“The Reproduction of Non-Productive Sex: The Brothel as a Site of Learning in English, French, and Spanish Pornologies.”

2015

Prostitution is one of the world’s oldest professions. Prostitution supplies a demand that is constantly seeking to be met. Due to financial need, involuntary force, poor education, and just bad luck many women have fallen into this profession that will always be available to the misfortunate. This was no different in both the rural and urban parts of the United States during the 19th century. In Anne M. Butler’s Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, an investigation of the prostitutes of the frontier west is explored. In The History of Prostitution by William W. Sanger, the lives and experiences of New York prostitutes during this same time are described. Using Butler’s accounts of the fallen women of the west based on her own research using local newspapers, jail registries, diaries, censuses of the time as well as other scholarly monographs on the subject, and Sanger’s first-hand interviews with prostitutes living in New York City, an analysis of the similarities and differences between the way the lives of these prostitutes are depicted by the two authors, can be examined. Analysis of each theses presented by both authors will be explored to compare their two different uses of sources (primary and secondary) and the effectiveness of those sources towards their arguments.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 79, 2019

Although the prostitute became a fairly common figure in eighteenth-century prose fiction, there were already narrative texts dealing with that type of character in Restoration England, although most of them have been largely disregarded. This article will focus on three of those texts: 1) The Crafty Whore (1658), an anonymous dialogue between two courtesans that is framed between a preface that presents it as a cautionary text, and an epilogue entitled "Dehortation from Lust"; 2) Richard Head's The Miss Display' d (1675), a narrative in the picaresque mode introduced by an admonitory preface and told by an intrusive third-person narrator that is often critical of prostitutes and women in general; and 3) the anonymous The London Jilt (1683), another picaresque novel presented as a cautionary tale to warn readers against the deceit and corruption of prostitutes, but with an autodiegetic narrator who interlaces the relation with social and moral comments. In these texts the female agency and voice are often curbed by a male authorial voice that uses a misogynistic discourse in an alleged attempt to expose the crafty contrivances of prostitutes in order to ensnare men. Keywords: prostitute narratives, Restoration England, misogyny, The Crafty Whore, The Miss Display' d, The London Jilt. REVELANDO A LA R AMER A: MISOGINIA EN NARR ACIONES SOBRE PROSTITUTAS DE LA INGLATERR A DE LA RESTAUR ACIÓN Resumen Aunque la prostituta es un personaje frecuente en la novela inglesa del siglo xviii, ya apa-rece en textos narrativos publicados en la Inglaterra de la Restauración, aunque la mayoría de ellos han sido ignorados. Este artículo analiza tres de esos textos: 1) The Crafty Whore (1658), un diálogo anónimo entre dos cortesanas que está enmarcado entre un prefacio que lo presenta como una advertencia, y un epílogo titulado «Disuasión de la lujuria»; 2) The Miss Display' d de Richard Head (1675), una novela en modo picaresco introducida por un prefacio también admonitorio y relatada por un narrador intruso en tercera persona que es a menudo crítico con las prostitutas y las mujeres en general: y 3) la anónima The London Jilt (1683), otra novela picaresca presentada como relato que alerta a los lectores contra el engaño y la corrupción de las prostitutas, pero con un narrador autodiegético que entrelaza la narración con comentarios de tipo social y moral. En estos textos la voz y agencia femenina se ven refrenadas por una voz autorial masculina que utiliza un discurso misógino con la intención de revelar los astutos ardides de las prostitutas con el fin de engañar a los hombres. Palabras clave: narraciones sobre prostitutas, Inglaterra de la Restauración, misoginia, The Crafty Whore, The Miss Display' d, The London Jilt.

American Historical Review, 1995

Oxford Art Journal, 2006

2011

When a reader has in front of him a text, be it a novel, a play, or a poem, he must be aware that the text is the result of a long process of mutation, a process which starts with the author and is consolidated at the hands of the editor. The origin of that mutation, during the Victorian era, stems from key aspects such as morality and social conventions. However, unlike what Randall McCleod suggests, the reader should not only make of the text a point of departure, but also a case study of the period it was written in. A text is fundamentally a projection of the historical circumstances it was created in. What I propose to demonstrate in this argument, is how a text can be used by the reader as a portrait of social and moral struggle, namely Victorian codes of morality and social convention regarding women and the issue of prostitution. I’ll discuss this proposition in relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue, ‘Jenny’, and his portrayal of these issues in his poem, as well as the issues of censorship of the period. The Victorian era has long been characterised as a period of change, instability and contradiction. The nineteenth century saw a revival of religion, – which brought with it a greater concern with morality – as well as a fast passed industrialization. Laura Cenicola and Mareike Aumann have defined Victorian morality as ideals that ‘supported sexual repression, low tolerance of crime and importance of the British Empire’. Also, as Maria Frawley said, ‘literary rates increased, print culture proliferated, […] and a mass reading public was born’. This meant literature was a vehicle for the dissemination of ideals, which meant in turn a greater control of publications was required. If readers had easy access to any sort of publication, measures needed to be taken to make sure codes of propriety were maintained. Literary censorship flourished this way, alongside anti-obscenity laws. Censorship could significantly condition the shape of a text, in a sense that authors needed to model their subject-matters in a way that would preserve moral standards. If that wasn’t the case, it would be up to the publishers to separate the wheat from the shaft. Therefore, an editor could change the original meaning of a text in order to keep a book from being banished, or even destroyed, as it was stipulated by the Obscenity Publication Act of 1857. Randall Macleod’s proposition could be seen in this light, to the extent that the text a reader had access to, wasn’t necessarily the original text that the author wrote, as it might have been altered by the editor. However, even if a text suffered alterations and omissions, that didn’t mean it would change its original meaning, as it can be seen with Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’. The censorship in this case was in fact self-censorship, as I will discuss ahead.

In this dissertation I consider the ideological implications of representations of courtesan culture in Émile Zola’s Nana, and assert the validity and value of this analytic approach to the naturalist text. The date range I have chosen (1860-1885) encompasses the rise of fall of the Second Empire, from its pinnacle at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, to Napoleon III’s surrender to Prussia at the Battle of Sedan in 1870. French terms are referenced throughout this dissertation so I have included a glossary of translations after the concluding chapter. The chapters of my dissertation develop a Zolaesque framework, forming concentric circles that push out from the novel’s central theme: the sexual body. Briefly summarised, Chapter One explores the body observed: the body as myth, the body as spectacle, and the body in (and evading) the narrative field of vision. Chapter Two addresses the ‘crisis of the nude,’ structures of marginality, and the degradation of the social and political body of Second Empire high society. Chapter Three is concerned with the function of environment in the novel, particularly spaces of modernity and how they operate on gender. Nana is, once again, the centre of the hurricane; the focal point of sexual frenzy, the sexual narrative, and of its analysis; a site for the inscription of moral, political and social ideological commentary to which all symbolism returns. Accompanying each chapter is an analysis of Édouard Manet’s realist paintings Nana (1877), Olympia (1863) and Bar at the Folies-Bergére (1882), opening a wider commentary on literature and art as communicating forms of ideological discourse. Contrary to dominant academic criticism—which I will both cite and scrutinise throughout this dissertation—I posit that Zola’s moralising intention is not at odds with his naturalistic literary aim. Rather, the naturalist novel anticipates the immobilisation of its excessive commitment to descriptive realism; it signals the significance of its apparent contradictions as crucial to the topos with which it is engaged; its calls attention to formal and thematic dissonance, and in turn, the historical circumstances it seeks to expose. The irruption of the natural in the naturalist novel observes the ironies of man-made deformations of the natural world, and through ideological commentary on the body and its environment, Zola condemns the conditions of the Second Empire as the fall of man — posing naturalism as its redemption. Both Zola and Manet’s texts develop around a disparate historical, social and political context, and it is in their aberrations that they come the closest to observable truth.