Seduction, Prostitution, and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction (original) (raw)
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Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History, 2019
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the impoverished and vulnerable white sex worker was a ubiquitous figure in American fiction. Often portrayed as seduced and betrayed, this young woman could come from a lower-, working-, middle-, or upper-class background and almost always lived in an urban area. However, she also may have been a foreign-born naïf or innocent farm girl who only recently arrived in a bustling American city where she was easy prey for immoral men. The prostitute's most consistent characteristic in these stories, however, was her whiteness, which was strongly associated with notions of chastity, purity, and domesticityideals the prostitute directly violated with her immoral and overtly sexual behavior. 1 Male-authored novels written in the mid-to-late nineteenth century frequently denied female sexual desire and agency and adhered to themes of poverty and seduction. Karen J. Renner argues that the "prostitute became an object of antebellum fascination and concern less because of her defiance of the ideology of passionlessness and more because of the extent to 1 For background information about nineteenth-century sex work, see
" Mr Ballard, I am compelled to write again " : Beyond Bedrooms and Brothels, a Fancy Girl Speaks
2011
Using a review of several letters from the papers of Rice C. Ballard, a former Virginia slave trader, this article examines the lives " fancy girls, " a little known group of high-end, enslaved women who were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes during antebellum America. Specifically, this study uses letters from two women to demonstrate how this unique female slave encountered an industrializing America in ways that often differ from the experiences of other female slaves.
An Exploration through the Depicted Histories of 19th Century Prostitution
Prostitution is one of the world’s oldest professions. Prostitution supplies a demand that is constantly seeking to be met. Due to financial need, involuntary force, poor education, and just bad luck many women have fallen into this profession that will always be available to the misfortunate. This was no different in both the rural and urban parts of the United States during the 19th century. In Anne M. Butler’s Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, an investigation of the prostitutes of the frontier west is explored. In The History of Prostitution by William W. Sanger, the lives and experiences of New York prostitutes during this same time are described. Using Butler’s accounts of the fallen women of the west based on her own research using local newspapers, jail registries, diaries, censuses of the time as well as other scholarly monographs on the subject, and Sanger’s first-hand interviews with prostitutes living in New York City, an analysis of the similarities and differences between the way the lives of these prostitutes are depicted by the two authors, can be examined. Analysis of each theses presented by both authors will be explored to compare their two different uses of sources (primary and secondary) and the effectiveness of those sources towards their arguments.
Harlot or Heroine? Changing Views of Prostitution, 1870-1920
The Historian, 1980
B Y LESLIE FISHBEIN* HE persistence of prostitution in America troubled nineteenthcentury reformers who believed that the nation could rid itself of a corruption that had plagued Europe for centuries. Their faith in the ability of republican institutions and economic opportunity to cure social problems in the United States was sorely tested by the growing traffic in women.' In attacking prostitution, they were torn between two immediate goals: containing the social evil through regulation or eradicating it entirely. Although regulationists claimed that they favored the eventual elimination of the vice, they urged "realism" in managing it for the present. Believing that sexual intercourse was vital to men's mental and physical health, they viewed prostitution as a social requisite and argued that medical control alone would provide sufficient community protection. The noted criminologist Cesare Lombroso even claimed that prostitution reduced crime.* Hence, regulation, administered by police and by medical personnel, would safeguard both the prostitute and the public.3 This seemingly pragmatic approach to prostitution masked a number of conflicting assumptions. In examining the "Social Evil in Philadelphia," the Reverend Frank M. Goodchild noted the hypocrisy of the sanitarians in their scorn for the fallen woman: There are those who insist that the whole arrangement is necessary evil; that our daughters would not be safe on the streets but for these outlets *The author is Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at Douglass College, Rutgers University. 'For a general discussion of this optimistic view of American institutions and affluence, see David J. Rothrnan, The Discovery ofthe Asylum: Social Order and &or& in the
Frivolity to Consumption: Or, Southern Womanhood in Antebellum Literature
Civil War History, 1972
The Old South died over one hundred years ago on the battlefields of the Civil War. It is, however, only dead-not forgotten. The Lost Cause, if showing signs of wear, still maintains its place in American mythology. Essentially, the Lost Cause consists of a vision of a vanished agrarian society dominated by large plantation owners. Many sub-myths form the legend of the Old South, especially the cults of chivalry and womanhood and the myth of the happy darkey.1 William R. Taylor, in his analysis of the Old South, suggests that the cavalier image presented by southerners as an antidote to Yankee materialism was not solely a southern creation. Rather, both northerners and southerners developed this legend in antebellum literature. Thus,
The Fallen Woman: Prostitution in the Victorian Era
When a reader has in front of him a text, be it a novel, a play, or a poem, he must be aware that the text is the result of a long process of mutation, a process which starts with the author and is consolidated at the hands of the editor. The origin of that mutation, during the Victorian era, stems from key aspects such as morality and social conventions. However, unlike what Randall McCleod suggests, the reader should not only make of the text a point of departure, but also a case study of the period it was written in. A text is fundamentally a projection of the historical circumstances it was created in. What I propose to demonstrate in this argument, is how a text can be used by the reader as a portrait of social and moral struggle, namely Victorian codes of morality and social convention regarding women and the issue of prostitution. I’ll discuss this proposition in relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue, ‘Jenny’, and his portrayal of these issues in his poem, as well as the issues of censorship of the period. The Victorian era has long been characterised as a period of change, instability and contradiction. The nineteenth century saw a revival of religion, – which brought with it a greater concern with morality – as well as a fast passed industrialization. Laura Cenicola and Mareike Aumann have defined Victorian morality as ideals that ‘supported sexual repression, low tolerance of crime and importance of the British Empire’. Also, as Maria Frawley said, ‘literary rates increased, print culture proliferated, […] and a mass reading public was born’. This meant literature was a vehicle for the dissemination of ideals, which meant in turn a greater control of publications was required. If readers had easy access to any sort of publication, measures needed to be taken to make sure codes of propriety were maintained. Literary censorship flourished this way, alongside anti-obscenity laws. Censorship could significantly condition the shape of a text, in a sense that authors needed to model their subject-matters in a way that would preserve moral standards. If that wasn’t the case, it would be up to the publishers to separate the wheat from the shaft. Therefore, an editor could change the original meaning of a text in order to keep a book from being banished, or even destroyed, as it was stipulated by the Obscenity Publication Act of 1857. Randall Macleod’s proposition could be seen in this light, to the extent that the text a reader had access to, wasn’t necessarily the original text that the author wrote, as it might have been altered by the editor. However, even if a text suffered alterations and omissions, that didn’t mean it would change its original meaning, as it can be seen with Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’. The censorship in this case was in fact self-censorship, as I will discuss ahead.