Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris: "Diary of a Chambermaid: TV Series Maid"

Anne-Marie PAQUET-DEYRIS (professor, University Paris Nanterre)

Diary of a Chambermaid: Mollie Smith Metzler’s Raw Chronicle of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Maid (in English)

Wednesday, October 18, 10AM–12PM

Location: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/ISJPS, 1 rue de la Glacière, 75013 Paris

Bâtiment Suzanne Bastid, 2e étage, salle 13

The event will take place both in-person and on-line via Zoom. To attend in person, please register in advance by email at events.demoseries@univ- paris1.fr

To follow online, register at: https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArd-GsrjwiE9FL4VhP3…

Abstract:

Mollie Smith Metzler’s 2021 challenging chronicle of a young mother’s desperate escape from domestic violence could have flirted with melodrama as Alex and her young daughter Maddie flee Sean’s abusive relationship while having nowhere to go - not even a mother or a grand-mother’s home. Being herself a survivor of multiple episodes of trauma and battling Bipolar Disorder, Paula, Alex’s mother, remains consistently blind to her daughter’s psychological entrapment. The series however manages to steer clear of most miserabilist clichés by always coming back to a grounded, realistic representation of different types of motherhood. In keeping with the spirit of Stephanie Land’s 2019 source memoir, showrunner and head writer Metzler chronicles the heroine’s journey through the bureaucratic layers of government assistance, traps of toxic spouse, intermittent fatherly and motherly love and endlessly meandering job searches. So that if the structure in ten episodes of her itinerary from fright to fight and eventual flight is relatively conventional, the manner in which she finds her way out through determination and creativity isn’t.

In this presentation, we’ll focus on the way the mother(s) / daughters(s) relationships are represented and on how intersectionality, mainly gender and class, have a negative effect. The detrimental impact of extreme poverty and harmful relationships is compellingly chronicled by Metzler as she resolutely charts the various strata of the mother-daughter relationship at the core of the empowerment mechanism.

Bio:

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris is Professor of Film and TV Series Studies & (African) American Literature & Culture at University Paris Nanterre. Her books & articles mostly focus on contemporary American Cinema & screen adaptations as well as on English- speaking TV Series. She co-organized several international conferences on David Simon’s work and also cohosted an international symposium on Hammer Films at Paris Nanterre & Sorbonne Nouvelle in June. Two of her latest books, Vérités et mensonges dans le cinéma hollywoodien (Truths and Lies in Hollywood Cinema), co-directed with D. Sipière, and Dark Recesses in the House of Hammer, co-directed with G. Menegaldo & M. Boissonneau, were respectively published in 2021 by Paris Nanterre UP & in 2022 by Peter Lang, New York (Ray Browne Award of the Best Collected Volume at the 2023 Popular Culture Association of America).

Two of her more recent articles are “The Unreliable Female (Narrator) in Mary Harron’s Miniseries Alias Grace”, in Adapting Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (S. Wells-Lassagne & F. McMahon, Eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 : https://trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/8e6a5e9e-c203-4…- 99e00c16b575? sap-outbound-id=BC9093A452E5549562986D2C49FDA32DEA1A789B ) & “The Birth of a Nation's ‘Melodrama of Pathos and Action’: A Tale of ‘National Rebirth’?” in In The Shadow of The Birth of a Nation: Racism, Reception and Resistance (M. Stokes & P. McEwan, Eds., Palgrave McMillan, 2023).