© 2016 Jennifer Lyndsay Grant
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© 2016 Jennifer Lyndsay Grant MAISONS DE PRESSE, MAISONS DE PASSE: PROSTITUTION IN THE PARISIAN LITERARY MARKET, 1830 - 1923 BY JENNIFER LYNDSAY GRANT DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Laurence Mall, Chair Associate Professor Patrick Bray, The Ohio State University, Co-Director of Research Associate Professor Tamara Chaplin, Co-Director of Research Associate Professor Margaret Flinn, The Ohio State University ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century French novels are replete with prostitutes. These fictionalized versions of Paris’ real population of venal women and men usually possess an exceptional spirit; yet over the course of the narrative, they are consistently removed from public circulation in society. Literary critics such as Charles Bernheimer have adeptly shown that a desire for narrative control over the prostitute reveals a prevailing anxiety surrounding gender—and more specifically, female sexuality—in nineteenth-century France. My work demonstrates that this anxiety also has a material component, one that was both specific to, and endangered, the evolving Parisian literary marketplace. Furthermore, I show that the evolution in depictions of prostitution indicates that the threat came not only from women, but from another non-dominant group that benefited from education reform and a wider availability of reading material: the working class. In this dissertation, I analyse prefaces to slang dictionaries and scenes in novels in which venal characters read and/or write: moments where the prostitute as subject collapses into metaphor. I use these as an interpretive lens for understanding how authors from Balzac to Proust might turn to an illicit subject to further their careers. I argue that depictions of reading and writing prostitutes make the venal body an effective, but perilous, site for the production of new ideas about the professional writer. Effective, in that the ideas the novels supported continue to echo in current Western notions of genius, intellectual property and labor, and creative license. Yet perilous in that, as an image of intellectual venality, the literate prostitute risks mapping the venal body—sexed, gendered, and working class—back onto either the figure of the idealized author, or his body of work. At stake in this dissertation is a way of representing prostitution that contributed to the gendering of not only the professional author, but the public intellectual. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the members of my committee—Tamara Chaplin, Patrick Bray, Laurence Mall and Maggie Flinn—whose patience, encouragement, and unfailing belief in my ability to complete this project kept me on this long, winding path... To my mentors, near and far—Larry Schehr, Doug Kibbee, Sandy Hamrick, Annie Smart, Eloise Buker, Dale Cosper and Pat Henry—who inspired me to ask questions, taught me how to do so, and encouraged me to pursue answers... To my Illinois colleagues over the past several years—Lizzie Black, Juliette Dade, Nicola Dach, Faith Stein, Tricia Dimit, Jessica Sturm—whose support and friendship through writing groups and long-distance conversations was unwavering.... To those who funded my work—Karen Fresco and the department of French & Italian, Ed Costello and the Illinois Program in Paris, the Graduate College, the School of Languages, Cultures and Literatures—whose generous contributions afforded me not only the ability to travel and do archival work, but also the necessary time to complete the writing... To those who facilitated my research—Caroline Szylowicz and the Proust-Kolb Archive, The Kinsey Institute, the Bibliothèque national de France, the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, and the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique—for the privlege of legitimating my own bibliomania... To my friends in the Champaign-Urbana community and beyond, to the members of Amasong, for helping me to laugh, to breathe, and to keep going... To my family—my parents Linda Bentley, and Bob and Jane Grant, and in memory of my grandparents Lark and Jack Blum—who set me on this path and have supported my growth in so many ways... To my husband, Rudy Fratti, whose love, support, patience and sincere appreciation of Proust, is legible (to me, anyway) as the palimpsest of every sentence of this final draft... And finally, to my daughter, Amelia Lark, whose presence in my life brings me daily joy, and whose bright future gives meaning to my commitment to feminist scholarship... ...I extend my most heart-felt thanks. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION : READING THE “PUTAIN DE LIVRE” ........................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE: P IS FOR “P…”: THE PROSTITUTION OF WORKING-CLASS LANGUAGE IN SLANG DICTIONARIES ................................................................................................................................ 26 CHAPTER TWO: BETWEEN FILLE AND FEUILLETONISTE: BALZAC, THE LITERARY CRISIS OF THE LATE 1830S, AND THE GENDERING OF THE FICTIONAL WRITER ...................................................... 68 CHAPTER THREE: THE COURTISANE IN CIRCULATION: ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS’ LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS ...................................................................................................................................... 108 CHAPTER FOUR: PROSTITUTION, CENSORSHIP, LITERACY AND OTHER EXCLUSIVE DISCOURSES IN EARLY NATURALIST NOVELS ....................................................................................................... 151 CHAPTER FIVE: READING MOREL: THE PROUSTIAN AUTHOR AND THE PROSTITUTIONAL ECONOMY ..................................................................................................................................................... 193 CONCLUSION: WRITING THE PROSTITUTED BODY (OF WORK) ..................................................... 230 EPILOGUE: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MAISON CLOSE ON THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OPEN MARKET ....................................................................................................................................... 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 251 iv INTRODUCTION : READING THE “PUTAIN DE LIVRE” “Notre siècle est un siècle de putains, et ce qu’il y a de moins prostitué, jusqu’à présent, ce sont les prostituées.” —Gustave Flaubert, writing to Louise Colet, January 29 1854 In January 2015, photos of an anonymously hacked electronic traffic panel in Los Angeles went viral. FranceInfo radio personality Guy Birenbaum picked up on it, saying “Réussir à pirater la signalisation publique pour faire passer des [sic] beaux messages à tous de manière anonyme c’est une opportunité géniale, un fantasme.” 1 The “beau message” in question? “Lisez un putain de livre. [Read a fucking book.]” In many ways, this dissertation is about “hacking” the media that serve to regulate public circulation.2 It is about a small group of people trying to shape what those around them read, and how. And it is about reading the “putain de livre,” as the full plasticity of this phrase allows: reading books that juxtapose vulgarity and literature, books viewed derisively, books that defy such derision, books compared to putains in the public nature of their commercial circulation and desirability; and, of course, reading the putains de livres themselves: the “paper prostitutes” that are as much products of a larger literary tradtion as they are the titillating subjects of individually-sold books .3 Since the era that gave 1 No one has taken credit for hacking into the wireless network that allowed an L.A. city traffic sign to display the message, “Read a fucking book” on January 9, 2015. ActuaLitté documented the viral circulation and FranceInfo Journalist Guy Birenbaum commented on it on his radio show Jan. 13, 2015. http://www.franceinfo.fr/emission/l- autre-info/2014-2015/lisez-un-putain-de-livre-14-01-2015-04-35 2 “hacker (n.): 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.7, 20 Nov, 2015. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html 3 I have borrowed the term “paper prostitute” from Mireille Dottin-Orsini and Daniel Grojnowski’s excellent “Préface” to the anthology Un Joli monde, romans de la prostitution, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008, p. xxxv. They 1 rise to the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), it has been understood that the act of reading “a fucking book” (with the expletive serving as both adjective and noun) can have political, cultural and artistic implications. In short, what I am concerned with here is the conscious association of prostitution with the vulgar in order to direct the flow of literary traffic. Prostitué(e), etymologically, denotes someone exposed indiscriminately in public. Adapted into French from the Latin verb prostituere—composed of pro- (before) and statuere (to place)—it means, literally, placed in front.4 Figuratively, it implies a degrading public exposure of