The Prostitute's Body

Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain

Nina Attwood

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317324249
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

Attwood examines Victorian attitudes to prostitution across a number of sources: medical, literary, pornographic.

1 WHITE-WASHED SEPULCHRES AND WIVES OF ENGLISHMEN: WILLIAM ACTON’S REPRESENTATION OF ENGLISH PROSTITUTES

It is a little too absurd to tell us that ‘the dirty, intoxicated slattern, in tawdry finery and an inch thick in paint’ – long a conventional symbol of prostitution – is a correct figure in the middle of the nineteenth century.¹

It is perhaps ironic that the Victorian doctor best known today for his somewhat stereotypical views on female sexual passivity should also be the author of an equally influential text on prostitution. When the venereologist William Acton published his treatise on prostitution in 1857, he was contributing to a debate that had been running for decades. Like his predecessors, Acton reiterated a familiar body of information: the numbers of recorded prostitutes, the causes of prostitution, and the existing measures for its amelioration or prevention.² Acton’s work differed from earlier efforts, however, in advancing a sustained call for state and medical intervention in recognizing and regulating prostitution. Acton was an influential medical figure in the arguments which preceded the institution of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, and his work offered a different type of engagement with the existing mythologies and representations of prostitution.³ These Acts entailed the registration and compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes in selected garrison towns in England, which further involved periods of compulsory hospitalization until venereal infections were cured. What makes Acton particularly interesting is that his key work on prostitution offers a dialogic window on the interplay between public debate, legislation and medical opinion. When a petition was made for the extension of this Act into civilian areas and a debate over the Act itself ensued, Acton revised the 1857 edition of Prostitution Considered and published the new version in 1870, consolidating the case for regulation, supporting its extension, but also aiming to present a well-researched and up-to-date study of the current state of prostitution. These works of 1857 and 1870 are important texts in the Victorian literature on prostitution, particularly for their contribution to the representation of the prostitute. Acton’s texts engaged with conventional imagery and attitudes on prostitution, as well as an existing discourse on the subject.

When Acton published Prostitution Considered in 1857, the ‘myth of the prostitute’s downward progress’ – an arc of disease, deprivation and early death – predominated in the medical works on prostitution and in other discourses of the Victorian period.⁴ Although Acton relied on many earlier works on prostitution, he posed significant challenges to this mythology. Acton argued that this mythology was characterized by certain ‘vulgar errors’ concerning the inevitability of the physical and moral decline of prostitutes.⁵ Although scholars have argued that Acton merely constructed this imagery to better make his case for regulation and to convince the lay and professional publics, his works are widely acknowledged as fundamental interventions in Victorian representations of prostitution.⁶

Mary Poovey has argued that representation is ‘the arena for negotiating values, meanings, and identities’ and ‘stages the workings through of the dominant ideology’, but she has also made the important distinction that ‘opposition can also emerge within representation’.⁷ Acton’s texts exemplify this possibility of internal dissonance, complexity, and even contradiction. Acton attempted to define prostitution – in the face of the obvious ambiguity evident in other sources – but his discussion of the causes and characterization of prostitution often worked to highlight the various and almost indefinable manifestations of venal sexuality in the Victorian period. The significant challenges he posed to the ‘vulgar errors’ of the dominant mythology surrounding prostitutes were then often tempered by imagery and tropes that – guided by the overarching aim of suppressing venereal disease – worked to construct the prostitute and her body as an agent of both moral and physical disease. Although he perpetuated some stereotypes, he simultaneously challenged others, showing that the Victorian construction of the prostitute was far from stable. But where any unitary coherence in this text may appear to be compromised by its internal contradictions and inconsistencies, it is precisely these contradictions that make it valuable in understanding Victorian representations of prostitution.

When published, Prostitution Considered represented the most significant attempt to harness the multifarious official representations and also realities (as Acton saw them) of prostitution, while attempting to bring together these various aspects into a case for regulation. This process itself is an enterprise worthy of closer analysis. Therefore, this chapter will analyse Acton’s definition and characterization of the prostitute, and his engagement with the mythology of decline. The analysis of this single text (in two editions) not only reveals evidence of a complex schema of representation for Victorian prostitution, but shows how an author could be aware of the subject’s scope and ambiguities, even while using it to construct particular and purposeful representations.

Historians have emphasized the role that the medical profession played in the production and dissemination of the mythology of the Victorian prostitute. In terms of its growing authenticity and status as a creator and disseminator of rational and scientific knowledge, the medical profession signified one of those ‘instances of discursive production’ involved in the ‘production of power’ and the ‘propagation of knowledge’ that Michel Foucault historicized in his History of Sexuality.⁸ William Acton’s Prostitution is one of these official voices, and, as such, has been a staple component of any study of Victorian prostitution and sexuality.⁹ However, Acton’s text, despite being acknowledged as a notable work, has been subject to considerable critique by scholars.

Judith Walkowitz’s study of Victorian prostitution and the CD Acts argued that Acton and other writers on prostitution from the 1850s onward were largely derivative of the works produced in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet’s work on prostitution in Paris was especially influential on British writers, who relied on it both for its categories of analysis and actual social details.¹¹ Where Acton (and also W. R. Greg of the Westminster Review) differed was in refocusing the issue on an agenda for regulation. Regulation, it has been argued, was an agenda firmly rooted in the sexual double standard and part of the propaganda that legitimated men’s access to prostitutes. Lynda Nead has argued that Prostitution Considered was only different from prior works in its challenge to the medical accuracy of the myth of the prostitute’s downward progress, and that even in this venture the prostitute gains only a mere elevation from her prior status as victim.¹²

However, although Acton most definitely presented his material explicitly to make a case for regulation, he also used past literature alongside newly compiled and available medical statistics and reports to fashion what he saw, and consciously intended, as the most detailed and up-to-date work on prostitution. Acton perceived his own originality in privileging the medico-scientific over the religious in delineating the nature of prostitution, rather than formulating anything radically different in terms of its interior details – although his challenge to certain aspects of the stereotype at that time is significant in itself. So while I would agree that ‘rather than a new intellectual venture, Prostitution represented the ultimate elaboration of a style’, I would hesitate to accept Walkowitz’s further comment that the ‘basic assumptions’ of this style ‘inhibited further development’.¹³ Where, for Walkowitz, Acton’s primary faults lie in an agenda and dependence on literature that prohibited a more accurate social profile of the prostitute, this chapter aims to tease out the strands of his overall representation to assess its coherence and its engagement with the traditional mythology surrounding the prostitute. This is particularly relevant because, as Walkowitz admits, Acton’s stereotype would dominate debates over the CD Acts in the 1870s and 1880s.¹⁴

Acton’s stereotype has come under fire from other academic quarters as well. Shannon Bell’s work on the cultural construction of the prostitute body, as a linear process from the premodern to postmodern eras, sees in Acton’s and other official nineteenth-century texts, the inscription of the prostitute body as diseased, profane – the marginalized ‘other’. Bell describes Acton’s work as a ‘good collage of medical and moral writings … supporting the regulation of British prostitution’, both inscribed by previous works and then, in turn, influencing the debates on the CD Acts.¹⁵ This idea of a ‘collage’ is important and indicative of Acton’s presentation of contemporary attitudes and research methods; the metaphor of collage, I would argue, also offers the historian more than one possible reading. Bell’s reading of Acton reflects her larger ideological enterprise – tracing the historic development (or lack thereof) of the prostitute subject voice – and although this is a persuasive interpretation, its ‘presentist’ agenda makes it less useful to the historian interested in teasing out the complexity of contemporary attitudes to prostitution and authors’ reflexivity and flexibility in this cultural context. Acton’s representation of prostitution involved some contradictions and challenges that were more than just propagandist reformulations of older staples from the prostitution back catalogue, and it is time to subject his text to re-evaluation.

My interest lies primarily in Acton’s conceptualization and representation of Victorian prostitution and his relationship with the wider discursive context, but it is also valuable to more fully understand the construction of his system of representation. After all, Acton’s agenda, professional experience and prospective audience affected his narrative style and use of language. As a text that made explicit challenges to the iconography of prostitution, the nature of these deviations also requires close attention. Historians have tended to subsume such departures from convention beneath Acton’s general adherence to the mythologies of prostitution or his crystallization of stereotypes. However, as literary critics and deconstructionists have argued, all texts include ‘grey areas’, contradictions: moments when they risk subverting themselves — Acton is a perfect example of these dynamics. It is precisely these dissonances and inconsistencies in which this chapter is interested. Acton oscillated between adhering to and challenging particular tropes or assumptions, showing instancesof apparent self-subversion, and also demonstrating a clear authorial purpose. It is more important to recognize what Acton added to the representational schema, what remained, what was reformulated, and what was completely challenged, than to judge him as incoherent or unoriginal. His work remains an important and central nineteenth-century text on prostitution. While Prostitution Considered has been read differently by academics it is precisely its amenability to multiple readings that displays the many possibilities for deciphering Victorian perspectives onprostitution. Whether or not Prostitution Considered was ‘the ultimate elaboration of a style’, as Walkowitz argued, it remains necessary to discuss the elements of its style: the structure of the text, the narrative voice, and the employment of particular language and motifs. This chapter will explore Acton’s representation of prostitution through three key areas: defining prostitution, characterizing the prostitute, and engaging with the mythology of decline.

Acton is perhaps best known for his comment in another of his works – Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs – that the majority of women ‘are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.¹⁶ As well as his more general medical work on the ‘urinary and generative organs’, Acton specialized in venereology, publishing his two editions of Prostitution Considered alongside a number of other pieces for the British medical press.¹⁷ Acton’s approach to the problems of venereal disease and prostitution in England had been influenced by time spent in Paris studying venereology under one of its most well known practitioners, Phillippe Ricord, and as an ‘externe’ to the women’s venereal hospital in Paris. Like most British medical authors on prostitution, Acton was also heavily influenced by the work of the French doctor, Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet, whose De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris was published in 1836.¹⁸ Critical of current efforts to reform prostitutes – be they lock hospitals or midnight missions – Acton advocated the recognition of the inevitability of prostitution, and therefore the need to regulate the activity and ameliorate its adverse effects. He argued that ‘though incapable of absolute repression, prostitution admits of mitigation’.¹⁹ Nor was Acton’s view unusual. The Lancet, one of the British medical profession’s key periodicals, was strongly supportive of state regulation. It argued that ‘prostitution is as much a fact as the existence of society, and will continue as long’.²⁰ Such arguments for the inevitability of prostitution were significant components of regulationist calls to join medicine with larger moral and social concerns. ‘Medical men do well, then,’ the Lancet declared, ‘repeatedly and energetically to call upon Government to arm science with the social powers necessary to destroy this spreading cancer of civilisation’.²¹

The medical discourse on prostitution was not homogeneous, however, especially regarding the issue of the CD Acts. Even John Simon, the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, objected to the ‘state interference to provide for the disinfection of prostitutes’ and was distrusting of the implications for the civil population if the Acts were extended.²² Historians have largely ignored medical opposition to the CD Acts, no doubt assuming it to be negligible, but there is important evidence for a significant amount of dissension among doctors.²³ The Medical Enquirer was a journal set up with the express purpose of challenging the medical hegemony of periodicals like the Lancet that professed to represent majority medical opinion.²⁴ So although the medical establishment was, to a considerable degree, constructing a morbid stereotype of the prostitute and exploiting this otherness in order to forge a medical professional identity, this process was not representative of the whole profession. Acton would not have had to argue for regulation so pointedly had the medical fraternity agreed on how to deal with prostitution.

Acton claimed in 1857 that his work was designed to address the ‘absence of reliable guides’ on prostitution, and to force the issue into the State’s attention so as to oppose venereal diseases ‘upon public grounds’.²⁵ The first edition was thus a push for recognition and intervention, and the second edition in 1870 was an effort to consolidate the current system of medical surveillance which had recently seen a petition (1869) for extension outside garrison towns and into the civilian population. I have chosen to focus on the second edition of Prostitution Considered because of Acton’s claim that ‘the whole work has been carefully revised and remodelled, and to a great extent rewritten; moreover, sources of information formerly closed or unknown, are now ope...