Figures of ill repute : representing prostitution in nineteenth-century France

Author

Bernheimer, Charles

Document type

Livre

Language

English

Source

ill.; bibliogr. ref.; index ; xiv, 329 p. ; 1989

ISBN

0674301153

Publisher

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (usa)

Publication country

United States

Abstract (en)

Argues that the prostitute is ubiquitous in the literature and art of this period because of her function in stimulating artistic strategies to control and dispel her fantasmatic threat to male mastery. She fascinates to the degree that that fascination can produce structures to contain, sublimate, or metaphorize the contaminating decomposition of her sexual ferment. Confronted by this pathological erosion, the writer/artist must construct art against nature, against woman, against the organic. Such constructions of artifice and reflexivity signal the birth of modernism which, the author suggests, is "inscribed on the prostitute's wounded body."

Subject (en)

• General history of art -- 1800-1945 -- France
• Art
• Literature
• France
• 1800-1900
• Iconography
• Prostitutes
• Women
• Misogyny
• Illness
• Decomposition
• Modernism
• Representation

Subject (fr)

• Histoire générale de l'art -- 1800-1945 -- France
• Art
• Littérature
• France
• 1800-1900
• Iconographie
• Prostituées
• Femmes
• Misogynie
• Maladie
• Décomposition
• Modernisme
• Représentation

Origin

DatabaseBHA (Inist-CNRS/GRI)

Identifier19920401-00424410

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