51 pages • 1 hour read
Loreth Anne WhiteThe Maid's Diary
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
False Narratives and Identities
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to rape, assault, stalking, coerced abortion, and infanticide.
The Maid’s Diary contains many false narratives and makes multiple deliberate references to the creation of these and their relation to ideas of personal identity. Through Kit, the novel shows how false narratives and personas can be a way to explore, process, and reclaim a coherent sense of identity. By creating multiple perspectives around the main characters, the novel poses questions about truth, individual experience, and deception, especially important for the plot’s focus on contradictory accounts and gaslighting. These ambiguities of narrative and identity also provide much of the novel’s intrigue and mystery, essential to the thriller genre.
The novel’s most important narrative is Kit’s unreliable self-narration, in the form of her diary. In the first pages of the novel, Kit states what she believes about deceptive appearances: “Perfection is deception. An illusion. It’s a carefully curated but false narrative.” (9). Her words not only set up her own external projection but emphasize that her job reveals the intimate lives of the wealthy patrons who hire her. The “illusion” also foreshadows the “perfect” life of Jon and Daisy, based on mutual deception but propped up by wealth, power, and social status. The novel shows that false narratives can win over true ones when they play into society’s idea of acceptability and success, perpetuating the vulnerability of victims.
To counter this injustice, the novel shows the adult Kit manipulating similar narratives for her own benefit. She Instagrams pictures of herself in beautiful houses, failing to mention to her viewers that she only cleans these dwellings but doesn’t live in any of them. When she posts a photo of Daisy’s ultrasound, her fans assume that Kit is the one who is pregnant. She photographs Boon and herself standing beside an expensive car, and everyone believes that Kit lives the life of an affluent jet setter. Kit’s Instagram posts are meant to be playful, but her chance encounter with the Rittenbergs reveals the darker underside of the manipulation of perception.
The novel uses disguise and deception as devices to drive the mystery plot and create intrigue and fun. Kit’s numerous revenge personas are central to this. As Mia, she stages an orgy scene that implies Jon was an active participant. In reality, he remained in a drugged stupor while Kit and two actor friends simply set the scene and then photographed it. Jon’s haggard appearance after the fact seems to contradict his innocence: The novel shows that his appearance matters more than the truth, an example of its creation of punishments that fit the crime.
Kit’s continuous use of disguises and red herrings with others points out that her self-narration is a construct. The novel plays with this idea explicitly: In her diary, Kit reveals, “We’re all tricksters. Each and every one of us. No one is a totally reliable narrator. Life is all Story. Every bit of it” (290). With her words, the novel asks the reader to consider the ways in which Kit is and isn’t a reliable first-person narrator in the projection of her own identity. Kit’s disappearance at the beginning of the novel leaves her diary as the only manifestation of her, in contrast to the real-time perspectives of the other characters. Kit’s suggestive absence from the novel points to the ways in which all written narratives, including the novel, are constructs.
Shame, Silence, and Invisibility
The Maid’s Diary explores the experiences of those who, through prejudice, disadvantage, or the control of others, are silenced and made invisible. By focusing on the experiences of victim-survivors and comparing these to the relative privilege and power of the perpetrators, the novel shows how social inequality—economic, social, racial, and gendered—causes and perpetuates abuse. In particular, the novel shows how victim shame is a tool for control and concealment.
Through the historical rape plotline, the novel explores how easy it is for a perpetrator to conceal inconvenient truths by silencing and sidelining the truthteller. The narrative details various different ways in which the achieved, as well as the lasting impact on the victim who suffers gaslighting and humiliation as well as abuse. Financial inequality is one mechanism for this. After Kit’s assault, her mother is bribed into silence, and everyone involved in raping Kit gaslights Kit into believing she imagined the assault. Kit is “ghosted,” banished from her own life story. Similarly, Charley Waters, desperate for money, accepts a payment and signs her own NDA. When she recants her statement to the police she writes, “I am sorry” (106), showing how total this injustice is: She must apologize to her abuser. Like Kit, Charley’s character and backstory emphasize how women’s bodies can become a nexus for shame and control by others. Others’ treatment of them both as problems that need containment perpetuates the removal of their agency during the sexual assault itself. The novel makes this explicit in the parallel that both women become pregnant without their consent and are then persuaded by weaponized shame to have abortions, an act for which society places additional shame on women.
The novel widens its discourse on inequality and victimization through the character of Boom, a gay immigrant living among elites who won’t tolerate him because he’s different: “You get branded the target […] Bullied. Humiliated. Disliked. You start to wear that label. You start to believe them” (247-48). Boon becomes so self-effacing among the rich kids in Whistler that he erases himself from any involvement in Kit’s ordeal. He is at the ski lodge party where she is assaulted but fails to speak up for fear of drawing attention to himself. He has also become invisible. Through Boon, the novel shows how toxic masculinity impacts other men and wider society by demanding conformity.
Early on, the novel makes it explicit that Kit has been made to feel invisible through injustice and that she reappropriates invisibility for her own revenge:
I have been bestowed with the gift of invisibility. I move through people’s houses unseen—a ghost—quietly dusting off the daily debris of their lives, restoring order to their outwardly “perfect” little microcosms. (8-9).
This passage shows how Kit already views her invisible status as a position of subversive power, foreshadowing the increased control she will gain once the North’s identities become clear to her. While the Rittenbergs and Norths treat people like Kit, Charley, and Boon as barely human, Kit recognizes that remaining beneath the notice of social elites will allow her to enact her revenge. The novel suggests that Kit’s strength, in contrast to Boon and Charley, is her agency and ability to turn disadvantage to her advantage.
Through the characters of Kit, Charley, and Boon, the novel shows how social inequity and power structures allow for and encourage those with power to abuse the more vulnerable with impunity. The novel’s revenge plot pushes back against this injustice, showing the underdogs winning, making for a satisfying denouement.
Abuse Enablers: Complicity and Moral Responsibility
The novel’s thriller revenge plot is centered on the punishment of its main antagonist, Jon North, a man who is shown to have little or no redeeming features. Jon’s villainous character is quite flat in this respect: Much of the novel’s moral complexity comes from the creation of a realistic network of characters who enable Jon’s behavior for a variety of motivations including selfishness, greed, cowardice, fear, and shame. The novel suggests that a wider moral responsibility is needed to mitigate and control the actions of men like Jon, who succeed because society’s power structures incentivize complicity. The Maid’s Diary is especially interested in the complicity of women in gender-based violence and control, showing how fear can corrode moral responsibility and solidarity.
The novel shows that Jon can only continue to commit sexual assault because of the collusion and support of others. During and after the historical rape of Kat, he is backed not only by his ski team members and fellow rapists but by everyone else who attended the party. The novel explores the variety of different motives for this, assigning different levels of guilt and moral responsibility to the characters. Jon is shown as the ringleader in the assault whose social power encourages and enables his friends to behave likewise. Other party attendees remain silent for fear of getting into trouble with the law themselves. Boon remains silent because he especially fears reprisal if he speaks out.
Daisy has more complex motives for her behavior and these change throughout the novel. The text suggests that these changes are partly her grasping for justification and partly the development of her character as she begins to see more clearly. The teenage Daisy has ambitions to be the wife of a sports celebrity and allows herself to become actively complicit in Jon’s crime and its cover-up. The novel explores the female dynamic here when Daisy tells her friend, “This will never happen again. He asked for my help to get her out of the lodge. […] He loves me. I won’t let her do this to me—ruin my chances…He’s going to marry me” (364-65).
This passage shows that Daisy’s self-worth is allied to Jon at all costs, and this overrides moral considerations. Her friend’s warning alerts the reader to Daisy’s relative lack of power in her relationship, echoing the nature of her adult marriage. Daisy’s words victim-blame, showing how she sees the threat to her reputation as Kat, not Jon. The novel shows how she is incentivized by Jon’s manipulation and wider gendered norms of blame to distance herself from the victim and the correct course of action.
The role of society in perpetuating injustice is represented by the role of mothers in the novel. Ideally exemplars of female strength and compassion, the novel’s mothers instead connive to reduce the fall-out of gender-based violence, incentivized by a sense of shame and a desire for concealment. Daisy’s mother compounds the problem by offering Mrs. Popovich a large sum of money to keep Kit quiet and force her to have an abortion. In later years, Kit will recognize the collusion of these two older women to keep her silent, voicing this theme’s central question: “Why do women betray other women like this?” (244).
This cycle of abuse and enablement therefore continues from one generation to the next. While Annabelle handles the ski lodge incident, Daisy takes the reins to manage Charley’s accusations years later, causing Kit to write, “Daughters learn from their mothers” (304). In The Maid’s Diary, social power structures enable men to cause destruction and incentivize women to conceal and whitewash. This reveals a nuance in the book’s title: All the novel’s women, whatever their status, clean up messes caused by men.
