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Literary
Representations
Hugo
Balzac
Lorettes and society
Lower
Class Prostitutes and the Law
Representations in Les Miserables
Realities of Authority in Paris
Brothels and Streetwalkers
The Privileged Class: Courtesans
Defining the courtesan
Visual representations
Courtesans in reality
Bibliogrpahy
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Alexandre
Dumas was, unlike Victor Hugo, not someone who empathized with
the plight of women in the nineteenth century. Although he was
known to have affairs he had quite a different view of women and
prostitution then Hugo did.
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Alexander
Dumas 5.for source click
here
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Alexandre
Dumas (1824-1895), was a French playwright and novelist,
who wrote plays about the problems of the middle class.
He was the son of the writer Alexandre Dumas père. His
first work was a volume of poetry, Péchés de jeunesse
(Sins of Youth). The following year his first novel,
Camille, appeared, and the subsequent dramatization
of this work established him as a success. The play,
about a courtesan who sacrifices her happiness for her
lover's good, has since that time served as a vehicle
for many great actors. The story was finally immortalized
by Giuseppe Verdi in his famous opera La Traviata.
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Alexandre
began an affair with Marie Duplessis when he was only twenty-one.
He described his camellia lady as "one of the last of those
rare courtesans who had a heart," 6.for source
click here but
the cost of a single evening with her was enough to ruin Alexandre.
Though already suffering from the consumption that was to kill
her, she was kept by millionaires and spent a hundred thousand
gold francs in a year. Yet it was he, and not she, as in the
popular novel he wrote about her (before turning it into an
even more popular play), who broke it off. He wrote in a letter
to her: "My dear Marie, I am neither rich enough to love
you as I would wish, nor poor enough to be loved by you as you
would." 6.for source
click here
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Eventually
Dumas came to see life "as a battle between the woman and
the man." 6.for source click
here Young men in the Second Empire, he thought,
had become hard; the women provocative.
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He
seemed to have a greater leniency for men which was based, on
his belief that sexual promiscuity was a natural condition for
a young male, but not for a female. A man need not exercise
strong will to curb his lusts; a woman would be most indiscreet
to do so. And as for men? "The only crime would be in marrying
the mistress." 6.for
source click here
So prostitution was built into the social system,
and the moral code must be adapted to accept it. The crack that
this causes in the code did not appear to Dumas until near the
end of his life.
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If
the woman accepted her status as a prostitute and did not aspire
to become a wife, she might be redeemable, like the lady of
the camellias, who had a heart. But she was rare. Dumas added
a note to his novel: "It is not my conclusion that all prostitutes
would have behaved as did Marguerite."7.for
source click here
More typical to his mind was Suzanne d'Ange of Le
Demi-Monde, who is determined to achieve social respectability
by marrying a young army officer who is ignorant of her tarnished
past. In this she is frustrated by the hero, Olivier de Jalin,
a friend of her proposed victim, who uses every trick in the
book except the revelation of their own old affair-which his
honor prohibits. Perhaps due to a suspicion that at least some
of his audience might sympathize with an unfortunate woman trying
to better herself, Dumas makes Suzanne a good deal wickeder
than the situation really requires.
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When
Dumas wrote La Femme de Claude, he created a woman so vile,
not only in her ruthless promiscuity but in her betrayal of
her nation to an enemy, her husband, is justified in shooting
her dead. Dumas answered his critics in a pamphlet more violent
than his play:
"Women never
listen to reason; not even to proof. When they do surrender it
is always to feelings or to force. They must be either in love
or cowed; either Juliet or Martine! Nothing else is of the slightest
interest to them. I am writing, therefore, for the instruction
of the male. If, after this revelation of the truth, men still
persist in making mistakes about women, it will no longer be my
fault, and I shall do as Pilate did . . ." 6.for
source click here
Many of Dumas's
views on women and virtue seemed somewhat hypocritical seeing
that he himself was not one to pass up an evening with a woman
of the night but he remained stayed in his view that prostitution
was not something that could be excused. In fact the French dramatist
went so far as to blame the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870
on the prevalence of prostitution in Paris.
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