ABSTRACT
Figures of prostitution, sexual abjection, and illicit forms of economic exchange dominate the paintings, novels, and poems associated with the advent of realism and modernism. In the attempt to adequately capture the upheavals of the Haussmanization of Paris, the industrialization of England, or the development of a mass culture in the US, writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, Theodore Dreiser and Émile Zola were drawn to the fallen woman and, as John Berger puts it, “the realism of the prostitute” (Berger, 1977). Where we do not find prostitutes, we find overlapping figures for sexual abjection and economic perversion in, for example, the recurrence of the actress (another kind of “painted woman”), the celebrity (a living commodity), or the sodomite (who engages in a prohibited form of reproduction). We have a myriad of brothel scenes in French art (by Manet, Degas and Toulouse Lautrec, for instance), Zola’s infamous (and influential) Nana, the web of debt and scandal in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the spectacularly magnetic title character of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. The latter’s rise to theatrical celebrity is explicitly figured as a descent in character, and is initiated by her acceptance of money from a suitor. As she fingers the dollar bills, feeling how soft they’ve become from having passed through so many hands, Carrie trembles not with fear, but with an almost sexual excitement. Once she puts the money in her pocket, there is no going back. The change that comes over her is as permanent as it is mysterious. Every step she takes away from domesticity and honest work seems both inexplicable and inevitable.
The money Drouet puts into her hand merely seals a deal which had long been in the works.
