The Nineteenth-Century Female Sex Worker in Britain and France: The Representation of Stereotypes in Visual and Literary Cultures

Abstract

This thesis examines the subversion of stereotypes by the nineteenth-century female sex worker in Britain and France in visual and literary cultures. It uncovers the methods working-class women employed to escape the legal, medical, and cultural restrictions which arose from the Régime des Moeurs, Solicitation Laws, Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. I explore how sex workers could evade detection and criminalisation by evading stereotypes regarding their clothing, body, and behaviour. I argue the women’s carefully considered identity became an unforeseen and overlooked source of contagion for a society that sought to criminalize and ostracize the sex worker as a conduit of vice and venereal disease. Section 1 explores how sex workers manipulated clothing to transgress social boundaries and avoid police detection. I investigate how and why sex workers were able to manipulate clothing to reclaim personal agency. The section evaluates how sex worker stereotypes became morally contagious toward the rest of society. Section 2 focuses on the sex worker’s body to determine how the women were able to avoid corporeal stereotypes surrounding their weight, skin, cosmetics, perfume, and hair. I examine how the body could be manipulated to meet physical ideals of femininity created by the middle and upper class. However, I also identify the limits of stereotype subversion particularly concerning the fate of the fictional sex worker and her untimely demise. Section 3 investigates the stereotypes surrounding sex workers’ behaviour focusing on their manners, habits, and titles. It reveals how sex workers were constantly performing whether they altered their habits, recited middle- and upper-class mannerisms, or improved their etiquette and education. I primarily focus on male representations of the female sex worker in British and French literature; British texts include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893). French texts include Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), and The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), Joris Karl Huysmans’s Marthe (1876), and Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias (1848). I also reference several short stories and novels by French and British authors, draw from contextual resources including courtesan memoirs, newspaper reports, medical essays and social commentaries, and artwork to demonstrate the prevalence of sex worker stereotypes. The thesis concludes by determining the extent to which sex workers could reclaim personal agency by subverting stereotypes.