Understanding Whores

This book reconstructs the "fascination" of the prostitute, as manifested in whore biographies and fictional episodes set in the sexual underworld; Rosenthal's chosen texts are mostly English, with a few Irish memoirs. It adds to a significant group of scholarly projects that take nonmarital or illicit sexuality as their field, as mined from legal records, reform treatises, and "pornographic" fiction. The most innovative studies have looked beyond the direct and obvious theme of sexuality itself, to ask what else did prostitution mean. Historians like Guido Ruggiero and Elizabeth Cohen (for Renaissance Italy), and Randolph Trumbach (for eighteenth-century London), have uncovered an astonishingly rich archive of individual cases in the legal record, with abundant stories of brutality, betrayal, magic, and resilience. Sympathetic studies of the Renaissance courtesan—particularly Margaret Rosenthal's biography of Veronica Franco—emphasize fashioning, resourcefulness, and creativity, both literary and social. A volume of comparative essays (and a CD of musical examples) commissioned by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon deepens this emphasis on the courtesan's "arts," meaning creative expressions rather than wily tricks or sexual refinements.¹ Many of us have related the discourses of transgressive sexuality, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to politics, social order, gender ideology, and intellectual history. Within eighteenth-century studies proper, Pamela Cheek brings two different projects together, one showing how the French secret police turned the brothels into a vast intelligence-gathering network, the other exploring how Western categories of sexual property fare in the South Seas (notably in Bougainville's travel narrative and Diderot's famous Supplement to it).² On the English side, William Warner and Bradford Mudge have both compared canonical fiction to scandalous autobiographies and "whore's stories." My own work in this area concentrated on the confusion in categories brought about by the great courtesan or royal mistress, who is simultaneously a "whore" (that is, sexually active outside marriage), and a glittering member of the elite, rich not only in money, but in the more valued currency of social prestige, fashion, and access to power. Of particular interest for the current review are the paradoxical formations of Restoration wit, such as Horner's view, in Wycherley's Country Wife (1675) that all women are merchants of sex, but great ladies "enhance their commodities," or Rochester's observation, in "A Satyr against Mankind" (1679), that patrons treat whores and men of wit the same way: "First they're enjoyed, and then kicked out of doors," though satirical poets, like diseased prostitutes, get their revenge by leaving a sting behind. Much interesting work remains to be done on a subject sketched out by Catherine Gallagher in her remarks on Aphra Behn, the connection between prostitution and authorship.³

Now Laura Rosenthal (no relation to Margaret) engages a mass of texts about women and men who sell sex, but shifts the emphasis from the sex to the selling. She is interested in the way writers understood the commercialization of what should, in theory (whose theory?), be intimate, individual, and priceless. In particular, she reads this "infamous commerce" as a synecdoche or extreme paradigm of commerce, and argues that it grew increasingly difficult to separate sex trading from the rest of capitalism, as everything became a "commodity." (Rosenthal expects us to know already that commodity was slang for vulva in Restoration English.) "For writers as diverse politically as Aphra Behn, Bernard Mandeville, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding," she concludes, "sex work provided an explosive opportunity to hold capitalist relations up for scrutiny" (212). She provides densely clustered readings of libertine and reformist whore biographies that will feel like fresh discoveries to all but the most jaded readers of pornographia, and provocative new insights into such well-trodden classics as The Fable of the Bees (1714), Roxana (1724), Clarissa (1748), and Tom Jones (1749).

I can only sample here the many new angles on old texts that I will ponder and probably incorporate into...