
In the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust introduces a rather enigmatic character: a pregnant kitchen-maid who served in the family house in Combray.
The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty was to peel them, was a poor sickly creature, with an advanced pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter.
Proust’s portrayal of the kitchen-maid is dominated by a general air of disdainful detachment. The narrator renders her as an allegorical figure rather than as an individual, lending her an abstract quality. This sense of abstraction is reinforced by the absence of her name; she is simply referred to as la fille de cuisine or, as we later discover, “Charity.” The constant rotation of personnel accentuates the prominence of the role itself, overshadowing the individual who temporarily fills it.
Furthermore, the mention of the asparagus suggests an additional distance between the family and the kitchen-maid. During that period, asparagi experienced a surge in popularity as a coveted commodity, a phenomenon into which Proust delves extensively and one that Édouard Manet has carefully evoked. Afterwards, it comes to light that the task of peeling asparagi was imposed to her by Françoise, the main cook, because they caused her assistant fits of asthma. This devious plan ultimately succeeds in forcing her out of service.
(Fig. 1) Édouard Manet. The Asparagus, 1880.
Crucially, the dehumanization through allegory is further underscored by the way Charles Swann alludes to her.
When he [Swann] inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: ‘Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?’ And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel.
(Fig. 2) Giotto. Carità, 1306.
Her likeness to Giotto’s personification of Charity in the Scrovegni Chapel eradicates any hint of her individual identity. By virtue of her pregnancy, she aligns with the allegorical character that foreshadows her existence. This is suggested by Proust as follows:
the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant, without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather heavy burden.
At any rate, what bears more significance is the disruption caused by both embodiments, Giotto’s and the kitchen-maid’s, in terms of the concept they are supposed to represent. According to Proust, the problem is that they yield a “Charity devoid of charity.”
[T]he powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena beneath the label ‘Caritas’… incarnates that virtue… [But] it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter’s invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say ‘handing’ it to Him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to someone who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level above.
Despite its disparaging tone, Proust’s description carries weight. In effect, Giotto’s rendering of Charity takes on an uncharitable aspect. Her emblematic heart is indeed reducible to a kitchen utensil, and her demeanor, unbecoming for a virtue. This contradiction has been labelled by Paul de Man as a “semantic dissonance,” which erases “the substitutive power engendered by resemblance.”
What I aim to emphasize is that through his reasoning, Proust raises doubts about one of the main features of personification: its association with a core attribute and a distinctive agency. As Angus Fletcher and Andrew Escobedo have argued, personifications possess a simplistic structure: they transparently express what they embody. The personification of Peace, for instance, looks and acts peacefully, while Sin looks and acts sinfully, and Anger, angrily. However, Proust unfolds an uncharitable Charity, whose “symbol… is represented with such realism” that it defeats its purpose.
(Fig. 3) Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Allegory of Peace, 1339.
So, what is the point of an uncharitable Charity? Proust’s argument paradoxically suggests that when attempting to convey an abstract concept through a tangible representation, the conventional tools we typically employ, such as established attributes or gestures (like Justice’s scales or blindness), prove insufficient. This is precisely how Françoise, the perverse cook, interprets the world. She approaches the situation conceptually: upon discovering her employee’s symptoms in a book, she weeps. Yet she persists in her practice of assigning the asparagi task when they are face to face. By contrast
…the special beauty of these… symbols… is [that they] were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled. This added something more precise and more literal to their meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that side of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
Proust speaks of an “arresting strangeness” in these personifications. The perplexity caused by them affords us the opportunity to apprehend the concept at hand. There is nothing charitable about the kitchen-maid, confined to a minor role that disgusts her. Yet, her expanding belly becomes a source of wonder. The weight (or “basket,” as Proust put it) she carries, combined with the malaise caused by the asparagi, eventually crystallizes into an incidental, non-conventional, charity: the generous, even painful, contribution of her body to the bearing and birth of a child. Charity made flesh.
A contemporary of Proust, the German art historian Aby Warburg, developed a similar idea concerning works of art, claiming that “the arrival of an alien root achieves an intensification of the original meaning.” He was obsessed by a similarly enigmatic painting: Domenico Ghirlandaio’s “female servant carrying a basket of fruit,” who “rushes by in quite conscious imitation of the Victory of a Roman triumphal arch.” In his notes to the Panel 46 of his Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg scribbled “deliver it fast!“. Through this “nymph,” one almost sees a runner on the final line with the controlled urge of throwing everything away. Girls with baskets are arguably conspicuous conductors of meaning.
(Fig. 4) Domenico Ghirlandaio. Detail from The Birth of St John the Baptist, 1490.
In sum, allegory and the emotions it encapsulates can only be communicated by an undiscerning, disruptive, gesture, one that makes room for its reception. When we gaze upon a blindfolded and scales-holding statue, we recognize Justice, but we do not engage emotionally with this abstraction. Conversely, when we encounter a girl clutching a basket, we start wondering. As Proust reflects, the “lack (or seeming lack) of participation of the soul of a being in the virtue that acts through it,” is what truly defines personification.
(Fig. 5) Peggy Olson in Mad Men S07E14. A girl with a basket.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jerónimo Rilla (August 23, 2023). Proust’s Paradoxical Personification: an Uncharitable Charity. Personifications of the state. Retrieved June 6, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1270u
(Fig. 1) Édouard Manet. The Asparagus, 1880.
(Fig. 2) Giotto. Carità, 1306.
(Fig. 3) Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Allegory of Peace, 1339.
(Fig. 4) Domenico Ghirlandaio. Detail from The Birth of St John the Baptist, 1490.
(Fig. 5) Peggy Olson in Mad Men S07E14. A girl with a basket.