Maigret and His Feminine Side

 

Today I would like to recommend the film Maigret Sets a Trap (Maigret tend un piège, directed by Jean Delannoy, 1958, starring Jean Gabin).
It is here, in a brilliant adaptation of Simenon’s novel, that Jean Gabin reveals an original and remarkably deep story about a woman who is not a source of misfortune, but a subject in her own right — a dialogical voice for the male protagonist.

A Brief Summary of the Plot (with Spoilers)

The film takes place during a summer heatwave in Paris, primarily in the Montmartre district (Place du Tertre, the surroundings of Sacré-Cœur), with episodes in other parts of the city. Paris is suffocating, sweaty, tense — the heat acts as a catalyst for aggression and frustration, exactly as it does in Simenon’s fiction.

The city is terrorized by a serial killer who targets young women. The victims are stabbed, and their clothes are brutally torn apart — the violence has a clearly sexual and sadistic character, even though rape itself does not occur. The women share similar physical traits: small, rather plump, dark-haired. Depending on the source, four murders precede the beginning of the film, with another occurring during the investigation.

The police find themselves at a complete impasse: no witnesses, no robbery motive, no coherent clues. Under pressure from the press and public opinion, Maigret consults a psychiatrist, Professor Grosjean. He diagnoses the killer as a man with an enormous narcissistic ego, burdened by a deep inferiority complex toward women and driven by an obsessive need to dominate and demonstrate power. The key insight is that the killer will not stop until he feels threatened, exposed, or psychologically provoked — and that he is vain and highly sensitive to public humiliation.

Maigret therefore decides on a risky bluff. He arrests a petty criminal, Maurin (Marcel), and publicly announces that he is the murderer. Shortly afterward, Maurin is released but kept under close police surveillance. The goal is not to catch Maurin, but to provoke the real killer into either striking again or making a fatal mistake out of wounded vanity.

At the same time, Maigret investigates the circle of suspects, focusing on seemingly ordinary figures: craftsmen, petty bourgeois, artists. Inspector Lognon plays an important role (more prominent here than in the novel), as do figures of mothers and wives — family relations marked by toxic dependence, suppressed humiliation, and childhood trauma. Sexual tension, frustration, and rage hang over the city; Paris “chokes” in the heat just as Maigret chokes on his sense of helplessness.

The trap works — but not exactly as planned. The true perpetrator reveals himself through a series of dramatic events: a seemingly insignificant man, deeply wounded in his masculinity and trapped in a destructive family structure. The film introduces a significant shift in emphasis: a subplot in which Maurin’s wife kills to protect her husband. This twist strengthens the drama but simultaneously simplifies the psychological diagnosis known from the novel.

Three Women in the Trap: The Mother, the Accomplice, and the One Who Watches

In Maigret Sets a Trap, Simenon — perhaps more forcefully than anywhere else in the cycle — juxtaposes three female figures that together form a commentary on male violence, fantasies of femininity, and the limits of autonomy. Two of them become active participants in the drama of crime and punishment; the third remains outside the scene, yet it is her gaze that provides the story with its moral perspective.

The first is the mother — the classic Simenonian figure of la maman. In the novel (and even more clearly in Gabin’s film), the murderer’s mother is willing to do anything to protect her son. She not only remains silent and lies, but assumes the moral and emotional burden of guilt, and in the end even factual guilt. Her maternal love is absolute and unconditional — and at the same time destructive. By protecting her child, she becomes complicit in the continuation of the murders. Simenon does not portray her as a monster; instead, he shows how maternal sacrifice can become a trap for both sides — the son imprisoned by guilt toward his mother, the mother trapped in the belief that her sacrifice is the sole meaning of her existence.

The second woman is the wife — the figure of the “silent accomplice.” By agreeing to be not only a partner but also a shield for her husband, she assumes guilt so that he may continue to function in the world. In the novel, this role is especially clear in the figure of a woman who, knowing about the crimes, does not denounce her husband but remains silent and, at a crucial moment, tries to take the blame upon herself. Her stance is not heroism, but a form of self-destruction in the name of love — a love that demands she become a shield, an alibi, a shadow. Simenon does not glorify this posture; he exposes its tragic nature: a woman who relinquishes her subjectivity eventually ceases to exist as a distinct person.

And finally, the third woman — Mrs. Maigret. In The Trap, her role is minimal in terms of plot, yet structurally decisive. She appears in a few brief domestic scenes: making tea, handing her husband his slippers, listening as he returns exhausted; she does not interrogate, advise, or admire him. She is a witness and a commentator — not verbally, but through her presence. Her existence contrasts sharply with the two women from Montmartre: they die or lose themselves in the name of a man; she exists alongside Maigret, not for him. She does not mirror his expectations or become a projection of fantasy. She preserves an intact autonomy — quiet, unassuming, yet unquestionable.

Maigret’s Feminine Side

In her essay Maigret and Women: La maman and la putain (1978), Erica M. Eisinger formulated a thesis that has shaped most interpretations of women in Simenon for over forty years. According to her, the author divides female characters into two archetypes: the mother-caregiver (warm, domestic, asexual or sexually repressed) and the prostitute (passionate, destructive, most often a victim or the agent of her own downfall). Mrs. Maigret would be the pure maman; victims and suspects in most novels would be variations of the putain. This dichotomy, Eisinger argues, is deeply stereotypical and rooted in patriarchal imagination: a woman either serves (as a mother) or threatens and must be punished (as a prostitute).

But life does not always conform to feminist expectations.

Maigret Sets a Trap disrupts this scheme on two levels simultaneously. First, both the mother and the wife are implicated. Both function at once as maman figures and accomplices in crime; both are entangled in male sexual-sadistic violence. They cannot be neatly separated into archetypes — they are simultaneously victims and co-perpetrators. Second — and more importantly — Simenon condemns the male fantasy of woman as an object of projection. The killer murders women who, in his eyes, merge mother and prostitute into a single figure; he slashes them with a knife in an attempt to destroy an image he himself has created. The crimes are acts of desperate effort to break out of his own psychological trap — a trap in which a woman can be neither just a mother nor just a lover, but must be both at once, and therefore is never real.

In this context, Mrs. Maigret becomes the true heroine of the story. Not because she solves the mystery, but because she exists outside male imagination. A contemporary reader, shaped by feminist critique, may feel uneasy watching scenes in which she makes tea for her husband and remains silent. Yet Simenon does not portray her as a victim of patriarchy. Her silence is not submission; it is a choice. Her autonomy does not require loud declarations — it is realized in everyday life, in remaining herself even when her husband returns with yet another story of human misery and male destruction.

Unlike the mothers and wives of Montmartre, Mrs. Maigret does not sacrifice herself — she accompanies. She does not reflect Maigret’s expectations; she shares with him, as an equal, a space in which he can be himself: tired, empathetic, not always effective. It is precisely her intact personality — quiet, autonomous, non-fantasmatic — that becomes the final commentary on the entire story. In a world where men project their fears and desires onto women, and women die or lose themselves trying to fulfill those projections, Mrs. Maigret simply is. And this “being” proves to be the strongest form of resistance.

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