An interesting aspect of Flora Tristan’s discussion about Victoria prostitution was her own involvement in the story that she wrote. Instead of simply speaking with prostitutes, she goes a step further and explores late-night, underground London, entrenching herself within an environment that becomes openly hostile towards her. I found it depressing that she had to be accompanied by two men “armed with canes” in order to feel remotely safe, and even then the trio was still berated. It must have taken an impressive amount of courage to willingly submit herself to the things that she saw in the “finishes”, and her account is all the more powerful because of it. Instead of hearing stories told from others, we get a first-hand tale of wild masochism and debauchery fueled by an economic rift between classes. The oppressive male gaze is dominant throughout the entire article, and I think that this relates towards Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs”, in which his gaze is so prominently focused on.

Hood’s poem however has a different overall tone to it. The men in Tristan’s critique all exert their power over women, while Hood uses his gaze as a way of imagining what the object, a young dead woman, of his poem’s life was like before her death. While he focuses specifically on her body, he also imagines her family life in a way that seeks to humanize rather than sexualize her. Like Tristan, he laments the fate of the prostitute and considers the situation that has caused her to kill herself. Instead of blaming prostitutes, Tristan and Hood blame the society that has effectively forced these women into their profession without choice. Both the article and the poem critique the societal double standard as they relate to men and women (specifically lower-class women) and try to humanize those whose actions have been impressed on them by a ruling, male majority.