Literature and Prostitution

French literature has been preoccupied with prostitutes and prostitution for centuries. This course proposes to examine the some of the various depictions of women and men who make their living via sexual activity, from the 18th century through our own era. We will trace the different varieties of “loose women”, identifying an extensive taxonomy of courtisanes, lorettes, grisettes, filles de joie etc., in male-authored works from Manon Lescaut (1731) through the apogee of literary obsession with “fallen women” in the 19th-century. Over the course of the century the romantic “whore with a heart of gold” trope (Dumas’s Dame aux camélias) coexisted with Mérimée’s fatal gypsy Carmen, Flaubert and Baudelaire’s insistence on prostitution as metaphor, Maupassant’s analyses of bourgeois hypocrisy in this regard, and, finally, Zola’s irresistible and destructive Nana. The 20th century saw more nuanced depictions of both female and male prostitution from such authors as Colette and Jean Genet. We will conclude with 21st-century first-person accounts of sex work by Nelly Arcan (Putain, 2001) and Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie, 2006).