According to Labouchère Amendment, any man engaging in homosexual behavior, “shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and being convicted thereof shall be liable to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years with or without hard labor.” In Chapter 7 of A Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil admits his feelings for Dorian. Basil states that he was worried about putting his painting on for show because, “I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry.” Basil’s fear is reasonable considering he could be jailed for being found to have feelings for Dorian. It is also surprising that Basil is willing to admit these feelings to Dorian due to this law. I think that this passage reveals that Basil trusts Dorian. I think Wilde is commenting on this law because Basil has not acted on his feelings for Dorian, but could still be punished by law. I think the words the Basil uses to describe his feelings for Dorian are interesting. Basil uses words like idolatry and worship. This is interesting because homosexuals were describe using Greek mythology and these kinds of words echo the divine and mythical.
Basil Hallward vs. The Labouchère Amendment
The Labouchère Amendment mentions that “[a]ny male person who in public or private commits or is a party to the commission of or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor…” (Sexology Handout). If this is the status quo of law at the time, then it is worth noting that Basil’s admiration toward Dorian puts him in situation where he could be charged for said crime. His commission of Basil to model for his artwork may seem like artistic interest at first. However, it is at first hinted, and then revealed that Basil had ulterior motives for his artwork. He confesses to Dorian: “I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish still. Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible.” (79). The best pieces of Basil’s artwork are driven by his passion for Dorian. He redirects his sexual desire for the youth through artistic expression. While this is within the legal guidelines of the written laws of the time, it could be argued that Basil’s actions are that of gross indecency. This would especially be the case should his feelings for Dorian come to light. That is why he refused to have the artwork shown at first. He tells Dorian, “I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much” (79). It is clear that Basil is trying to appease his passions at his own risk. Even though he is aware of it, emotions can cause people to disregard their own well-being for the satisfaction of their passion.
Dorian Gray and 19th Century Sexology
John Addington Symonds argues in his 1896 essay, “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” that “Urning” men are markedly different in physical appearance and mannerisms. Symonds writes that although the gay man’s body may be visibly masculine, his soul is marked by the “attribute of femininity.” This concept uses the gender binary to define what society viewed to be concrete homosexual characteristics. Wilde uses almost the same rhetoric to describe Basil Hallward in a passage from Dorian Gray. Continue reading
Make-Up Assignment for 3/31 Class
Instructions:
Choose a passage from chapters 5-9 of Dorian Gray that relates to ideas expressed on the Sexology handout that I distributed in class. Write a 150-300 word blog post analyzing the connections between them.
Due
by April 3rd at 5pm for participation credit.
Prostitution in Victorian London
Flora Tristan’s account of prostitution in London, published in 1840, is remarkably sympathetic, filled with concern and even compassion for the sex workers of London. Tristan calls sex work “the most hideous of the afflictions produced by the unequal division of the world’s goods” and is very concerned by the “physical tortures” a sex worker faces daily in her occupation. Tristan takes a close look at the causes of women turning to sex work and criticizes societal inequities between men and women:
…let this monstrosity be attributed to our social state and let woman be absolved from it! As long as she is subject to the yoke of man or of prejudice, as long as she receives no profession education, as long as she is deprived of civil rights, there cannot exist a moral law for her! As long as she cannot obtain property only by the influence she has over men’s passions, as long as she has gained through her work or been given by her father, as long as she can have property and liberty only by leading a single life, there can be no moral law for her! And it can be positively stated that until the emancipation of woman has been achieved, prostitution will continue to increase.
Tristan blames men for the societal position of sex workers as well as their poor conditions and short lives. She writes about how disgusting the patrons are for torturing women by getting them really drunk and then giving them a concoction to drink that “almost always gives her horrible convulsions, and the jerkings and contortions of the unfortunate thing provoke laughter and infinitely amuse the honorable society.” Tristan targets the so-called classy English elite and criticizes them for their deplorable behavior and treatment of the women. Tristan brings up the fact that sex workers do not live very long for they are always obligated to drink alcohol with their patrons and they usually come down with pneumonia or contract sexually transmitted infections.
In Amy Levy’s poem “Magdalen,” Levy also addressed the issue of illness, disease, and sex work, however it is from the point of view of the sex worker herself. While Tristan’s piece is very sympathetic and calls for the emancipation of women to end the suffering of sex workers, Levy’s poem is even more sympathetic because the reader is listening directly to the voice of a sex worker. The woman is in a hospital designed for sex workers who have sexually transmitted infections to stay, locked away from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of disease, while the men, particularly the sailors, themselves were spreading disease. The speaker of the poem is shocked that she has contracted an illness from a man she slept with, the person to whom she is talking to throughout the poem. The hospital in which she is kept is miserable, where she hears other women cry at night:
At night, or when the daylight nears,
I hear the other women weep;
My own heart’s anguish lies too deep
For the soft rain and pain of tears.
The speaker of the poem also declares that she does not care to die because life has been so painful and death will finally be a time to rest. Like Tristan’s piece, Levy is bringing to light the physical and emotional hardships that sex workers deal with, however Levy’s “Magdalen” has her own autonomy. At the end she concludes that although this man has given her the disease that will end her life, in the end he does not define what her life was: “That all is done, that I am free; /That you, through all eternity, / Have neither part nor lot in me.”
Prostitution in London
Unlike society, Flora Tristan and Thomas Hood both have immense sympathy for the prostitute. Tristan argues that women’s dependencies on men is one of the main reasons prostitution, not only exists, but increases each year. Unlike society, Tristan has sympathy for the prostitutes because she realizes they are the aftermath of such rigid social rules for women. In “The Bridge of Sighs,” Hood describes a prostitute’s deathly jump of a prostitute to redefine her not as some awful outsider of society but a person in order invoke sympathy for her.
Tristan begins her argument with the repeated phrase, “I understand” in regard to dangerous jobs for men such as a sailor or a soldier. The phrases is repeated three times to emphasize its reduction in regard to prostitution: “But I cannot understand the prostitute, surrounding herself, destroying both her willpower and her feelings; delivering her body to brutality and suffering and her soul to scorn!” The line directs her to her main argument: a prostitute’s job can not only lead to physical death but a “moral death” as well, making it a far worse labor than a soldier or sailor.
Tristan feel strong sympathy for prostitutes because she believes women were pushed into this role due to inequality. She describes a prostitute as a woman who has been “pushed” from society because she does not have the same opportunities as men: “Yes, if you allowed her to have the same education, the same occupations and professions as the man, she would not be assailed by poverty more often than he.” Women, of course, were restricted to the home where they were to find a husband otherwise they would have no income. Even when married, the woman only existed in regard to her husband, in which her body became his property.
Once a woman is driven to prostitution, her body becomes a toy to the man. Tristan describes one amusement of the men: “One of the favorites is to make a girl dead drunk and then make her swallow some vinegar mixed with mustard and pepper; this drink almost always gives her horrible convulsions, and the jerkings and contortions of the unfortunate thing provoke laughter and infinitely amuse the honorable society.” The diction “honorable society” is meant as sarcasm, how can men possibly be “gentlemen” with this sort of behavior? How is it the woman’s fault? At the end of her essay, Tristan brings up the numbers: 80,000 to 100,000 women live by prostitution; 15,000 to 20,000 die each year and: “Every year an even greater number come to replace those whose frightful lives have ended.” More and more are become prostitutes.
Hood begins his poem with the mention of a prostitute’s death: “One more Unfortunate… / Gone to her death!” (1 and 4). He capitalizes unfortunate to suggest how it is a name for a prostitute, defining her as someone to feel pity for. He asks for someone to care for her: “Take her up tenderly, / Lift her up with care;” (5-6). This reminds me of the amusements mentions in Tristan’s article. Hood is trying to emphasize that the prostitute is human to and needs care, not someone you can just spit on or do whatever you will to.
To emphasize the sex worker’s humanity, Hood tries to think of her family. He asks: “Who was her father? / Who was her mother? / Had she a sister? / Had she a brother?” (36-39). These lines all rhyme together making the questions rush into each other. Hood is pondering the life the prostitute must have had before she worked on the streets. After all, the sex worker probably had a similar life to other middle-class women in London.
What is most irksome is Hood’s understand that the prostitute’s death was probably better than her life. As stated before, about a quarter of prostitutes die each year. Hood suggests their death is their only chance at peace: “Glad to death’s mystery, / Swift to be hurled– / Anywhere, anywhere / Out of the world!” (67-71). The repeated “anywhere” emphasizes the prostitute’s desperation to leave this cruel world and how can you not pity that?
Hood and Tristan both make good cases on why to sympathize with prostitutes. Tristan focuses more on the social and economic issues that cause the creation of the prostitute. Hood focuses on the emotionally of the prostitute to bring her back to a human level into society. Both pieces complement each other well.
Female Body as Commodity
Tristan begins her chapter on sex workers of London in the Victorian Period with an explanation of why they exist in the first place. Her argument is that all sex work is survival sex work. She says that their existence stems from the inequality of the sexes, particularly in England. The culture that places stigma on pre-marital sex for women, but does not instill that stigma for men invites this job as a remedy. It means that men can seduce or abuse young women with no risk to themselves, but at the cost of destroying those women’s lives. A woman must marry in order to assure a living for herself , because she is not allowed the same “occupations and professions” that allow for a living wage. However, in doing so she gives up her existence. Tristan describes this as choosing “between oppression and infamy.”
Tristan also blames the materialism and capitalism of an industrialized England. The more money accumulated by the upper classes, the poorer the poorer classes get. The more money these men get, the more they have to spend on the sex workers that they are creating by exploiting the poor classes that they come from. She describes seeing in a “finish” a beautiful Irish girl, who later that night she saw on the floor, her dress ruined, because people kept throwing drinks on her. She also describes seeing men create orgies in these finishes, in clear view of others, because they paid so much money that they should have that right. Tristan is describing a market of women’s bodies; where, rich men use them as things to consume and throw away, a growing symptom of the wastefulness of the industrial age. The actual humanity of these women do not matter, and is in fact ignored. When a sex worker is found struggling for breath after a john abuses her for allegedly giving him a disease, the man is not charged with any crimes towards the woman, but rather a crime for disturbing the peace of the neighborhood.
Hood’s poem, describing the body of a sex worker who committed suicide by jumping into the river, takes a stance on the “purity” of this woman. The speaker says to think “Not of the stains of her, / All that remains of her / Now is pure womanly.” And in the final stanza says “Owning her weakness, / Her evil behaviour, / And leaving, with meekness, /Her sins to her Saviour!” The implication of these words is that only through death could this woman receive any kind of forgiveness. She has done the noble thing by taking herself out of this world and placing her soul in the hands of God. Tristan says in her essay “To brave death is nothing; but what a death faces a prostitute! […] moral death all the time, and scorn for herself! I repeat: there is something sublime in it, or else it is madness!” The poem sees something sublime in her death, but sees her life as pitiful. It demands respect for her dead body that she would not have been given in life.
Developing An Understanding
Flora Tristan believes that prostitution, though it can be physically deadly to women, killing them usually in three to four years (eight if they’re lucky), definitely kills their soul.
It is the oppression of women, forced to constrain to the social acceptance of what men want, that leads women into the life of prostitution. They are required to choose an oppressed life as a wife with an unbreakable marriage or be a social reject in which the only way to make money is to use the only property given in this world: their own bodies.
Tristan then discusses the economical distress many women are forced into purely because of their gender, with male heirs receiving most inheritance, while “girls have only small dowries unless they have no brothers”(2 Tristan). This is another reason she offers as to why women would be forced into the occupation. Poverty and hunger are also key players in Tristan’s understanding for why women would enter into prostitution.
After discussing her beliefs for possible cause of prostitutes, Flora continues on to describe her own experience at a tavern on Waterloo Road where many women converged with pimps and customers, her shock and disbelief at the “revolting” occurrences amongst the aristocrats that visit such places and the “diabolical debauchery” forced onto the women, such as their dresses becoming covered in random stains (4 Tristan).
Thomas Hood has a sympathetic attitude throughout his poem “The Bridge of Sighs” towards the prostitute that kills herself in the poem, throwing herself into the Thames River; a very common death amongst the prostitutes of London. Throughout the poem he speaks of the woman with tender words, “Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care”, repeated in lines 5-6 and 80-81 for emphasis. He treats the woman with the respect she was not given in her life, “loving, not loathing” (14). He wants to make us aware of her pain and suffering, to not dismiss her as she was in life, “Picture it—think of it, Dissolute Man! Lave in it, drink of it,”, Hood forces us to pay her that attention, painting for us the image of her dripping wet, with blindly staring eyes (76-78).
In the fifth stanza, we are able to surmise her life occupation, discussing her “rash and undutiful” acts that are “past all dishonour” (23-24). Instead, in her death, she is free of all of those ugly acts, leaving behind nothing but her young beauty, taken too soon. The last stanza also references “Her evil behaviour” that she leaves behind by entering the afterlife (104).
I think the poem represents the struggle of prostitution from the women’s perspective better than Flora Tristan tries to in her article because her opinion remains too strong throughout her account. Though she is trying to come to an understanding in a world she herself is not apart of, her opinion of the “horrible” situation remains, showing her true feelings though she is trying to bypass her prejudice opinions, comprehending how these women could possibly find themselves in this situation, willing to give so much of themselves for only money. Hood however treats the poor woman with a tender care, her life’s actions having no affect on his opinion. Before line 67 he discusses her standing in the March wind before the flowing river, trembling not from fear of death but merely the cold, “Mad from life’s history, Glad to death’s mystery,” (67-68). We get an insight into her mind, her desperation but at the same time her acceptance in what her life was and the happiness to be rid of it. There’s no undertone of disgust in Hood’s poem, as there is throughout Tristan piece, though she does attempt to understand the act of prostitution in a way hood bypasses, focusing entirely on the woman herself and forgoing the sinful acts in her life.
It is not the act of prostitution, however, that causes the woman to kill herself, at least not entirely. If I’m reading the poem correctly on line 52 “Love, by harsh evidence,” means she has become pregnant such as the harsh evidence pregnancy would provide, though it could also be some sort of disease I guess. You could say it was a man’s fault for her death, but I do not think the poem is intentionally blaming men, not in the way Tristan does throughout her critique.
Lazo’s Thoughts on Prostitution
Tristan blames the existence of prostitution on society, specifically the inequality that existed between men and women during the Victorian era. She states, “…let this monstrosity be attributed to our social state and let women by absolved from it!” Tristen points out that had women been afforded the same opportunities as men, the need to engage in prostitution would not have been nearly as bad as it was during the Victoria era.
“Magdalen” by Amy Levy is a poem that takes the point of view of a woman who lives as a prostitute. Her life is cold and sad; she was forced into prostitution because of a man she thought loved her. By the end of the poem, the narrator dies of some unnamed disease. Tristan gives an account of the prostitutes she happened to encounter. Many of them were “half-dressed, [and] bare to the waist, they were shocking and disgusting…” (Tristan). The end of Levy’s poem really puts into perspective what Tristan meant when she wrote, “when a dog dies he is watched by his master, whereas the prostitute ends on a street corner without anyone’s throwing her a glance of pity.” Levy’s poem is full of lonliness, the narrator stops caring about her life in the end and is ready to move on. Tristan pointed out in her article that many women who go into prostitution usually do not make it past 4 years.
Personally, I blame the men of the Victorian period. They judged women who went into prostitution, but it was really the men who left the women with no other options. Also, prostitution would not have been a good alternative for these women if sex selling weren’t so popular. Obviously there were men who were willing to pay or there wouldn’t have been “80,000 to 100,000 girls” (Tristan) living by prostitution. Prostitution was by no means an easier life for these women, but it was a way for them to try to take back their lives. For many of them, it was the last thing standing between feeding themselves or starving to death.
Victorian Views of Prostitution
Flora Tristan’s article not only sympathizes with prostitutes, but it outright and shamelessly condemns English society for forcing unmarried, entailed, and/or impoverished women to resort to a “job” that risks their health, safety, and sense of well-being. She sees the desperate act most clearly as a result from an unjust society, claiming, “…this revolting degradation is brought about by the disastrous effects of prejudices, poverty, and slavery” (2). Tristan also comments on the lack of options for women to support themselves, “Girls born in the poor class are pushed to prostitution by hunger. Women are excluded by work in the fields, and when they are not employed in factories, their only resource is domestic service or prostitution!” (2) Tristan also talks about the conditions in the whorehouses where women are played cruel tricks on when they’re drunk, such as being forced to drink a nasty mixture or glasses of all different kinds of beverages thrown on them when they are drunk. Tristan shows that the “fall” into the role of prostitute is not the worst part about being one, which leads me to think about Thomas Hood’s poem, “The Bridge of Sighs.”
Tristan wrote about the horrors of prostitution. Hood’s poem portrays a different perspective. While the poem is about the suicide of prostitutes, I feel that Hood, while sympathetic in some parts, does not quite grasp the whole reality that a prostitute is forced to live in and how she is ultimately, driven to her death. The first three lines of the third stanza show a sense of sympathy: “Touch her not scornfully;/Think of her mournfully/Gently and humanly;” Observing these lines, one might think that Hood holds a deep feeling of compassion towards the prostitute, and there is no doubt a sense of compassion is there, however, just as quick as Hood seems to be able to show this sympathy for these “fallen women”, he also condemns them, implying them as “One of Eve’s family” (1) and “Owning her weakness/Her evil behavior,/And leaving with meekness,/ Her sins to her Saviour!” My first question with these lines is, what weakness? It almost seems as if Hood is suggesting this woman wanted to be a prostitute for lustful reasons or something other than the sheer necessity of trying to survive as a lone woman in this world as is stated in Tristan’s article. The next part of this stanza, which states her “evil behavior,” once again condemns the woman and the woman alone. What about the men who used prostitutes? They were not condemned like this. Was their behavior not thought of as evil? As in Tristan’s article, they most certainly were.
Overall, Hood seems to try to sympathize with prostitutes, but more so for the sake of Christian forgiveness (still blaming the woman for her fall) rather than sheer empathy and compassion. Whereas, Tristan’s view completely understands and sympathizes with the prostitutes and condemns societal structures.