Let's blame the maid: stories of exemplarity and blame in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spanish popular literature

Abstract

In Spanish popular literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, the figure of the maid is remarkable for her absence. With the exception of plays published in chapbook form, and whose origin is in Golden Age drama, the presence of the maid in popular literature of this period is limited to a number of examples of bad behaviour, most of which occur in the last decades of the 19th century, offering a positivist vision of the destiny of the good maid and the bad one. Contrasting with these exemplary tales which show no room for the exercise of free will, a famous story circulates in suelto form from the mid-18th century that exposes issues of gender and class. If we interpret this tale on the model of «Over her dead body» as articulated by Bronfen, we can perceive the maid here not only bearing the blame of wrongdoing and its punishment, but can see her also as a scapegoat for the society she is in.