Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin- De-Siècle French Novel

Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin- de-Siècle French Novel The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Tanner, Jessica Leigh. 2013. Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin-de-Siècle French Novel. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10947429 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, WARNING: This file should NOT have been available for downloading from Harvard University’s DASH repository. Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin-de-siècle French Novel A dissertation presented by Jessica Leigh Tanner to The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 © 2013 – Jessica Leigh Tanner All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Janet Beizer Jessica Leigh Tanner Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin-de-siècle French Novel Abstract This dissertation examines representations of prostitution in male-authored French novels from the later nineteenth century. It proposes that prostitution has a map, and that realist and naturalist authors appropriate this cartography in the Second Empire and early Third Republic to make sense of a shifting and overhauled Paris perceived to resist mimetic literary inscription. Though always significant in realist and naturalist narrative, space is uniquely complicit in the novel of prostitution due to the contemporary policy of reglementarism, whose primary instrument was the mise en carte: an official registration that subjected prostitutes to moral and hygienic surveillance, but also “put them on the map,” classifying them according to their space of practice (such as the brothel or the boulevard). It is this spatial and conceptual taxonomy, I contend, that makes the prostitute a fulcrum for authorial mapping – for the assertion of mastery over both the prostitute and the city. The first chapter reads the inscription of the tolerated brothel in novels by Huysmans and Goncourt as the mark of a nostalgic longing for old Paris and a desire for stability in a resistant urban present. Analyzing the representation of the brasserie à femmes in lesser-known works by Tabarant and Barrès, Chapter Two posits that the brasserie prostitute fuels the desires of a generation of aspirational Rastignacs by selling stories alongside beer and sex, adopting a writerly role and troubling authorial mastery of the prostitute and the city. The mobilization of prostitutional metaphors in the Rougon-Macquart is the subject of the third chapter, which argues that Zola deploys the prostitute’s entropic force to dismantle the Paris of his predecessors, Balzac and Haussmann, iii and clear the ground for the construction of a proper city. The final chapter demonstrates that fin- de-siècle novelist Charles-Louis Philippe makes use of the clandestinity of street prostitution in order to locate a breed of urban mapping that is not contingent on mastery. By remapping the prostitute, the dissertation proposes a new model for understanding both the nineteenth-century novel of prostitution and the lived and represented experience of a Paris that Zola termed “le mauvais lieu de l’Europe.” iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One................................................................................................................................................. 17 An Unhomely Home: Naturalist Nostalgia and the Maison de tolérance Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marthe, Histoire d’une fille (1876) and Edmond de Goncourt, La Fille Élisa (1877) Chapter Two .............................................................................................................................................. 87 Turning Tricks, Turning the Tables: Plotting the Novel in the Brasserie à femmes Adolphe Tabarant, Virus d’amour (1886) and Maurice Barrès, Les Déracinés (1897) Chapter Three ........................................................................................................................................... 137 Organizing Paris: Zola’s Bawdy Houses of Metaphor Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) Chapter Four.............................................................................................................................................. 167 Occupying Paris: Streetwalking and Disobedient Narrative Charles-Louis Philippe, Bubu de Montparnasse (1901) Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 205 The Place and Space of Prostitution Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 214 v Acknowledgments Writing a dissertation is somehow both the most solitary thing I have ever done and the one whose successful completion most depended on community. I want to recognize here the inestimable contributions of those who gave me the courage and tenacity to see it through. First, I want to thank the members of my committee for their direction and their tireless support. My work has benefitted immeasurably from their presence, in the fullest sense of that word. Tom Conley has been a theoretical cartographer and has challenged me to reorient my thinking in productive and stimulating ways. I am immensely appreciative of his erudition, his incisive readings, and his keen wit. In an undergraduate seminar many years ago, Luis Fernández Cifuentes taught me how to read and write in all the ways that matter. His kindness, steadiness, and thoughtful critiques have made me a better thinker and a better person. And finally, my advisor, Janet Beizer, has propelled and sustained me through this process with endless patience, compassion, insight, encouragement, and intellectual rigor. She helped me to see this project for what it was and what it could be, and believed in me even when I did not. Her example and her guidance have been an abiding source of inspiration, and I am forever grateful for her support, her mentorship, and her friendship. I am thankful for the support of Harvard University, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, without which this project would not have been possible. I am deeply indebted to Marlies Mueller and Stacey Katz Bourns, who have been extraordinary role models and sources of knowledge and strength. I feel incredibly fortunate to have the most heartening, funny, and sanity-preserving group of friends imaginable. For their friendship, their empathy, and their sense of humor, I thank Stefanie Goyette, François Proulx, Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, Kathryn Rose, and Tali Zechory. I could not have done this without them. vi To Bella and Calvin, whose unconditional love, attention-seeking antics, and indiscriminate typing kept me smiling and writing on even the most trying of days. I want to express my profound gratitude to my parents, Rebecca and Travis Tanner, for standing by me throughout this process. Their love and support has been a source of comfort, and their strength and resolution in the face of adversity has inspired me to persevere. And finally, I want to thank Joe Bascetta for having the patience to listen to me drone on about brasseries and brothels for hours on end, and for having the wisdom to know when to tell me to shut up and write. You are my landmark and my home. I dedicate this dissertation to you. vii Introduction L’Empire allait faire de Paris le mauvais lieu de l’Europe. - Émile Zola, La Curée (1872)1 In the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Ferragus (1833), the first volume of the Histoire des Treize, the narrator delineates two modes of perceiving and negotiating Paris. For the majority of its citizens, the narrator affirms, the capital is a “monstrueuse merveille, étonnant assemblage de mouvements, de machines et de pensées, la ville aux cent mille romans, la tête du monde.”2 From this perspective, the city resists assimilation, revealing itself to observers as a bewildering accumulation of stimuli, intelligible as a whole only by virtue of its centrality and cultural capital. For those “amants de Paris” who “dégustent” and “possèdent […] la physionomie” of the city, however, “Paris est une créature; chaque homme, chaque fraction de maison est un lobe de tissu cellulaire de cette grande courtisane de laquelle ils connaissent parfaitement la tête, le cœur et les mœurs fantasques.”3 Metaphorizing Paris as a heterogeneous courtesan, her every fiber discernible and available to select observers, Balzac endows the urban initiated with a synoptic gaze capable of circumscribing the city and incorporating it as an appropriable other.4 This latter mode of perception of Paris resonates with Balzac’s most iconic assertion of urban mastery, Eugène de Rastignac’s confrontation of the city from the heights of the Père-Lachaise at the end of Le Père Goriot (1835): 1 Émile Zola, La Curée, ed.

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