Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's Rise from Prostitution (review)

Known by her courtesan nom de guerre "La Mogador" and later as the Comtesse de Chabrillan, the woman born into the humblest ranks of the working class in 1824 as Céleste Vénard led a life that was no less than extraordinary. From her registration as a prostitute with the Paris police at the age of sixteen to her marriage to the comte de Chabrillan in 1854, from her time in the notorious Saint-Lazare prison to her success as a self-taught autobiographer, novelist, and playwright, she experienced and documented both the monde and the demi-monde of the nineteenth century in France in ways that few others, male or female, were able to do. And yet, throughout this extraordinary life, she carried with her personal demons borne of the shame, guilt, and rage of her early years and of the societal injustices that contributed to her suffering. Through her writing, Céleste de Chabrillan sought to exorcise these demons, avenge and right the wrongs done to her, and expose the plight of the working class, especially women.

This remarkable life and work are the subjects of Carol Mossman's Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's Rise from Prostitution, which the author aptly describes as a "contextualized literary study" (5). Indeed, Mossman's introduction to Chabrillan and her work also guides her reader through the historical, social, cultural, and literary worlds that she inhabited as it accomplishes the stated goals to "introduce [Chabrillan] and her work to a reading public who may not suspect that such a remarkable woman existed" (18) and to "explore the power of the process of writing" (17) in her life.

Part one focuses on the context for Chabrillan's work, dividing it into chapters dedicated to her biography, to an historical overview of prostitution in the nineteenth-century Paris, and to a survey of the portrayals of prostitution in contemporary literature. The first of these chapters pieces together a concise and coherent biography of the countess despite the challenges presented by biased accounts of her life and by sources lost to shame, taboo and historical accident. This chapter serves not only to introduce the woman behind the literature that part two will discuss, but also outlines the motivations for its composition. The second chapter is dedicated to an historical overview of the world of venal sex in nineteenth-century Paris, including the regulatory system, the business of prostitution and of maisons de tolérance, and a glimpse into the daily lives of the prostitute, the courtesan, and the kept woman. These are harmonized throughout with Chabrillan's experience as it is outlined in the first chapter and provide it with its immediate context. This second chapter also explores the particular societal conditions that created this demi-monde, and compellingly links its rise to larger changes in society brought about by the Revolution, the Napoleonic code, and the newly powerful bourgeoisie's emphasis on respectability. Chapter three turns to the literary context of Chabrillan's work with an overview of nineteenth-century French fictions that take prostitution as their subject, from Romanticism's grisette to Realism's lorette to the socially and genetically predestined prostitute of Naturalism. She shows that the prostitutes of the period's literature play a varied and complex set of roles, but are always subject to the male gaze and to male needs, which are less often purely sexual than social and philosophical.

Part two of Writing with a Vengeance analyzes Chabrillan's novels in light of her biography and her social context. Although she penned ten novels between 1857 and 1885, the first of the three chapters in part two is dedicated to La Sapho (1858) because it "demonstrate[s] what happens when the lens of writing passes from the beholder to the beheld" (118). In stark contrast to the venal women in her male contemporaries' works, the title character in this novel...