Prostitution

Prostitution in Victorian London

~ Rachel W. ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Autumn H ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Antonia ~ Leave a comment

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

~ n02565783 ~ Leave a comment

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.

Prostitution and Blame in Victorian London

~ philliph1 ~ Leave a comment

Flora Tristan views prostitution in England during the Victorian Period as something like a disease, a “diabolical debauchery” that women were forced into by economic necessity, hunger, and inequality between the genders.

Tristan uses forceful language to express her disgust at the way prostitutes conduct their daily business and are forced to live their lives, as well as the lack of “commiseration for victims of vice” through the church or society. She also blames England’s greed (primarily the growing market economy/ public sphere) and corruption alongside rigid gender expectations. With growing poverty came a need for women to provide for themselves in any way they could. The “love of money” breaking down the young man’s wants for domestic affection or compassion further aggravated treating the women like animals. Overall, Tristan does not blame the women for their profession, saying that they are “driven to” it, placing her ire toward English society.

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Victims of Society

~ reevesj2 ~ Leave a comment

Tristan sees prostitutes as victims of the patriarchal society of Victorian London. She says, “…if chastity had not been imposed on the woman for the sake of virtue without the man’s being subjected to the same thing, she would not be pushed from society from yielding to the sentiments of her heart…” (Tristan, 2). Tristan describes how the unfair balance of virtue and sexuality affects women: they would be seduced by men, usually wealthy men, and end up giving up their virginity. The men would then turn on them, having played their game, and move onto the next girl. With women’s sexuality being so closely tied to their identity, they would be disgraced and turned out by the strongly opinionated society. As a result, they have no choice but to turn to prostitution as a source of income. The poem Magdalen supports this idea. It tells the story of a girl who is seduced by a man, she falls in love, and then she is left cold. Without anywhere else to turn, she becomes a prostitute and finds out that she is going to die from some disease. This supports Tristan’s statements. The poem blames society as a whole rather than men or women. The speaker says, “…And there is nothing false nor true; // But in a hideous masquerade // All things dance on, the ages through. // And good is evil, evil good; // Nothing is known or understood // Save only pain” (Levy, 800). The lines speak about the “masquerade” which is the false faces that people wear. They follow the flow of society because that is the system that has been set in place by those in power. Even if it is not “known or understood” it is the lifestyle that the population has become accustomed to. The poem definitely takes a sympathetic tone for the prostitutes who are victims of their society. It is also not quick to cast judgment on those who wrong them either. It offers a more objective look on the affairs that go on.