Progress of Misogyny: Representing Prostitutes and the Pox in the Early Eighteenth Century
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This study investigates how early eighteenth-century representations of London prostitutes captured the concomitant progress of the expansion of street prostitution and feminization of venereal disease onto the diseased prostitute body. The number of urban prostitutes, especially streetwalkers, sharply increased as they emerged as a compelling presence in London’s nightscape in this period, giving birth to the prototype of “Covent Garden nymphs,” the common subject of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Jonathan Swift’s prostitute poems. Hogarth’s pictorial narrative of Moll Hackabout pursues her progress from arrival in London to syphilitic death in six densely historicizing images, each centering on Moll’s body, inevitably diseased and degenerating. The diseased prostitute body appears larger than life in Swift’s “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731) and “Progress of Beauty” (1719), where the “rotting” flesh and “running sores” threaten to liquefy the venereal bodies of Covent Garden prostitutes, similarly to that of Hogarth’s dying Moll. In both Hogarth’s and Swift’s representations, the London prostitute is no longer the archetypal whore or the Restoration courtesan but one among the legion of poor and diseased streetwalkers. The dominant image of the diseased prostitute body evolved alongside a new theory of venereal disease, which pathologized the (overheated) womb as ‘cause’ of venereal disease by mixing and thereby ‘putrefying’ semen from numerous men. This theory, informed by the new science of iatrochemistry of the late seventeenth century, quickly displaced Renaissance venereological discourse and myths with a ‘Modern’ and essentially misogynous view of the female, implicitly prostitute, body. The unnerving parallels between Hogarth’s Harlot and the Lady in Marriage à la Mode and between Swift’s nymphs and the Lady of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” show how the progress of misogyny reached much farther than the precincts of Covent Garden.
Abstract
This study investigates how early eighteenth-century representations of London prostitutes captured the concomitant progress of the expansion of street prostitution and feminization of venereal disease onto the diseased prostitute body. The number of urban prostitutes, especially streetwalkers, sharply increased as they emerged as a compelling presence in London’s nightscape in this period, giving birth to the prototype of “Covent Garden nymphs,” the common subject of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Jonathan Swift’s prostitute poems. Hogarth’s pictorial narrative of Moll Hackabout pursues her progress from arrival in London to syphilitic death in six densely historicizing images, each centering on Moll’s body, inevitably diseased and degenerating. The diseased prostitute body appears larger than life in Swift’s “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731) and “Progress of Beauty” (1719), where the “rotting” flesh and “running sores” threaten to liquefy the venereal bodies of Covent Garden prostitutes, similarly to that of Hogarth’s dying Moll. In both Hogarth’s and Swift’s representations, the London prostitute is no longer the archetypal whore or the Restoration courtesan but one among the legion of poor and diseased streetwalkers. The dominant image of the diseased prostitute body evolved alongside a new theory of venereal disease, which pathologized the (overheated) womb as ‘cause’ of venereal disease by mixing and thereby ‘putrefying’ semen from numerous men. This theory, informed by the new science of iatrochemistry of the late seventeenth century, quickly displaced Renaissance venereological discourse and myths with a ‘Modern’ and essentially misogynous view of the female, implicitly prostitute, body. The unnerving parallels between Hogarth’s Harlot and the Lady in Marriage à la Mode and between Swift’s nymphs and the Lady of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” show how the progress of misogyny reached much farther than the precincts of Covent Garden.
참고문헌 (35)
- Boswell, James, "London Journal 1762-1763" (2010), Penguin
- Brown, Laura, "Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century" (2001), Cornell UP
- Carter, Sophie, "Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture" (2004), Ashgate
- Clark, Beverley, "Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition : A Reader" (1999), Macmillan
- Dabhoiwala, Faramerz, "The Pattern of Sexual Immorality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London", pp.86~106
- Gay, John, "Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716)" (2009), Oxford UP
- Gay, Joseph, "The Lure of Venus; or, A Harlot’s Progress: A Heroi-comical Poem Descriptive of Hogarth’s Prints"
- Gowing, Laura, "‘The Freedom of the Streets’: Women and Social Space, 1560-1640", pp.130~151
- Grant, Charlotte, "Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and ‘A Harlot’s Progress’", pp.99~113
- Griffiths, Paul, "Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London" (2000), Manchester UP
- Guilhamet, Leon, "Pox and Malice: Some Representations of Venereal Disease in restoration and Eighteenth-Century Satire", pp.196~212
- Hammond, Brean, "Corinna’s Dream", The Eighteenth Century, 36(2), pp.99~118 (1995)
- Healy, Margaret, "Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics" (2001), Palgrave Macmillan
- Henderson, Tony, "Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis 1730-1830" (1999), Longman
- Ingram, Allan, "Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable" (2016), Palgrave Macmillan
- 이시연, "스위프트의 “배설적 상상”에 나타난 여성, 몸, 소비", 영미문학페미니즘, 16(1), pp.91~115 (2008), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회[DOI]
- Lewis, Ann, "Prostitution and Eighteenth- Century Culture" (2012), Routledge
- Lowe, N. F., "The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth’s Graphic Art", pp.168~182
- McAllister, Marie E., "Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth- Century England: Science, Myth, and Prejudice", Eighteenth-Century Life, 24(1), pp.22~44 (2000)
- Merians, Linda E., "The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France" (1996), UP of Kentucky
- Norberg, Kathryn, "From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal Disease, 1730-1802", pp.34~50
- Ober, William B., "Boswell’s Gonorrhea", Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 45(6), pp.587~636 (1969)
- Pope, Alexander, "The Poems of Alexander Pope" (1963), Routledge
- Real, Hermann J., "Dean Swift on the Great Pox: Or, The Satirist as Physician", pp.77~99
- Rosenthal, Laura J., "Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth- Century British Literature and Culture" (2006), Cornell UP
- 류혜원, "<메리 프리쓰의 생애와 죽음>을 통해 살펴본 런던 거리의 여자들", 18세기영문학, 14(2), pp.29~63 (2017), 한국18세기영문학회
- Siena, Kevin, "Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Medical Discourse on Social and Sexual Danger", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8(4), pp.553~574 (1998)
- Spongberg, Mary, "Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse" (1997), New York UP
- Stallybrass, Peter, "The Politics and Poetics of Transgression" (1986), Cornell UP
- Stewart, Mary Margaret, "And Blights with Plagues the Marriage Hearse", pp.103~113
- Swift, Jonathan, "The Complete Poems" (1983), Penguin
- Waller, Maureen, "1700 Scenes from London Life" (2000), Four Walls Eight Windows
- Weisner-Hanks, Merry E., "Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe" (2008), Cambridge UP
- White, Jerry, "London in the Eighteenth Century : A Great and Monstrous Thing" (2012), Bodley Head
- Zimbardo, Rose A., "Satiric Representation of Venereal Disease: The Restoration versus the Eighteenth-Century Model", pp.183~195