The Maid

Twenty-five-year-old Molly Gray has porcelain skin and pointed cheekbones. She wears her straight dark hair in a simple bob parted in the middle. She loves her job. She loves her cleaning cart. She especially loves her uniform. It is her protective shell, her armor.

Molly’s last name, Gray, represents ambiguity, halfway between black-and-white. She is bracketed by Giselle Black and her husband on one side and Mr. Snow on the other. The author provides several examples of Molly’s ruthlessness in the death of her grandmother and the deliberate implication in court that it was Rodney she saw in the mirror. This is an example of the ends justifying the means. In Molly’s case, however, it suggests a kind of innocence. Molly determines what is the moral outcome and commits small wrongs to produce a greater right.

Molly experiences a Coming of Age. In archetypal terms, she is the maiden (Molly the Maid) emerging from the palace (the Regency Grand Hotel) in which she has been sheltered. Her life has not been perfectly serene—she toils like Cinderella, picked on by her wicked stepsisters in the form of Cheryl and some of the other hotel staff. In the course of the story, she throws off the constraints imposed by parental figures like Mr.