‘Réprimer le désordre’: Prostitution, Regulation and the Poetics of Realism in Balzac and Sand
Steven Wilson
The figure of the unregulated prostitute — the fille insoumise who escaped the rigours of the police des mœurs — was typically identified with disorder, insubordination and the spread of venereal disease in nineteenth-century France. As Alain Corbin suggests, the sense of menace embodied in the unlawful prostitute stems from her unhindered circulation in different social spheres: ‘Si la clandestine inspire une telle terreur aux spécialistes, c’est bien parce qu’en apparence c’est une femme […] qui côtoie tous les milieux et présente, de ce fait, un risque accru de contagion morale et sanitaire.’1 As a member of the unruly classes dangereuses, the prostitute therefore became a figurehead for attempts to manage myriad forms of ‘excess’ in the ever expanding city of Paris.2 From his background as a member of the Conseil général de salubrité from 1825–36, the public hygienist Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet turned his attention to the scourge of prostitution and quickly became the city’s chief authority on the subject. His two-volume study, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, argued that the threat posed to the efficient workings of the body (and society more widely) required effective policing in the form of a regulated brothel solution. For Jann Matlock, Parent-Duchâtelet’s desire to control urban prostitution is symptomatic of a more widespread (and patriarchal bourgeois) obsession with the imposition of order over sexually ‘deviant’, troublesome figures in
1. Alain Corbin, Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 193. 2. Prostitution was defined as ‘[une de] ces formes extrêmes de la pathologie urbaine’ by Louis Chevalier in Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 331. IJFrS 11 (2011) 2 WILSON
nineteenth-century culture.3 Charles Bernheimer has further argued that the fantasmatic dimension to prostitution — or, ‘all the vague fears, tensions, anxieties, and misogyny of the nineteenth century’ that get tangled up in it, as Jill Harsin puts it4 — led to a proliferation of plots of control and containment in the male-dominated literature and art of the time.5 Notwithstanding the validity of these analyses, particularly the insistence on a rich lexical field of prostitutional metaphors emanating from Parent-Duchâtelet’s writings, this article suggests that representations of prostitution in Balzac and Sand’s writings should not be seen merely as strategies designed by individual writers to police the prostitute’s narrative destiny, for this limits the scope of enquiry and, crucially, neglects the literary significance of the prostitute figure who is freed from the strictures of plots of containment, often in women’s writing.6 Instead, this study aims to reveal a more fundamentally textual — rather than fantasmatic — self-consciousness that pervades the narrative structures of the nineteenth-century ‘roman de la prostitution’. In this respect, my approach is to situate texts in dialogue with each
3. See Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially pp. 29–33. 4. Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. xx. 5. Bernheimer argues that ‘the strategies he [Parent-Duchâtelet] recommended to control this potential contamination from below by germs of disease and desire are analogous to the strategies of plot and style devised by 19th-century novelists to control their fantasies of women’s threatening sexuality’. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Prostitution in the Novel’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 780– 85 (p. 781). Also see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) for a sustained examination of the generative impulses behind artistic strategies that policed and regulated the sexualized female. 6. Bernheimer states that the scarcity of prostitutes in women’s writing is due to the fact that they are ‘anomalous creatures’ who typically ‘play primarily symbolic roles as sexually liberated women in a repressive social order’. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, p. 6. My reading of prostitution in Sand’s writings will suggest that such an interpretation underestimates the literary significance of the textually liberated prostitute, freed from strictly controlled narrative structures. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 3
other, so that the circulation of the prostitutional motif is appreciated as a textual, rather than simply a sexual, phenomenon. In particular, I propose that the essential tenets of prostitution in the work of Balzac reflect the tone, character and content of Parent-Duchâtelet’s representations, and should be read as an essential feature of a poetics of realism that, according to Naomi Schor, could ‘neither accommodate the Otherness of Woman nor exist without it’.7 Then, building upon Richard Terdiman’s theory that dominant nineteenth-century discourses encounter a series of alternative counter-discourses in an era defined by social rebellion and political subversion,8 I will suggest that George Sand’s writings on prostitution, which are entwined with a number of challenges to the principal modes of representing women in the realist tradition, provide a particularly pertinent model by which to chart resistance to the dominance of realism. Thus, prostitution, which lends itself to an articulation of myriad metaphorical concerns, may also be read as a motif around which debates on literary representation coalesce. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet regarded his seminal 1836 study of prostitution as a natural progression from his previous research into the conditions required for the efficient functioning of the Parisian sewage networks. Following this apparent logic, he considered prostitution in terms of a network that required strict surveillance and control so that the biological cycle did not become contaminated through the spread of syphilis, or the social sphere blemished by moral contagion:
Une des lois constantes de la nature, c’est que les êtres vivants ressemblent à ceux qui les reproduisent, et que les générations se transmettent les vices aussi bien que les bonnes qualités du corps et de l’esprit; de là, le précepte donné aux chefs des États par les 7. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xi. 8. Terdiman defines counter-discourses as ‘a variety of strains of opposition to the modes of perception and assertions which writers and artists in the nineteenth century experienced as the dominant discourse’. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/ Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 13. 4 WILSON
législatures de tous les temps, de surveiller les générations futures, d’éloigner d’elles les maladies et les infirmités, en fortifiant leur constitution, et de faire concourir au perfectionnement moral et physique des populations tous les moyens capables de conduire à ce but.9
Parent-Duchâtelet identified the prostitute in particular with instinctual and biological transgression; hence the need to control and regulate her mobility, as this was felt to be the driving force behind the spread of venereal disease and evolutionary decline. This is why prostitution became inextricably linked to a range of concerns — including crime, madness and hysteria — that were themselves the target of various mechanisms of power, control and containment in the nineteenth century. This connection between prostitution and the imposition of authority infuses much of Parent-Duchâtelet’s writing. With the assertion that ‘les bonnes mœurs de toute une population’ were his overriding concern (DP I 19), a desire to control prostitution for social and moral, as well as biological, reasons, pervades his work. As such, his observations on how to contain prostitution through a regime of tolérance in strictly controlled brothels — the so-called ‘maisons closes’ — highlight a perceived necessity for public displays of vice to comply with the strictures of administrative procedures and sanitary controls, and therefore to become less obvious, and potentially less corrosive, to society at large. He argued that channelling desire into well-regulated brothels, where it would be subject to ‘une surveillance exacte’, itself designed to ‘réprimer le désordre’, was preferable to the destruction that unchecked passions could cause in society (DP I 315); therefore he regarded his recommendations in terms of a broader social ideal characterized by ‘le bon ordre public’ (DP I 353) and ‘[le] pouvoir de l’autorité’ (DP II 513). In other words, the imposition of authority over the prostitute — via the mechanism of inscription into police
9. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration, 2 vols (Paris: Baillière, 1837), I, 8, hereafter DP in the text. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 5
files and medical reports — become the guiding principle defining his writings, and an analysis of the discourse used in his representations of prostitution unveils an evident appreciation of the benefits to be accrued from dominance and control. Clandestine prostitution — that which escaped the rigours of inscription — was the major concern of the time precisely because of the challenge it posed to the imposition of power. As Parent-Duchâtelet puts it: ‘C’est elle [la clandestine] qui corrompt et pervertit l’innocence, et qui, revêtant les apparences les plus honnêtes, paralyse l’autorité, la brave à chaque instant, et propage impunément la contagion la plus affreuse et l’immoralité la plus grande’ (DP I 492). As his own textual emphasis reveals, those prostitutes who escape the power mechanism of inscription were deemed to pose a threat to authority, and were therefore associated with instability and the spread of subversion. Indeed, Parent- Duchâtelet explicitly refers to them using the discourse of rebellion: ‘Les filles publiques, abandonnées à elles-mêmes et dégagées de surveillance pendant l’anarchie des premières années de la première révolution, s’abandonnèrent à tous les désordres que favorisait, à cette époque désastreuse, l’état de la société’ (DP I 366–67). However, one of the consequences of the practice of inscription was that those prostitutes whose personal and medical details were recorded in written documents were effectively subjected to a textual strategy of containment. It is this underlying desire to manage mobile bodies, suppress perceived sexual deviance and police potential disorder that links Parent-Duchâtelet and Balzac’s writings, and makes De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris a particularly appropriate intertext for reading representations of prostitution in La Comédie humaine. As Antoine Adam points out, Balzac generally eschews the minutiae of the world of prostitution in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, his work that deals most explicitly with the theme, concentrating instead on the wider, more metaphorical concerns that he associates with prostitution: 6 WILSON
Rien, dans son roman, sur les maisons publiques, rien sur les ‘dames de maison’, rien sur toute la réalité sordide ou ignoble pour laquelle l’ouvrage de Parent-Duchâtelet lui fournissait pourtant une information abondante. [...] Ce qu’il veut, c’est découvrir les lois, c’est pénétrer jusqu’aux causes, c’est aussi dégager la signification pathétique et humaine de la réalité qu’il étudie. C’est pour cette raison qu’il met en si fort relief la mobilité extrême des filles publiques, l’excès […], leur ignorance, la conscience qu’elles ont de leur abjection […]. Car chacun de ces traits nous amène à comprendre la nature de la prostitution.10
Far from distancing himself from the salient aspects of Parent- Duchâtelet’s account, Balzac’s focus on the ‘nature’ of prostitution — its essential qualities and features — is, as Adam notes, infused with the very same motifs that characterize and define Parent-Duchâtelet’s work: excess, circulation and, above all, mobility. In his novels, Balzac exploits the general sense of mobility associated with prostitution and presents it more specifically in terms of the financial gain and social ascendancy to be derived from turning the body into a pragmatic tool that performs its sexual availability. For this reason, critics have often pointed to the metaphorization of prostitution in the Comédie humaine, suggesting that the prostitutional relationship is both profound and widespread in le monde balzacien. With ‘grandes dames’ such as Julie d’Aiglemont, who prostitutes herself in marriage, and courtesanesque aristocrats such as Diane de Maufrigneuse and Lady Dudley who, even without the motivation of money, enjoy the benefits of liberation and empowerment offered by venality, it is little surprise that Anne-Marie Baron has stated that ‘la prostitution devient un modèle pour l’ensemble des relations humaines décrites par Balzac et structure tous ses romans’.11 Because of its invasiveness and ubiquity, the term ‘prostitute’ in Balzac’s work is, as Owen Heathcoate has conceded, ‘epistemologically, socially and
10. Antoine Adam, Preface to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris: Garnier, 1958), p. xix. 11. Anne-Marie Baron, Balzac, ou les hiéroglyphes de l’imaginaire (Paris: Champion, 2002), p. 83. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 7
morally unstable’.12 For that very reason, any reflection on the notion of mobility in relation to representations of prostitution in the Comédie humaine must be considered carefully, for the real link between Balzac and Parent-Duchâtelet’s writings is not one of mobility per se, but checked, policed and hindered mobility — precisely because of the inherent dangers the prostitute poses. Thus, in the light of Heathcoate’s detailed examination of the different modes of prostitution of the female characters in Balzac, this study focuses on the so-called ‘professional’ prostitutes in Balzac’s work — the literal rather than metaphorical or social prostitutes — because of what they reveal about the overlaps between the positional and essential features of prostitution in the Comédie humaine. As Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut have noted, ‘le corps prostitué’ is, essentially, a theatrical product:
La prostituée n’est […] pas un corps qui jouit, s’émeut, rit, pleure, se déchire, s’extasie, souffre, c’est un corps qui travaille, qui représente un personnage particulier dans une pièce particulière écrite par les clients, c’est un corps qui incarne le théâtre intime d’un étranger et, à ce titre, sera requis de faire taire en lui ses caprices et ses envies (sauf si cela lui est demandé).13
It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the ‘professional’ prostitutes in Balzac’s work are also actresses — Florine in Une fille d’Eve, Coralie in Illusions perdues and Esther in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, for example. Esther is also symbolically known as ‘La Torpille’, her mobility and her potential to provoke desire being the essential features of the power invested in her:
À dix-huit ans, cette fille a déjà connu la plus haute opulence,
12. Owen Heathcoate, ‘Negative Equity? The Representation of Prostitution and the Prostitution of Representation in Balzac’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 40 (2004), 279–90 (p. 279). 13. Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, Le Nouveau Désordre amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 97. 8 WILSON
la plus basse misère, les hommes à tous les étages. Elle tient comme une baguette magique avec laquelle elle déchaîne les appétits brutaux si violemment comprimés chez les hommes qui ont encore du cœur en s’occupant de politique ou de science, de littérature ou d’art. Il n’y a pas de femme dans Paris qui puisse dire comme elle à l’Animal: ‘Sors!...’ Et l’Animal quitte sa loge, et il se roule dans les excès?14
As this quotation illustrates in its powerful use of contrasts, the prostitute-actress uses her sexual power — her potential to wreak destruction in society and subvert traditional models of authority and stability — in order to move through social spheres. Thus, it is her very mobility — her unregulated trajectory — that leads the prostitute- actress to be associated with the dangerous notion of ‘excess’ in Balzac’s world. Significantly, then, Balzac’s prostitute-actresses do not fare well in his work: the sense of power that comes from the carnal desires they project on the stage and their perceived erotic perversions are always checked in the end; their mobility is hindered and their freedom regulated. For example, Coralie, in Illusions perdues, is identified as a failed actress; her slavery to the temptations of sexual gratification exposes her as nothing but an ambitious prostitute who simultaneously drains the creative energies of her poet-lover, Lucien. Her doomed performance on the stage marks her out as a worthless creature and denies her any further sexual capital to be invested in the marketplace of desire. Any potential for metamorphosis from lowly prostitute into socially mobile ambitieuse is therefore refused. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Vautrin, seemingly playing a regulatory role by proxy, sets about implementing an elaborate attempt to control and contain the disruptive desires of Esther so that her lover Lucien might redirect his energies towards the goal of social success. However, his farcical attempts to cast her as a ‘rehabilitated’ prostitute, before re-
14. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), VI, 442, hereafter CH in the text. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 9
charging her with erotic energy and putting her back in his script as a ‘femme vénale’, fail, and serve to highlight the fact that, in his eyes, the courtesan is ultimately irredeemable: ‘Vous êtes toujours courtisane’, he tells Esther (CH VI 460). In this sense, Esther is but another prostitute in Balzac’s world who simply cannot escape an irrevocable identification as fille no matter how much she may wish to. Thus, despite the fact that Balzac’s prostitute-actresses attempt to perform a new identity on stage, their essence — their latent venality — is always visible, so that their performance lacks credibility and potential. Vautrin emphasizes this reality to Esther in a particularly unequivocal and forceful manner: ‘Vous êtes fille, vous resterez fille, vous mourrez fille; car, malgré les séduisantes théories des éleveurs de bêtes, on ne peut devenir ici-bas que ce qu’on est’ (CH VI 487). Following the paradigm established by a system of regulation which restricts the prostitute’s mobility, a form of textual regulation can be seen to operate in the Comédie humaine that serves to control the narrative destiny of Balzac’s prostitute-actresses and prevent them from escaping their alleged essence. The role of Vautrin as performance director in Balzac’s script, casting the prostitute in her role and attempting to direct the routine she enacts, marks him out as a powerful authority figure in Balzac’s narratives of prostitution. Yet it is significant that the so-called Vautrin trilogy deals extensively not only with the theme of prostitution, but with the destiny of the male hero in each case too. Far from seeing his performance hindered and regulated, the male hero in Balzac’s work is, in fact, given a large degree of freedom to perform a prostituted persona in his quest for social achievement. In this regard, given that Balzac’s conceptualization of prostitution might usefully be thought of in terms of its etymological roots — a placing forth (of the body), in public15 — it is important to note that the trope of prostitution attaches itself, albeit in a metaphorical sense, as much to the male characters
15. As the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle puts it, ‘littéralement, mettre en avant, exposer au public, de pro, en avant, et de statuere, placer, mettre’. Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. by Pierre Larousse, 24 vols (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1866–76), XIII, 289. 10 WILSON
of the Comédie humaine as to the female courtisanes, though with different results. Whereas the prostitute-actress is unable to escape her innate identity, Lucien’s interactions with Coralie and then Esther, the direction and advice he receives from Vautrin (the arch-criminal who appears under his very own variety of disguises), and the model of success as incarnated by Rastignac, all point to the benefits of public performance enjoyed by the male hero in Balzac’s world. As D.A. Miller puts it, Rastignac’s role in particular is that of the ‘semiotic manager alert to ensure that his body is bearing the signs proper to its social integration’.16 In this respect, the male ambitieux of the Balzacian roman d’apprentissage — of whom Rastignac, who is synonymous with ideas of sexual and social role-play, is the epitome, followed by Marsay, who attains success because he learns to regulate his body and project the ‘correct’ signs necessary to social integration17 — might be regarded as the embodiment of what is termed in La Cousine Bette ‘[les] hommes à bonne fortune qui sont des espèces de courtisanes-hommes’ (CH VII 274) in a description that alludes to those men who use their body as a tool with which to please the powerful. Therefore, one of the fundamental questions to be addressed in any discussion of prostitution in Balzac’s work — prostitution being defined here as the projection of a carefully crafted artefact to be ‘read’ by a potentially purchasing customer — is the extent to which the performance of different sexual identities determines how successful various enactments of prostitution are to be. The image the Balzacian protagonist must present of himself in modern Parisian society is conditioned by the importance he attaches to the ways in which the body may be prostituted in the public marketplace. Rastignac’s social performance must be used in order to define his body as a political and sexual tool that will assure him of social success;
16. D.A. Miller, ‘Body Bildung and Textual Liberation’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier, pp. 681–87 (p. 682). 17. ‘M. de Marsay, homme fameux par les passions qu’il inspirait, remarquable surtout par une beauté de jeune fille, beauté molle, efféminée, mais corrigée par un regard fixe, calme, fauve et rigide comme celui d’un tigre: on l’aimait et il effrayait.’ (CH V 277) REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 11
the profitability of his body depends on the lengths he will go toin order to serve those whose money, influence and social connections are deemed advantageous. Such a trajectory in Balzac’s contribution to the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman tradition posits the traditional prostitutional narrative alongside the male plot of ambition. In both cases, the body is turned into a pragmatic tool from which to derive maximum profit; but the key difference is that whereas the male hero can succeed if he projects the ‘correct’ signs necessary to social integration and trades on desire rather than sexual exchange, the female courtisane is only ever defined as an incorrigible, hopeless creature, ultimately bound to failure in the Balzacian universe because of her inescapable, innate venality. As Vautrin puts it, ‘La femme est un être inférieur, elle obéit trop à ses organes. Pour moi, la femme n’est belle que quand elle ressemble à un homme!’ (CH VI 902). Yet the implications of the distinctions to be drawn between the admired, performative sense of (male) prostitution and the condemned, venal enactment of (female) prostitution in Balzac’s work stretch beyond questions of gender identity in a narrowly-defined sense. The motif of prostitution in Balzac’s work — with its fundamental links to male performance, duplicity and social ascendancy on the one hand, and the containment of sexual power and female mobility on the other — raises important questions about the disparities between male success based on the modalities of prostitutional practices, and, importantly, the regulation and control of expressions of female sexuality in the Comédie humaine. Critics have long focused on the masculinist ideology of the realist novel by authors such as Balzac, proposing that writers such as George Sand fell from the nineteenth-century canon precisely because of the rise and dominance of such modes of representation. Naomi Schor suggests that the representation of ‘bound women’ is a key narrative and structural precondition of the realist novel with its tendency towards order and stability: ‘Realism, far from excluding woman from the field of representation draws its momentum from the representation of bound women, and that binding implicitly recognizes woman’s energy and the 12 WILSON
patriarchal order’s dependence on it for the production of Literature.’18 That being the case, it is hardly surprising that George Sand takes issue with realism, and its symbolic baggage. However, one aspect of Sand’s work that has largely been passed over in critical discussion to date is the role played by prostitution in her fictional exploration of strategies of representation that depend upon the imposition of authority, order, control, inscription and surveillance over the supposedly wayward woman. In this respect, debates on the various relationships between Sand’s work and realist structures may usefully be extended.19 In the criticism of dominant conventions that subtends her representations of prostitution, Sand exploits the dubious equivalences established between prostitution and performance in many of Balzac’s works in order to call attention to the links between prostitution and duplicity, language and power. For example, highlighting male appropriation of language as a means of empowerment, the narrator of Indiana challenges Raymon’s manipulation and distortion in the following way:
Rien n’est si facile et si commun que de se duper soi-même quand on ne manque pas d’esprit et quand on connaît bien toutes les finesses de la langue. C’est une reine prostituée qui descend et s’élève à tous les rôles, qui se déguise, se pare, se dissimule et s’efface; c’est une plaideuse qui a réponse à tout, qui a toujours tout prévu, et qui prend milles formes pour avoir raison. Le plus honnête des hommes est celui qui pense et qui agit le mieux, mais
18. Schor, Breaking the Chain, p. 144. 19. Following on from Schor’s discussion of the relationship between Sand’s writing and realist structures, largely motivated by feminist concerns (and her reading of the oppressive marriage plot in particular), more recent notable studies include Nigel Harkness’s examination of masculinity and desire — ‘a grounding component of realist aesthetics’ (p. 134) — in Sand’s work, and Nathalie Buchet Rogers’s study of aesthetic experimentation — especially Sand’s rejection of any mimetic imperative — in Isidora. See Nigel Harkness, Men of their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand’s Fiction (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) and Nathalie Buchet Rogers, ‘Aux limites du genre: Séduction et écriture dans Isidora’, in George Sand: Pratiques et imaginaires de l’écriture, ed. by Brigitte Diaz and Isabelle Hoog Naginski (Caen: PUC, 2006), pp. 187–200. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 13
le plus puissant est celui qui sait le mieux écrire et parler.20
The narrator’s allusion to Raymon’s language as a ‘reine prostituée’ is associated with the tropes of dupe and falsehood, and is implicitly contrasted to Indiana’s honesty and refusal to mask the truth. References to the manipulations of language that benefit the male protagonist— ‘C’est une reine prostituée qui descend et s’élève à tous les rôles’ — recall the rhetorical traits of artificial disguise and role-play that are wedded to imagery of prostitution in La Comédie humaine. Sand’s metaphor therefore highlights a gender imbalance at the heart of the use of language, for power is attributed to the performed (or prostituted) language of ‘celui qui sait le mieux écrire et parler’. In other words, the narrator’s reference to language — and, by extension, writing — as a ‘reine prostituée’ draws attention to a construct that is moulded to fit the exigencies of male control and power. This short excerpt from Indiana sets the tone for the consideration of a more fundamental trend in Sand’s work, for, as we shall see, her extended writings on prostitution in Lélia and Isidora also criticize performative representations that yield power through the copy and mimicry of dominant conventions. In this regard, Sand’s writings on prostitution react against the dominant aesthetic discourse of her era — that is, a realist doxa that depends upon the replication and preservation of established social and sexual norms. As such, they may be read in terms of Barthes’s notion of the para-doxa — or, as Graham Allen puts it, ‘that which would disturb the beliefs and forms and codes of [the reigning] culture’.21 The effect of Sand’s use of the motif of prostitution to describe the power afforded to the male who successfully manipulates language is to highlight the deceptions and dishonesties that characterize the process. It is no surprise, then, that in Lélia and Isidora, Sand not only liberates the prostitute — often a deliberately subjugated figure in
20. George Sand, Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 130. 21. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 90. Barthes’s ideas on the para-doxa are set out in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 75, 143. 14 WILSON
nineteenth-century literature — from a plot of repression, but also gives her her own voice, thereby raising a number of fundamental questions concerning the limitations and inadequacies of dominant discourses and representations of prostitution. In these novels, the courtesan figures (Pulchérie and Isidora) are released from the strictures ofa narrative of suppression and subjugation, and are allowed to articulate their desires. As such, Sand establishes a direct contrast between her writings and narratives of prostitution that only manage to underpin stable representations by mobilizing a plot of containment. Yet Lélia in particular has not traditionally been read as a nineteenth-century ‘roman de la prostitution’; critical commentary has, instead, tended to focus on the metaphysical complexities embodied in the eponymous heroine rather than her prostitute sister.22 But the trope of prostitution is indissociable from the notion of control and containment in nineteenth- century discourses; in this respect, its significance in debates on the distance Sand puts between herself and realist aesthetics merits greater attention that has been afforded to date. Indeed, in a scathing review, the critic Capo de Feuillide condemned Lélia as ‘la prostitution de l’âme et du corps’ because of its perceived immorality and the dangers that depictions of female ‘transgression’ could potentially pose to a female readership.23 In a description that recalls one of the predominant images linked to prostitution in Parent-Duchâtelet’s writings, Feuillide advises that women should be kept away from the novel if they are to avoid becoming contaminated by its impurities: ‘Le jour où vous ouvrirez Lélia, renfermez-vous dans votre cabinet pour ne contaminer personne. Si vous avez une fille dont vous voulez que l’âme reste vierge et naïve, envoyez-la jouer aux champs.’24 In a further textual appropriation of prevalent metaphors of prostitution, Sainte-Beuve characterizes the text by ‘ses défauts et ses excès’ and states that, in Lélia, ‘il y a le sentiment
22. I refer to the original 1833 edition of the novel in my analysis. 23. In L’Europe littéraire, 22 August 1833. Cited in Annarosa Poli, ‘George Sand devant la critique, 1831–1833’, in George Sand, ed. by Simone Vierne (Paris: CDU and SEDES, 1983), pp. 95–100 (p. 98). 24. Cited by Pierre Reboul in George Sand, Lélia (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 589. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 15
immense d’un mal sans remède; et ce mal […] envahit tout’.25 Such references to the ‘excess’ of Sand’s text reflect a narrative that is uncontained and uncontrolled. In its refusal of standard emplotment, its multiplicity of form — with epistolary, confessional and, in a much more limited capacity than the realist novel, traditional third-person narration — and in the reflections on literary representation it inspires, this particular ‘roman de la prostitution’ openly flaunts its rejection of realist conventions. As Leslie-Ann Minot suggests, ‘Sand saw a need to write fictions of prostitution that exceed or escape the plots that prostitution automatically suggested.’26 Minot’s focus is on the sexual identity of Sand’s prostitutes which, she argues, tells us ‘not only what it means to be a woman, but also about the world more broadly’.27 Yet it is precisely because they refuse assimilation into traditional plots of containment that Sand’s prostitutes also perform a notable narrative function. In a novel in which Lélia’s lover, Sténio, seeks to impose a stable identity onto the eponymous heroine through his attempts to resolve her metaphysical complexities, it is the prostitute Pulchérie who deliberately celebrates disrupting Sténio’s attempt to ground Lélia’s perceived otherness into a more stable, traditional sexual identity. In the scene at the Pavillon d’Aphrodise, where Sténio believes that the frigid Lélia is, at last, to spend the night with him, Pulchérie surreptitiously takes the place of her sister under the cover of darkness. When the trick is revealed the following morning, leaving the male hero confused and humiliated, Pulchérie revels in his disorientation, celebrating the benefits of an identity characterized by plurality: ‘Je suis Zinzolina la cortigiana [la courtisane], Pulchérie, la sœur de Lélia; je suis Lélia elle- même, puisque j’ai possédé le cœur et les sens de Sténio.’28 In her use
25. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, 5 vols (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881–1889), I, 505, 501. 26. Leslie-Ann Minot, ‘Sand’s Unassimilable Prostitutes: Pulchérie, Isidora, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Prostitution’, George Sand Studies, 21 (2002), 56– 69 (p. 64). 27. Minot, ‘Sand’s Unassimilable Prostitutes’, p. 68. 28. George Sand, Lélia (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 220. 16 WILSON
of the verb ‘posséder’, Pulchérie has subverted the classic paradigm of realist desire whereby the female protagonist is ‘represented as forbidden to experience sexual pleasure, fulfil her ambitions, and move about freely’.29 Lélia refuses to allow for the realization of male desire in Sand’s text, but it is Pulchérie who is arguably the more radical figure, not only because she herself resists masculine domination and refuses self-abnegation, but because she actively exploits male desires to further her own ends. Juxtaposed with the rational, philosophical Lélia, Pulchérie is prepared to seize all the opportunities life presents for personal gratification.As Lélia testifies: ‘C’est vrai, ma sœur, nous ne nous ressemblions pas. Plus sage et plus heureuse que moi, vous ne viviez que pour jouir; plus ambitieuse et moins soumise à Dieu peut- être, je ne vivais que pour désirer.’30 The equation of the sexually loaded term ‘jouir’ with the fulfilment of desires and its direct contrast with the more intangible sense of desire in the abstract — that is, unfulfilled desire — establishes Lélia’s sexual identity in opposition to Pulchérie’s. Such a representation of prostitution in Sand’s writings can, of course, be read against some of the typical features of realist representation as interpreted by Schor — namely, the forestalling of subversive (sexual) complexities and ‘the binding of female energy’ so that both the social order and patriarchal desire might be maintained.31 But Pulchérie’s literary significance is felt in one further respect, for it is the prostitute who provides the literary space for her sister to articulate her complex emotions: ‘Commencez votre histoire’, she implores her as they talk alone, in an apostrophe that allows for female self-expression and denies Sténio any occasion to control and contain the narrative. 32 What Lélia ultimately demonstrates is that when the sexually ‘deviant’ woman is liberated from a plot of repression and textual emancipation occurs, the instability and inadequacy of realist structures are fully exposed. The violation of the defining aesthetic and structural codes of 29. Schor, Breaking the Chain, p. 145. 30. George Sand, Lélia (2003), p. 155. 31. Schor, ‘The Scandal of Realism’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier, pp. 656–61 (p. 659). 32. George Sand, Lélia (2003), p. 158. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 17
realism is also apparent in Sand’s novel Isidora.33 Here, the young philosopher, Jacques Laurent, comes across two apparently contrasting figures — the virtuous, well-mannered Julie, described as ‘un ange’ I( 70), and the notorious courtesan Isidora, ‘la femme la plus méprisée, sinon la plus méprisable de Paris’ (I 87), whom he associates with bodily desire and destructive passions. However, at a masked ball, Jacques discovers that Julie and Isidora are, in fact, the same person. Unable to accept this, he sets about trying to rehabilitate Isidora — hence seeking to place her within his control — as the pure and ‘angelic’ Julie. But Sand’s prostitute rejects Jacques’s attempt to resolve an identity that he perceives as problematic, and therefore refuses to accept the very premise of a male plot of redemption:
Tu vois toujours dans l’amour l’idée de pardon et de correction, tu ne vois pas que ton rôle de purificateur, c’est le préjugé du pédagogue qui croit sa main plus pure que celle d’autrui, et que la châsse où tu veux replacer la relique, c’est l’éteignoir, c’est la cage, c’est le tombeau de ta possession jalouse? (I 84)
Jacques proposes to Julie/Isidora that they flee to ‘[une] vie pure et simple’ (I 90), but the prostitute is only too aware that this scheme is dependent upon burying her identity as Isidora. Sand’s protagonist will have nothing to do with such an arrangement that forces her, against her will, to negate part of her identity. Instead, Isidora wants nothing other than to love and be loved, without preconditions or domination, as a complete being, rather than an idealized part of her self. Thus, the prostitute refuses to become identified according to a reductive binary system of representation, and refuses Jacques’s offer of a conditional pardon if she agrees to identify herself only as the righteous, self- sacrificing Julie:
Déjà des conditions! dit-elle; déjà le travail de ma réhabilitation qui commence! Jacques, tu vas croire que je t’ai trompé, que 33. George Sand, Isidora (Paris: des femmes, 1990), hereafter I in the text. 18 WILSON
je me suis trompée moi-même, quand je t’ai dit que je détestais mon luxe et mes plaisirs. […] La misère sans l’amour! c’est impossible. Eh quoi! tu me demandes déjà des sacrifices? Tu n’attends pas que je te les offre! tu acceptes la pécheresse à condition que, dès demain, dès aujourd’hui, elle passera à l’état de sainte! Oh! toujours l’orgueil et la domination de l’homme! Il n’y a donc pas un instant d’ivresse où l’on puisse se réfugier contre les exigences d’un contrat? (I 90)
As Bernheimer remarks, the myth of redemption in nineteenth-century literature (as seen, for example, in Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas fils’s writings, and as exploited by Balzac in Splendeur et misères des courtisanes) depends on the prostitute’s condemnation as ‘irredeemably marked by her sexually deviant past’.34 Unlike her literary predecessors, however, Isidora refuses to accept this hypothesis, and thereby denies patriarchal power through apparent redemption at the behest of a male other. She elects instead to escape to Italy with her protector, Félix, whom she later marries on his deathbed, rather than submit to humiliation and remain forever in debt to Jacques’s decision to ‘purify’ her. As she tells the latter,
Vous n’auriez jamais pu m’aimer sans vouloir me dominer et m’humilier. […] Je veux mourir debout, vois-tu, et non pas vivre à genoux. J’ai trop bu dans cette coupe du repentir et de la pénitence; je ne veux pas surtout que la main d’un amant la porte à mes lèvres. (I 92)
Isidora’s refusal to conform placidly to the role allocated to her is confirmed when, after Felix’s death, Jacques attempts to love her for herself, instead of his idealized vision of Julie. However, his pretence does not last for very long, and rather than meekly accepting her fate and her eternal stigma, as Esther was forced to in the Balzacian narrative of prostitution, Isidora articulates her exasperation and anger in Sand’s text:
34. Bernheimer, ‘Prostitution in the Novel’, p. 781. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 19
Pourquoi Julie n’est-elle pas morte et ensevelie à jamais au fond de ton cœur et du mien? Mais l’infortunée ne peut pas mourir. Cette âme pure et généreuse s’agite toujours dans le sein meurtri et souillé d’Isidora; elle s’y agite en vain, personne ne veut lui rendre la vie; elle ne peut ni vivre ni mourir. Vraiment je suis un tombeau où l’on a enfermé une personne vivante. (I 152)
Through the strength of her protestations, Isidora refuses to bury her perceived sexually transgressive identity. By articulating her own feelings and desires, and going on to control the narrative in the form of the epistolary final section of the novel, and enjoying, quite literally, the last word in the narrative, Sand’s prostitute once again invites us to recall the inadequacy of narrative structures that are built on grounding sexual difference, and thereby regulating female identities and women’s trajectories. Sand’s writings react against a poetics of realism whose authority and domination comes at the expense of accurate and inclusive representations of the complexities of gender and sexual identities in the nineteenth-century French novel. Moreover, they point to the fact that the stability of patriarchal order depends to a large extent on the control and containment of a perceived deviant female sexuality. In this respect, this article has proposed that an examination of the motif of prostitution in Balzac and Sand’s writings demonstrates that prostitution is as much a textual signifier as a sexual one. In its application to modes of writing, the trope of prostitution — with all its links to control and containment, regulation and power — is to be found at the heart of competing visions of textual practice in the nineteenth century. While in Balzac’s work prostitution is often a metaphor for duplicity and role-play, reinforcing dominant representations and conventions, it is exploited for different ends in Sand’s writings. Instead, building upon the work of a number of feminist writers who likened prostitution to a form of slavery,35 Sand uses the motif of prostitution as a vehicle for voicing demands for women’s
35. See, above all, Flora Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres (1840) and Louise Michel’s Mémoires (1886). 20 WILSON
emancipation and as a means of expressing the liberation of her own textual practice from literary control. Thus, just as the female writer was disparagingly likened to the figure of the prostitute in the nineteenth century,36 so Sand proved to be a deviant, disorderly, troublesome figure who refused to submit to the powerful force of authority. Whether we talk of her writings on prostitution as a counter-discourse to, or para- doxa of, realist representations, in the end it should be no surprise that Sand displays more than a faint empathy with the personage of the unruly insoumise, for both were considered marginal figures, variously engaged in the subversion of normative social and literary structures in nineteenth-century France.
University of Leicester
36. As Christine Planté writes, ‘La métaphore de la prostitution, pour désigner et flétrir la condition de l’artiste qui accepte de créer pour de l’argent, constitue au XIXe une banalité, qui n’en garde pas moins son sens. […] Mais il y a pour les femmes une différence importante: pour elles, la prostitution n’est pas que métaphorique.’ Christine Planté, La Petite Sœur de Balzac: Essai sur la femme auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 194–95 (emphasis in original).