It was Alison Light's 2007 study, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service, that sharpened my awareness of how research into the working conditions of the servant class could be combined with analysis of literary representations of individual domestic worker figures. Nellie Boxall was not only Virginia Woolf's employee, but also her subject in various novels; Woolf also wrote about Nellie fairly obsessively in her letters. Having paged through various works of South African literature for mentions of domestic workers, and after searching my own family albums for traces of all the Nellie Boxalls I have known, I decided on a systematic research project. I would comb the rich archive of South African literature – English as well as Afrikaans – for mentions of nannies, cooks, cleaners and carers in novels, plays, poems and films. My aim was to examine what Stuart Hall describes as the ‘cycle of representation’, and recent works suggest that the representation of domestic workers continues to be of interest to writers as well as artists.

Mary Sibande, for example, uses large sculptures modelled on herself to critique sterotypical depictions of domestic workers. Her alter ego, a figure called ‘Sophie’, has been exhibited internationally, and images of these sculptures have even been projected onto tall buildings in Johannesburg's city centre. Acclaimed photographer Zanele Muholi also critiques the traditional figure of the domestic worker, and has produced photographs of herself playing the role of a maid in her ‘Massa and Minah’ series. In this manner, the female black body is foregrounded, not only in its degraded form, but also in its intimately present form in domestic settings. Sibande and Muholi are but two of the thousands of young South Africans whose mothers and grandmothers were domestic workers and whose creative work refers to their own families’ histories. As such, their work presents viewers who share this history with a heritage of sadness and suffering. Simultaneously, however, this work confronts viewers from the ‘madam’ class with the attitudes they hold towards these women.