Mapping Prostitution
Subtitle: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin-de-siècle French Novel
Contributors: Beizer, Janet; Conley, Tom; Fernández Cifuentes, Luis
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Description: 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.
Notes: Keywords: narrative, naturalism, novel, Paris, prostitution, space.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2013