THE PROSTITUTES BODY: REWRITING PROSTITUTION IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN
THE BODY, GENDER AND CULTURE
Series Editors: | Lynn Botelho
Elizabeth Hurren |
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THE PROSTITUTES BODY: REWRITING PROSTITUTION IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN
BY
Nina Attwood
First published 2011 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Taylor & Francis 2011
Nina Attwood 2011
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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Attwood, Nina.
The prostitutes body: rewriting prostitution in Victorian Britain. (Body, gender and culture)
1. Prostitution Great Britain History 19th century. 2. Great Britain Social conditions 19th century.
I. Title II. Series
306.74094109034-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-006-3 (hbk)
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
CONTENTS
This book began several years ago as a PhD thesis and as such I am indebted to encouragement and support both collegial and financial garnered during that process. I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Barry Reay and Joe Zizek, for their support, enthusiasm, and constructive criticism over the years, and to examiners Cathy Coleborne and Bertrand Taithe for their insight and comment. Thanks are also due to Nisha Saheed and Barbara Batt for their assistance, support, and good humour. For invaluable library assistance thanks to Philip Abela and Christine Jackson at the University of Auckland library, and to the staff at the Womens Library in London for securing research materials on and by Josephine Butler. I am also very grateful for the responses given to conference papers based on parts of this research: First, at the Sixth European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 2006; and then at the Sexual Histories: Bodies and Desires Uncovered Conference in Exeter, UK, July 2007. I was aided in these research and conference trips with grants awarded by the University of Auckland History Department, the Faculty of Arts, and the Graduate Research Fund. Working with Barry Reay, Kim Phillips and Claire Gooder in our various histories of sexuality courses has been stimulating and always entertaining.
In the process of revising the thesis into its current form Id like to thank Elizabeth Hurren for comments on early drafts and, most importantly, to Lynn Botelho for her gracious allocation of time and critical comment during the whole process. Thanks also to Daire Carr for vital editorial support and encouragement.
A special thanks to Claire Gooder my good friend and colleague for her great conversation and constructive criticism. Last but by no means least, thanks and love to Jason and my family for their continued support and encouragement. The arrival of my son Nico proved the greatest distraction but also the best reward.
The career of these women is a brief one; their downward path a marked and inevitable one; and they know this well. They are almost never rescued; escape themselves they cannot.
If the prostitute had become, as the Saturday Review termed it, the most interesting class of womanhood in Britain in the Victorian period, what did she look like? How, and by what means, did her contemporaries depict her? Such basic questions raise further issues: What was (and perhaps still is) the significance of representations of prostitution and what role did they play in the production of myths and cultural narratives, the regulation of behaviour and the shaping of social attitudes? Historians (and others) interested in Victorian social and cultural history, and in perceptions of prostitution particularly, cannot avoid such questions and they continue to invite further analysis even after decades of innovative scholarship.
Studying contemporary representations provides a way of reading prostitution: the analysis and study of images and texts as discursive forms sheds light on the process of constructing social meaning. Lynda Nead has argued that studying representations involves recognizing the improbability of discovering a true reflection or an objective picture of what is shown on the surface of a text, but such study raises the issue of how particular kinds of images are circulated, consumed and produced at any given moment.Scholars have argued that mid- to late-Victorian definitions and characterizations of the prostitute remain indebted to a corpus of works published in the early 1840s. The myth of the prostitutes downward progress a narrative involving disease, destitution and early death was, so it is claimed, crystallized in the Victorian consciousness from this period on. It was then reproduced without examination in the work of historians. Modern academic interest in the art and literature of the fallen woman has reinforced this interpretation. In reading representational homogeneity in the nineteenth-century texts on prostitution, modern scholars have consequently limited their interpretations of contemporary attitudes to prostitution and underestimated the variety and complexity of these attitudes. This book reads a selection of post-1850 sources to assess historical claims for the resilience and codification of the myth, and to subject Victorian ideology to much-needed scrutiny. Victorians were more complex in their representation of prostitution than historians have given them credit for, and this study illustrates this complexity both by revisiting canonical texts and utilizing lesser known sources. This analysis reveals how actively some Victorians worked to challenge the myths that historians continue to attribute to them.
The works of the 1840s are considered by historians as central to establishing a conventional prostitute narrative that continued to influence subsequent representations of prostitution into the 1850s and beyond.narratives of the prostitute, and the reproduction of a stereotype which would allegedly prove resilient in later decades.
These early authors varied in their ability (or desire) to define their subject matter. Talbot avoided delineating a working definition of prostitution. Bevan merely described prostitution (rather than prostitutes) as a system of unmitigated pollution and woe. Despite the apparent clarity and distinction in terms of the act of prostitution and the identity of the prostitute in these statements, most of these texts referred to a variety of women of different ages and occupations, who became prostitutes from a variety of causes, and who challenged this apparent ease of definition.
