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  • Des filles sans joie: le roman de la prostituée dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle by Marjorie Rousseau-Minier
  • Hope Christiansen
Rousseau-Minier, Marjorie. Des filles sans joie: le roman de la prostituée dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Droz, 2018. ISBN 978-2-600-05828-5. Pp. 490.

What this isn't is a study of the novel of prostitution. Rather, it showcases the prostitute herself, the main character in works by Dostoyevski, López Bago, Pérez Galdós, Edmond de Goncourt (La fille Élisa), Huysmans (Marthe, histoire d'une fille), and Zola (Nana). Rousseau-Minier eschews a narrow feminist discourse, aiming instead for "un élargissement comparatiste" to enrich existing scholarship while [End Page 211] demonstrating that despite the diversity in these figures, there is a coherence "dans l'imaginaire littéraire de ce personnage ainsi que dans son fonctionnement méta-phorique" (25). Rousseau-Minier sees the fille naturaliste as a reaction to the courtisane romantique in such works as Dumas fils's La dame aux camélias and Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. To say that the world of prostitution becomes more complex toward the end of the century would be an understatement: there are filles à numéro, filles en carte, and filles de joie clandestine/courtisanes, not to mention a variety of colorful names for them (pieuvres, carpes, demi-castors, horizontales, etc.). A composite portrait of the literary prostitute emerges from Rousseau-Minier's treatment of her corpus: typically red-headed and voluptuous, she is immature, unstable, isolated, self-destructive (and destructive of others), lacking in self-control, and on the verge of insanity. Her story likewise has certain standard features: an opening description of a brothel from her perspective; characters including a tyrannical tenancière, a good friend, a loyal servant, and a posse of male clients; details about daily activities (eating, reading, playing cards, bickering). It is a plot that unfailingly follows "un itinéraire descendant" (150) marked by the protagonist's passage from one kind of prostitution to another, "un événement perturbateur" (typically a diagnosis of syphilis) (148), and death. Rousseau-Minier insists on the importance of Nana as a pivotal work in the history of naturalism, one which inaugurated the Europeanization of the movement. She reads the novel as an allegory of the Second Empire and Nana as a burlesque version of the emperor, whose name is echoed by hers and that of her son (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte) (300). Rousseau-Minier is at her best when engaging in such microtextual analyses (an exception being her puzzling claim that since prostitution rhymes with illusion, and even more so with falsification, it symbolizes "le contraire de l'authenticité et cristallise ainsi une dualité" [336]). The book could have benefitted from a heavier editorial hand to eliminate the frequent restatement of its main ideas and occasional repetition within short sequences ("Émile Zola [...] revendiqu[e] désormais la littérature comme un objet commercial, ainsi qu'il semble l'exhiber et l'assumer dans Nana. [...] Nana est le roman qui exhibe le plus manifestement l'objet littéraire comme objet commercial" [355]). But Rousseau-Minier's mastery of her material, meticulous documentation, and especially her comparatist approach make for a unique contribution to the fields of nineteenth-century literature and culture in France and beyond.

Hope Christiansen
University of Arkansas
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