Sex Work, Text Work: Mapping Prostitution in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

In the nineteenth-century French novel, male authors used prostitution to make their names, but the sex workers in their books managed to evade efforts to contain them. Sex Work, Text Work: Mapping Prostitution in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel explores how prostitutes depicted by Émile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt, Adolphe Tabarant, and Charles-Louis Philippe "write back," confounding civil and literary efforts to contain them in space and in narrative. Working-class prostitutes served to reinforce the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion, but even the novels that most explicitly aligned with the disciplinary logic of regulated prostitution make space for a literary form of resistance. Tanner argues that debates about the regulation of prostitution surfaced in tandem with racialized anxieties about the boundaries of the French nation and expands that framework to the history of French colonialism and the politics of immigration in the current day.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 30 June 2023
Publisher: Northwestern University Press

While male French authors sought to gain notoriety by depicting prostitution in their works, mimicking the surveillance of municipal authorities, the sex workers portrayed in their novels managed to elude attempts to confine them.

Prostitutes in nineteenth-century Paris faced stringent municipal laws that policed their bodies and movements. However, writers of the era capitalized on these women to assert their own claims on both the city and the novel as literary territories.

Sex Work, Text Work: Mapping Prostitution in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel delves into how prostitutes depicted by Émile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt, Adolphe Tabarant, and Charles-Louis Philippe "write back," challenging civil and literary efforts to contain them in both physical spaces and narrative structures.

In city-regulated brothels, brasseries à femmes, Haussmannian boulevards, and the novel itself, working-class prostitutes played a crucial role in reinforcing the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion. Despite their apparent compliance with regulatory frameworks, Jessica Tanner argues that even the novels that most explicitly aligned with the disciplinary logic of regulated prostitution made space for a distinct literary form of resistance. These women either eluded or disrupted the mapping that sought to claim them as literary territory, revealing the authors' inability to secure their narratives as property.

In pushing back against the critical tendency to attribute agency solely to courtesans who became published authors, Tanner proposes a new framework for understanding the political work that novels engage in as they circulate. She observes that debates about the regulation of prostitution surfaced in tandem with racialized anxieties about the boundaries of the French nation. Tanner expands this framework to encompass the history of French colonialism and the politics of immigration in the contemporary era.

Through its comprehensive analysis, Sex Work, Text Work demonstrates that the representation of prostitution in nineteenth-century French literature was not merely a reflection of societal norms but also a site of contestation and resistance. It sheds light on the complex interplay between literature, power, and the bodies of women who were marginalized and exploited. This book is a valuable contribution to the fields of literary studies, history, and gender studies, offering a fresh perspective on the intersections of sex work, literature, and politics in nineteenth-century France.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780810145849