K Fictions of the Bad Life K

Fictions of the Bad Life k Fictions of the Bad Life K The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 CLAIRE THORA SOLOMON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Solomon, Claire Thora, author. Fictions of the bad life : the naturalist prostitute and her avatars in Latin American literature, 1880–2010 / Claire Thora Solomon. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1247-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1247-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9351-5 (cd-rom) — ISBN 0-8142-9351-4 (cd-rom) 1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Prostitution in literature. 3. Human trafficking in literature. 4. Naturalism in literature. 5. Jews—Argentina—History. I. Title. PQ7081.S68 2014 860.9'3552—dc23 2013027460 Cover design by AuthorSupport.com Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 k CONTENTS K Acknowledgments • vii INTRODUCTION Prostitution as a (Meta)Discourse • 1 PART I The Metadiscursive Naturalist Prostitute in Latin America (1880–1930) CHAPTER 1 The Emergence of the Legal-Medical-Literary Prostitute in Latin America • 9 CHAPTER 2 Living Coin: Literary Prostitution and Economic Theory • 51 PART II Minority Metanarratives: White Slavery and the Reinvention of Jewish-Argentine History (1990–2010) CHAPTER 3 The Neo-Naturalist Reinvention of Jewish Argentina in Contemporary Historical Fiction about White Slavery • 91 CHAPTER 4 Blanca Metafiction: Denarrativizing Jewish White Slavery • 133 Notes • 171 Bibliography • 192 Index • 209 k ACKNOWLEDGMENTS K This book would not exist without the support of many friends, colleagues, family members, and mentors over the years. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, and to Eugene O’Connor, Malcolm Litchfield, Laurie Avery, and Sandy Crooms at The Ohio State University Press. Thanks to Ed Hatton for copyediting the manuscript and Matthew White for compiling the index. Thank you to my colleagues and students at Oberlin College for being curious and intelligent interlocutors, generous with their energies, and devoted to teaching and learning as lifelong practices inextricable from the deep currents of social justice. In particular, I want to thank my colleagues in Hispanic Studies—Margaret Boyle, Ana Cara, Eli Cohen, Kim Faber, Sebasti- aan Faber, Matt Feinberg, Esmeralda Martínez-Tapia, Patrick O’Connor, Bar- bara Sawhill, Patty Tovar, and Blanca Villar—for their friendship, guidance, and good humor. I also want to thank William Patrick Day, Sean Decatur, Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, Jed Deppman, Jennifer Fraser, Suzanne Gay, Heather Hogan, Tim Scholl, Steve Volk, and Sandy Zagarell for their advice and support throughout my first two years at Oberlin. I also want to thank all my former colleagues and students at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Michigan. I’m grateful to Vin- cenzo Binetti, Veronica Davidov, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Stephanie Kirk, vii viii Acknowledgments Anton Shammas, Ruth Tsoffar, and Gareth Williams for their role as intellec- tual interlocutors for me during a precarious time, as I moved from institution to institution. I am also very grateful to Elzbieta Sklodowska for reading an early draft of the manuscript, and to Lucille Kerr and Alejandro Meter for their mentorship and for productive conversations around the notion of “Jew- ish Latin America” as I worked through the material in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. Thanks to Cristina Moreiras-Menor for her generosity and genius, and for modeling a way of working in the academy with integrity. Thanks to Josefina Ludmer for serving as my dissertation advisor and for the wild joy that lit up the cracks in systems, especially her own. Thank you to my friends, family, and mentors around the world, and especially to Tara Themis Brown, Jessica Chase-White and Mike White, Naomi Clark, Jeanie, Bruce, Sarah and Michael Coopersmith, The Fab Five, Temim Fruchter, Jennifer Koh, Elijah Oberman, Monica Pierrepointe, Mon Sendra, The Shondes, Louisa Solomon, Mark Solomon, Nicole Solomon, Diane Welch, Leonard Welch, and Jason Young. Special thanks to my brilliant, loving, and always well-dressed grandmother, Millie Solomon, my role model in so many things. Thanks most of all to my husband, Yago Colás. This book is dedicated in loving memory to my grandfather, Morris Sher Solomon. Parts of chapters 3 and 4 are revisions of material that appeared originally in my article “Reconsidering Anti-Semitism and White Slavery in Contemporary Historical Fiction about Argentina,” in Comparative Literature 63.3 (2011), published by Duke University Press. k INTRODUCTION K Prostitution as a (Meta)Discourse HE ANALYTICAL POTENCY of prostitution has to do with how “it”—prostitution—is always bound up with other discourses. It cannot T be defined except in relation to and in the terms of philosophy, psycho- analysis, economics, history and—perhaps most obviously—law. Prostitution is included within the discursive purview of any discipline that criminalizes or rationalizes it, or that represents, bemoans, judges or bans it; so it cannot be explained exclusively in relation to any one of these disciplines without conjuring up aspects of the others. While it may be defined temporarily in the language and logic of any of them, such a definition remains context-specific. At the same time, in talking about prostitution any discipline exceeds its own boundaries. This study defines prostitution as a discourse, focusing first on the way it emerged from other discourses in Latin America and was formalized in relation to Naturalism between 1880–1930, and then on how it has rewrit- ten its own conditions of emergence over the next hundred years. While the literature of prostitution in Latin America is rich and varied, I focus on how particular tropes, narrative techniques and—most of all—characterizations of literary prostitutes have triumphed. Latin American literature of prostitution during its modern consolidation under Naturalism thematized intersectional colonial anxieties about race, 1 2 Introduction class, ethnicity and gender and reconfigured them in relation to the nation. Close readings of literary fictions of prostitution from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—together with a broader survey of legal, medical and economic writings on prostitution during the time period—show that many elements of the discursive specificity prostitution had acquired from other disciplines endured in literature far beyond their relevance in law or medicine. At the same time, aspects of Naturalism appear unexpectedly in contemporary literature of prostitution, long past the time when such devices were linked to a mimetic representation of reality or to prevailing social views. The time frame for the solidification of prostitution as a discourse also coincides with an international scandal about prostitution and so-called “white slavery” that rocked Europe and the Americas beginning around 1880. The epicenter of the worldwide prostitution “mafias” was in some real and some imaginary ways Buenos Aires. For this reason, Buenos Aires and, by extension, Argentina, became central to the discourse of prostitution both within Latin America and internationally; and the name “Buenos Aires” came to symbolize prostitution and trafficking, for which Argentine Jews were dis- proportionately blamed. Contemporary literature of prostitution has taken up the topic of historical “Jewish White Slavery,” mobilizing the Naturalist regime that accompanies prostitution into even the most contemporary literature to rewrite the historical moment of prostitution’s inception as a discourse—in the terms and with the literary tools of that discourse. To address this complexity, I’ve divided my study into two parts. The first part, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, focuses on a Latin American corpus which explores how, from the 1880s to the 1930s, a set of narrative guidelines and contents are solidified under the aegis of Naturalism in the form of legal, medical and economic discourses that coincided with and participated in the consolidation of the modern states. Despite the explicit thematic engage- ment with the national in Naturalist texts, the emergent discourse of prostitution is in important ways international. I trace how the legacy of Naturalism is embedded in prostitution as a discourse: it reemerges in later literature, reanimating and deconstructing a literary regime infused with the incipiently national philosophical, legal and economic concerns of the late nineteenth century in a recursive movement. As a metonym for human trafficking at the time of its consolidation as a modern state, and as home to the greatest twentieth-century example of organized prostitution in America, Argentina merits the attention of the entire second half of the book, which tracks contemporary historical fiction on the topic of Jewish white slavery during the period from 1880–1930 in Buenos Aires, exploring how it was that the ethnically, nationally and geographically Prostitution as a (Meta)Discourse 3 varied practices of prostitution during that time period, as well as the rich literature of the same era, came to be retroactively simplified by way of this minority synecdoche, reducing Latin America to Argentina to Buenos Aires, prostitution to organized Jewish crime, and the prostitute to a resurrected ver- sion of the nineteenth-century archetypal “blanca”—a poor, ignorant Eastern European Jewish girl, sold into prostitution under false pretenses and left to a miserable existence in Buenos Aires, only to be rescued by good, upstanding Argentines and, finally, integrated into the nation. The apparatuses of Naturalism persisted in the discourse of prostitution far beyond the political moment in which they reflected and participated in national bids for power by presenting a representation of social reality.

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