Infamous Commerce

Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

Laura J. Rosenthal

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780801454349
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Infamous Commerce, Laura J. Rosenthal uses literary and historical sources to explore the meaning of prostitution from the Restoration through the eighteenth century, showing how both reformers and libertines constructed the modern meaning of sex work during this period. From Grub Street's lurid "whore biographies" to the period's most acclaimed novels, the prostitute was depicted as facing a choice between abject poverty and some form of sex work.Prostitution, in Rosenthal's view, confronted the core controversies of eighteenth-century capitalism: luxury, desire, global trade, commodification, social mobility, gender identity, imperialism, self-ownership, alienation, and even the nature of work itself. In the context of extensive research into printed accounts of both male and female prostitution—among them sermons, popular prostitute biographies, satire, pornography, brothel guides, reformist writing, and travel narratives—Rosenthal offers in-depth readings of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and the responses to the latter novel (including Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela ), Bernard Mandeville's defenses of prostitution, Daniel Defoe's Roxana, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and travel journals about the voyages of Captain Cook to the South Seas. Throughout, Rosenthal considers representations of the prostitute's own sexuality (desire, revulsion, etc.) to be key parts of the changing meaning of "the oldest profession."

1

A “Cool State of Indifference”: Mother Creswell’s Academy

Pleasure is a thief to business.

Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman

The most famous literary prostitute of the Restoration—Aphra Behn’s Angellica Bianca from The Rover—possesses beauty, wit, and nerve, but in the end she does not get what she wants. Angellica looks down from her window with a confidence and power that the other female characters lack; she hangs out her sign and names her own price, but at the end of the play she becomes so outraged by her treatment by the impoverished cavalier Willmore that she holds a gun to his heart. Before the other characters can happily pair off, a dispirited and disarmed Angellica must be escorted off the stage. Behn must expel the courtesan, it seems, in order to move on to the marriages. But in Angellica’s mini-tragedy ensconced in the play’s larger comic structure, Behn does not, as might her reform-minded contemporaries, represent the prostitute’s inevitable fate as disease, poverty, and miserable death. In fact, Angellica lives in wealth and contentment as a courtesan. She faces grief and danger only when, instead of charging men for sex, she turns the tables and compensates Willmore. Pleasure distracts from business, which makes for bad business.

With Angellica Bianca, Behn creates a prostitute character, unlike the self-consciously commodified Jenny Diver, poised between two historical possibilities: a very modern one in which the prostitute exchanges sexual labor in a public, contractarian marketplace, and an older model in which the whore would be the last person in the world to succeed in business because sexual passion, not financial planning, drives her. When Angellica hangs out her picture she confidently evokes the first possibility, but by the end of the play she has reverted to a version of the second, albeit an unusually sympathetic one. As Ruth Mazo Karras has shown, early modern writers in both Europe and England defined prostitutes overwhelmingly by their sexuality, presuming that women prostituted out of sexual desire rather than economic need. In certain times and places bawdy houses were tolerated, although not, Karras argues, out of an understanding of limited economic options for women but as an “outlet” for male sexuality. Authorities viewed prostitutes as extreme embodiments of general female lust.1 Consistent with Karras’s early modern model, Restoration prostitute figures generally display aggressive desire and/or transgressive passion; by the end of the eighteenth century, however, literary prostitutes appeal to reader sympathy on the basis of their lack of enjoyment.

Thus the difference between the early modern and the modern construction of the prostitute, this chapter will suggest, lies in this figure’s changing relationship to desire, pleasure, the body, economics, and work.2 Throughout the long eighteenth century, writers describe the prostitute’s presumed artifice as theatricality, often in the context of lamenting this feature of the modern world.3 Nevertheless, Restoration moralists and libertine writers rarely doubt the authenticity of the prostitute’s desire; instead, they represent only the most desperate, impoverished, and pathetic whores as failing to enjoy sex, and this usually only as the result of disease, exhaustion, and glutted pleasure. Restoration prostitutes do not necessarily relish each encounter, yet desire—for sexual pleasure, but also for luxury, power, prestige, and wealth—drives their careers and expresses their “true” character. In later constructions, however, prostitute figures often divide themselves between a private “inner” self with a virtuous potential and an exterior, public practice of often highly unpleasant sexual encounters undertaken for compensation.4 In the Restoration and eighteenth century, prostitute stories facetiously, satirically, ironically, melodramatically, and tragically reflected on the meaning, costs, and benefits of the alienation of some part of the self in the marketplace. But what begins as a comic oxymoron—prostitution as delayed gratification rather than just gratification—becomes during the eighteenth century one of prostitution’s central meanings and a widely intriguing figure for a range of commercial experiences.

The Feminist Debate

This chapter distinguishes between constructions of prostitution in the seventeenth century (mostly the second half) and those emerging in the middle of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century representations of sex work, while certainly different from those produced today, nevertheless reconfigure key elements from the earlier period in ways that make them recognizably “modern” and relevant to contemporary debates. I begin, then, with a brief discussion of recent feminist analyses of this issue.

Feminist arguments diverge sharply on prostitution, but converge in their definition of sex work as a form of divided selfhood. They disagree, however, as to whether this self-division constitutes one more instance of the alienation of labor in a capitalist marketplace, or whether commercial sex demands so much of the prostitute’s being that she loses herself entirely.5 The debate consistently returns to a few key questions: What exactly do sex workers alienate, labor or themselves? If labor, does it necessarily degrade the sex worker? On both sides, feminists condemn forced prostitution and acknowledge the hazards of the sex industry. Advocates of prostitute rights, however, understand prostitution as work that does not inherently differ from other kinds.6 Even the emotional challenges of sex work, argues Wendy Chapkis, leave prostitution comparable rather than unique, for many forms of work make emotional demands and require affective performances.7 Anti-prostitution feminists, however, represent prostitution as a devastating form of victimization and tragic self-alienation: Sheila Jeffreys, for example, argues that the prostitute experiences herself as “homeless in her own body”: one cannot, she argues, market sexual labor without violating the core of one’s being.8 Citing the historical indivisibility of self and sexuality for women, Carole Pateman concludes that “when a prostitute contracts out use of her body she is thus selling herself in a very real sense.” Because of this, “for self-protection, a prostitute must distance herself from her sexual use.”9

Contemporary feminists, then, understand prostitution as a commercial exchange that demands theatrical performance and a certain level of self-division, but disagree as to what the prostitute gives over. Arguments for the prostitute’s total self loss, however, seem inconsistent with the continued individuality of prostitutes. In popular rhetoric, this position becomes casually reformulated as “selling the body”; prostitutes, however, normally retain their bodies in such transactions. As prostitute rights advocates point out, representing the prostitute as selling “herself” detracts from recognizing the similarities between prostitution and other forms of labor, which also demand the negotiation of identity in the marketplace.10 Yet prostitution also holds a unique place in the marketplace: Historically, it has been represented as one of the most troubling kinds of exchange—not just sexually transgressive, but economically transgressive as well. Purchasers of sexual services have been long suspected of abusing financial or patriarchal power; sellers of sexual services have been suspected of abusing capacities designated for exclusively private, noncommercial use. So while prostitution may not be inherently different from other forms of labor, it has historically been constructed as an extreme form of commodification that provides a scandalous, negative version of exchange in implicit contrast to salutary forms, or more critically as commodification’s fallout that reveals the market’s potential to elide the difference between a person and a thing.

In the modern world, prostitution clearly functions, as Margaret Radin has argued, as a “contested commodity,” comparable to other troubling exchanges such as surrogate motherhood, the sale of human body parts, and forms of adoption that resemble the purchase of children.11 Contested commodities, she observes, test the remaining boundaries of the marketplace. John Locke characterized the rights-bearing subject as one who owns his own body; nevertheless, three hundred years later the current international market in body parts troubles many post-Lockean subjects. The boundaries of the marketplace had even less clarity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when raising the price of bread could generate clerical debate and political controversy.12 Drawing on Radin’s insight, then, we can see the feminist conflict over prostitution as not just a disagreement over how best to challenge the oppression of women but also as an expression of persisting uncertainty about the negotiation of personal identity in commercial society.

For Radin, sex work calls attention to the “incomplete commodification” observable even in late capitalism; since the eighteenth century, however, prostitution has also served as a lightning rod for contestation over commodification itself, as the “obvious” limit to universal commodification and a trope for the marketplace’s ominous incursions into personal identity (even though, from another point of view, the marketplace produces personal identity). Thus even if sex workers do not actually sell themselves or their bodies, the historical formation of female sexuality as the sum of female identity has constructed prostitution as a figure for the disturbing permeability of public/private boundaries. Pateman, for example, invokes “universal prostitution” as a dystopic vision of unbounded capitalism; Frank Capra fills Main Street with prostitutes as shorthand for the ruthless spread of commercialism unabated by George Bailey’s resistance in It’s a Wonderful Life. When Marx argues, “‘prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer,’” he clearly uses the presumed obviousness of the sex worker’s alienation (and implicit degradation) as a way of objecting to the general condition of all workers.13 This “contested commodity,” then, seems long to have held the power to reveal its disturbing continuities with other forms of labor and exchange. The explosiveness of prostitution as a political issue and narrative trope, then, lies not in prostitution’s “otherness” but in its more general implications: as Lynn Sharon Chancer argues, prostitution “treads into unconsciously threatening waters, remaining marginal and comparatively untheorized precisely because something about it is so central and meaningful.”14

“Contested commodities,” if sufficiently troubling, bear the potential to challenge commodification itself. For this reason, Radin argues, commercial cultures have attempted to neutralize their disruptive power through “compartmentalization”; that is, the notion that some potential goods and services can be marked as inalienable and preserved from commodification so that other goods and services can circulate unproblematically. Eighteenth-century writers, as we will see in subsequent chapters, commonly turned to this strategy. In the rest of this chapter, however, I want to suggest that prostitution’s evocation of the heartlessness of an unbounded marketplace, the exploitation of labor, and an unredeemed commercial dystopia only fully emerges in the early and mid-eighteenth century with the changing meaning of prostitution itself, and that earlier representations make different assumptions. Recent feminist theory continues to debate whether treating a “private” part of the self as an alienable commodity degrades or empowers the prostitute through commercial self-division. In the Restoration, however, this conflict would make limited sense because in most narratives, desire constitutes the whore’s identity. In the Restoration, the sexually alienated prostitute—the one who takes little pleasure in her work or feels objectified, estranged from herself and from others, the one who sees prostitution as inconsistent with her full identity—appears only rarely and sporadically as a harbinger of emergent possibilities.

“This is the fate of most whores”: The Restoration

In The Rover, to return briefly to this play, Angellica Bianca’s servant Moretta throws up her hands and declares the downfall of her mistress as inevitable: “This is the fate of most whores. Trophies, which from believing fops we win, / Are spoils to those who cozen us again.”15 The charming Willmore not only brings no income, not only accepts her money, but also seriously endangers Angellica’s affairs with the men who can pay. Thus in spite of working for a courtesan, Moretta believes that prostitution hardly ever proves good business because a whore will surely spend any profits on her “stallions,” as Angellica does on Willmore. Prostitution consistently fails as a business because whores will always prove incapable of professional distance from their work. As Moretta predicts and her mistress demonstrates, prostitutes are at this time understood to be for the most part incapable, or barely capable, of the sexual distancing that many modern theorists understand prostitution as demanding. Restoration prostitutes remain at home in their sexual bodies. Angellica underprofits because she values her own desire too highly; had she been more interested in alienating her commodified sexual labor for wealth, she would not have looked twice at Willmore.

While throughout her work Behn explores the tensions for women between desire and economic demand, other less sympathetic writers, not surprisingly, invoke the whore’s presumed desire to misogynistic and other political ends. James Turner argues that during this period “whore” was a “fighting word” that suggested “sexual infamy” rather than economic negotiation: “the accusation ‘whore’ served as a universal indicator of guilt.”16 Women who acquired the whore’s reputation became vulnerable to violent attack, either individually (men would slash their faces, as Pinchwife threatens to do to Margery in The Country Wife) or collectively, as the riots attacking bawdy houses in this period exemplify. Even the romantic Belville in The Rover, Turner points out, suggests breaking Angellica Bianca’s windows after Wilmore emerges from her mansion.17 Prostitution’s infamy also functioned politically in attacks on the notorious Stuarts and in attacks on their Puritan opponents: satirists on one side mocked the mistresses of Charles II as common whores; on the other side, writers suggested that secretly perverse Puritans visited prostitutes.18 Restoration poets and satirists consistently represent prostitutes as insatiable in their sexual desires, a point that for Turner contributes to the misogyny of much libertine writing. Other critics, however, have found the Restoration assurance of the whore’s desire an intriguing alternative to the female passivity that later representations would demand.19

But whether misogynist, liberating, transgressive, or threatening, Restoration texts consistently define prostitutes as women driven toward and indulging in sexual pleasure. Restoration prostitute figures generally do not, as in later sentimental representations, endure sex with a pathetic or professional distance for the sake of the payment. They certainly don’t sell “themselves,” but they don’t even contractually exchange their sexual labor. Any relationship between prostitution and work in these texts, then, generally emerges as satiric or ironic.20 In these early representations, whores seek pleasure; they often find it with their clients, but when they don’t they hire a stallion. They sometimes seek money as well, but in a way consistent with their sensuality, for they also desire luxurious clothing, delicate food, and lavish accommodations. Historically, a woman could be called a “whore” or “prostitute” and even arrested as “disorderly” without any money changing hands. (Currently, remuneration alone distinguishes prostitute from non-prostitute sex.) Women in Behn’s Feigned Courtesans and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina disguise themselves as prostitutes to seek erotic opportunities, not payment. Further, while Restoration prostitute stories can certainly seethe with misogyny, they do not genera...