable servant'', making it far more likely for her to secure a better position as her domestic career advances. Who knows, may be with time she will even become a lady's maid at one of London's aristocratic mansions! Oh, the excitement!

This short book contains a traditional list of behavior tips that can be found in many such books. They can be summarized as follows:

How Vulgar: Maids and Their Low-Class Speech

I have to admit it: I am a fan of old etiquette books and household-management manuals. There is no shortage of them online and they offer an interesting glimpse into the life that is long gone. Even though I have a sneaking suspicion that much of what is in these books has little relation to real attitudes and behaviors, it is not hard to imagine a social climber of the time actually reading these manuals to learn how to dress, walk and talk like a real lady, or an inexperienced wife learning how to interact with her household staff. Or a lady's maid learning a thing or two about how to serve her mistress best.

One particular aspect of the social downgrade transformation I have always found exciting was adopting a coarser and less educated manner of speech typical of the lower classes. Our speech is as much a part of us as the way we look and is, arguably, even more important in determining how we are perceived by people around us. That makes it a powerful instrument in describing a social drop or rise. While most stories dealing with upper/lower class transformation ignore the topic or only mention it in passing, there are some excellent examples of writers paying a great deal of attention to that. Emma Finn's writings, in particular Criminal Record, come to mind. Monica Graz's Domestication of a Parisian Bourgeois is another excellent example: the main character actually learns how to speak with a coarse Portuguese accent to fully embrace her immigrant maid persona. Another great example, offering the most painstaking description of learning how to speak like a low-class character I have come across, is "A Certain Perception'' by Angel Charysse. While the story doesn't deal with maids, its description of the voluntary change from an upper-class man into a dirty-talking and uncultured transsexual hooker is among the hottest (as well as most detailed) in transformation fiction.