A post about Neel Doff and her novel Keetje Errand Girl (Keetje trottin).
In 1921, exactly one century ago, a novel was published which ends in a remarkable scene. The novel narrates the childhood of Keetje Oldema, growing up in a destitute household in Amsterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century. The novel sees her, her parents and siblings struggling for a living through a series of jobs. Although the novel also contains many more cheerful moments, there is an ominous undertone throughout. From the very start, the novel is larded with scenes of pain, violence, and Keetje’s fear of growing up a woman, and scenes about the power that those with more money have over her. These scenes culminate in the book’s final chapter.
It is New Year’s Day, afternoon, and Keetje is alone – she thinks – in the house of her employers, apart from a sick lodger to whom she has to serve tea. Everyone else has gone out to pay New Year’s visits. Keetje is fourteen years old and she has been feeling increasingly alienated from her family, from childhood friends who have entered circles with more money, and from her own body. Her belly feels heavy, she is shivering. When she lies down for a moment, she discovers she has started her first period. Suddenly, she hears her boss enter the room. He throws herself on top of her, naked. “I could not cry out: he had glued his mouth over mine.”
The narrator goes on to describe a rape scene in explicit detail, naming what Keetje’s boss does to her, the sounds and movements he makes, how she tries to prevent him, and how her body feels, during and after the rape.
This was an exceptional scene to write in 1921, and it raises many questions: who wrote this novel, and what was their own connection to this literary material? What exactly made their work stand out from other work before them? And why was it important that they wrote it?
Writer Neel Doff (1858–1942) lived in a similar economic position as her protagonist Keetje for much of her life. She was born in Limburg in 1858. Her parents – mother from Limburg, father from Groningen – moved to Holland when Doff was a child, in their search for employment. As the family grew, and as her parents wandered from job to job and the family from cellar room to attic and back, Doff soon assumed responsibility for part of the family income. Many of her jobs took her onto the streets of Amsterdam, where she sold pots and pans, delivered medicines and hats, and acted as a domestic servant. She only visited school intermittently, yet she tried to read whenever she could. She found books in her employers’ homes and no doubt also made use of the commercial lending libraries that existed across town, often as part of a shop.
Nevertheless, the family remained poor. Some biographers mention that Doff took up sex work when aged fifteen for this reason; others that Doff has always denied this – though we have to take into account the tremendous social pressures for an aspiring writer to deny any personal association with sex work. The Doffs, still looking for work, then moved to Belgium. Here, we do know for certain that one of Doff’s new jobs was to model for painters and sculptors. Through these artistic circles and the money she earned there, she was able to befriend wealthier and more educated people, and to catch up on her own education. She moved out of her parents’ and hired her own private apartment. Like a Great Gatsby avant la lettre – though not in it for love but for a home of her own – she worked on her self-presentation and on her own professional artistic skills.
She trained for a career on the stage for a while but soon moved into writing. She began by publishing translations and short stories, for instance in her partner’s political art magazine La Société Nouvelle. In 1911, she presented Keetje Oldema to her audience: an alter ego that was to feature in three of her novels. The final volume in this trilogy was Keetje trottin, ‘Keetje Errand Girl’, published in 1921 and containing the scene with which this article opened. The trilogy met with considerable critical acclaim in France.
Meanwhile, she married, was widowed, and married again. She seems to have been very fond of both her husbands. Still, for much of her life, Doff continued to live on her own. She acquired a house with a garden, and with it, the calm and independence she had always dreamed of, in a small town in Belgian Limburg, and became increasingly engrossed in the countryside and the natural world. This is were she died, in the thick of the nazi occupation of Belgium, aged 84. In the final decade of her life, her work had received new attention, in Belgium itself this time, although it never entered either the Francophone or Dutch literary canon.
As mentioned, the Keetje trilogy is partly autobiographical. That does not mean it is a “true story” from A to Z – if such a thing exists at all. In fact, Doff herself has said in an interview about one of the other volumes that it was 25% fiction. But whether the scene took place exactly as described is perhaps of less relevance to most readers. Of greater interest is Doff’s relation to the theme of sexual violence in her own life and how that compares to her protagonist’s relation to sexual violence.
Rape has always been an important literary theme in the Netherlands, Belgium and France as in the rest of the world. Yet the way Doff addresses it is strikingly new.
Depictions of rape in European writing have usually been less open that Doff’s and the same goes for the visual arts, and, I suspect, also for oral traditions. They speak of a before and an after, for example, but not of a “during”. Or they speak of rape in metaphors. Frequently, narrators also transport the theme to faraway places and times. They depict the Roman Lucretia, for instance, or retell one of the countless rape stories in the Bible. Add to this these famous stories’ sense of inevitability, their often euphemistic translations, and the respect given to many of their violent characters (they made up the male elite’s Classical heritage and religious identity, after all), this worked to obscure the actual mechanics and experiences of rape in them. (If you read Dutch, you might want to take a look at Mieke Bal’s study Verkrachting verbeeld.)
Often, rape in such stories also functions as a metaphor. In early-modern war propaganda, for instance, the defended country (the Dutch Republic, for example) is portrayed as being raped by the enemy (the Spanish emperor). (See Amanda Pipkin, Rape in the Republic.)
Finally, when they do actually speak about rape in explicit and real-life terms, which seems to have happened more often from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, most narratives focus on the experiences of men, not as raped persons themselves, but as bystanders (hurt in their honour, failing to protect their wives) or as rapists. At other times, the perspective of the rapee is taken – the rapee almost invariably being a woman in nineteenth-century literature. Yet in those cases, the story was usually created by a male artist who imagined, and often in fact fantasised, how a female character might experience her rape. (See Mary Kemperink, Het verloren paradijs.)
In Keetje trottin, rape is none of these: not implied or distanced, not depicted from the perspective of anyone who is not its victim, and certainly not used as metaphor only. Instead, it is explicit, literal and felt through the body of the raped person. What is more, the author herself shared her social and economic position as a child with her protagonist. Both were poor working-class girls employed by a series of wealthier men, likely also employed in sex work, and definitely in occupations that were at that time closely linked to sex work: modelling and stage performance. As a result, Doff will inevitably have had many encounters with sexual aggression and sexual claims across her childhood and youth. When I write that Doff was possibly the first Dutch author to explicitly depict a rape scene from a survivor perspective, I therefore mean both that the passage describes the experiences of the victim, and that Doff herself knew about that perspective. (Do you know of similar, earlier depictions by Dutch, Belgian or French authors? Please let me know.)
Now my argument is not that in order to write a good book about a working-class girl, one has to have been one oneself. This is an identity-based form of art politics that I do not subscribe to. Instead, my argument is that when writing about a certain experience, the resulting text will most likely be richer and more insightful if one has had similar experiences oneself, or has closely investigated that experience. Doff, in her decades-long financial dependence on those around her, and living in an age when the sexual availability of women and of the working classes was taken for granted by most, will have had many similar experiences to Keetje’s in this key scene, experiences which she must almost inevitably have drawn upon. It is this that makes her books truly remarkable.
Access to such scenes, written explicitly and by an author intimately acquainted with some of its meanings, has a lot to offer. It offers us historical insights. It offers an insight into literary history: what enabled, perhaps even encouraged twentieth-century authors to write about rape in this manner? Yet above all, it contributes at least two forms of non-academic knowledge.
In a novel such as Doff’s, some readers may find recognition and comfort.
Others may broaden their worldview. In an article in journal Vooys (“Hoe lezers lijden lezen”), Emy Koopman explains that explicit descriptions of rape are experienced differently by readers from implicit descriptions. In particular, in an explicit text that uses a lot of stylistic, literary means, readers empathise with the victim more than in an implicit text, but without being scared away from reading the story, as they might in a more businesslike explicit account. To broaden readers’ worldview by encouraging empathy with experiences outside their own life: that is what a literary text can do; and that is one of the things that Doff’s Keetje books can do for us.
Keetje trottin is worth a read for many reasons. I discuss its intersectional characteristics in my recent article for Lover Magazine of which an English translation is available on my blog; I write about Keetje’s flânerie in an upcoming article for the academic journal Signs; and I reflect on various thematic, poetic and reception aspects in my afterword to the Dutch translation Keetje op straat, which is now available from IJzer Press. The original French text is available on Gutenberg.org.
This post was originally written for Women on the Timeline, a project run by Anouk Wolkotte, Charlotte Hermanns and other students at the Radboud University (Netherlands) that aims to rebuild the canon.
Historian at large 