The Prostitute/Mother in Maupassant's Yvette

The Prostitute/Mother in Maupassant's Yvette Shelley Thomas NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE was particularly prolific in fostering the notion of the dichotomized female: on the one hand a whore, on the other, a Madonna. Included in the term Madonna is both the virgin and the mother, for she was both pure and a maternal figure. When an author focuses on one element or another, he fragments womankind, denying, in effect, the possibility of integration and wholeness. In addition, he may validate one fragment over another, creating a hierarchy that further destroys the notion of an integral wholeness and results in marginalizing the female. A tripartite hierarchy of virgin/mother/whore is very clearly exemplified in Maupassant's Yvette. Recent criticism that deals with women in literature has sought to unveil the techniques of marginalization by treating differing aspects of fragmentation, most notably those which pertain to the female body.1 In this study, however, I am particularly interested in how the female is fragmented through language, that is, how an author depicts the female voice and her relationship to language. By so doing, I hope to add to the body of works which seek to clarify the role played by nineteenth-century French literature in female identity formation. The prostitute/mother is an appropriate focal point for a study on the dichotomized female. Within these two appellations is contained what has been an important philosophical, political, and social obstacle for women throughout history, namely, the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Included in the idea of the prostitute/mother are the sexual and reproductive functions, two areas which at one point had a peaceful coexistence in what some historians have termed the "sacred prostitute." Shannon Bell suggests that current forms of female marginalization are linked to the identity formation of the prostitute, whose origins date back to the ancient temple attendant, the sacred prostitute. Her function was to have sexual relations with the ruling monarch to ensure fertility for the land and to bring divine love into the sphere of the human; fertility and erotic passion went hand in hand. Two important phases in the dissolution of the spiritual-sexual unity of the sacred prostitute occurred during the classical age of Greece, when the legal system defined women according to their reproductive or sexual function (Bell 24), and the nineteenth century, when medical discourse joined legal discourse to define the prostitute as diseased , profane, and genetically predestined to hysteria.2 This discourse rele74 Summer 1999 Thomas gated the libidinal to the negative identity of the prostitute, defining the reproductive female body as normal and the sexual body as deviant. The implication for the "virtuous" woman was clear: desexualization with no legitimate avenue for the libidinal, not even for the married woman. Time and again, nineteenth-century authors showed that the results of sexuality in fictional wives and mothers were disastrous. The "maternal" in the lives of female characters cast in principally sexual roles has not been adequately explored. Maupassant's works are of particular interest because in them he lauds prostitutes and mothers as icons of sacrifice, the former in giving pleasure and the latter in their role as nurturer. rvefre is one of the few stories by Maupassant where we see a female cast in the role of both prostitute and mother. In his preface to the 1885 version of Yvette, Gilbert Sigaux calls the story "une des plus célèbres des longues nouvelles de Maupassant."3 To date, however, the novella has received very little critical attention. For current readers, the story may therefore require a brief summary . Yvette is the daughter of a famous courtesan, the marquise Obardi, who runs an unusually high-class brothel in Paris. The daughters of these courtesans are a novel attraction to men like Servigny, who aspires to be Yvette 's first lover. He has no intention of marrying her, and when she discovers this she goes to her mother for an explanation. She learns her mother is a courtesan , attempts suicide, but is found by Servigny before she succeeds. In Maupassant's works, the narrator usually initiates the story and other characters continue it, a device known as framing. Framing as a...