Maisons de presse, Maisons de passe: Prostitution in the Parisian Literary Market, 1830 - 1923

Nineteenth-century French novels are replete with prostitutes. These fictionalized versions of Paris’ real population of venal women and men usually possess an exceptional spirit; yet over the course of the narrative, they are consistently removed from public circulation in society. Literary critics such as Charles Bernheimer have adeptly shown that a desire for narrative control over the prostitute reveals a prevailing anxiety surrounding gender—and more specifically, female sexuality—in nineteenth-century France. My work demonstrates that this anxiety also has a material component, one that was both specific to, and endangered, the evolving Parisian literary marketplace. Furthermore, I show that the evolution in depictions of prostitution indicates that the threat came not only from women, but from another non-dominant group that benefited from education reform and a wider availability of reading material: the working class. In this dissertation, I analyse prefaces to slang dictionaries and scenes in novels in which venal characters read and/or write: moments where the prostitute as subject collapses into metaphor. I use these as an interpretive lens for understanding how authors from Balzac to Proust might turn to an illicit subject to further their careers. I argue that depictions of reading and writing prostitutes make the venal body an effective, but perilous, site for the production of new ideas about the professional writer. Effective, in that the ideas the novels supported continue to echo in current Western notions of genius, intellectual property and labor, and creative license. Yet perilous in that, as an image of intellectual venality, the literate prostitute risks mapping the venal body—sexed, gendered, and working class—back onto either the figure of the idealized author, or his body of work. At stake in this dissertation is a way of representing prostitution that contributed to the gendering of not only the professional author, but the public intellectual.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Grant, Jennifer

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bray, Patrick
• Chaplin, Tamara
• Mall, Laurence
• Flinn, Margaret

• French literature
• Nineteenth-century France
• Nineteenth-century literature
• Prostitution
• Publication
• Literary marketplace

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Jennifer Lyndsay Grant

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90947

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90947