Frydman on Tanner (2023)

In this thought-provoking and provocative book, Jessica Tanner approaches the social, cultural, and literary history of nineteenth-century French prostitution from a novel (pun intended) and illuminating direction, one that centers the novel and is productively difficult to map. Indeed, it is precisely the problem or even failure of mapping that animates the book: namely the way in which Haussmannization troubled authors’ ability to write the city, to assert their authorial authority over it and, by extension, the novel itself.  

Paris, in this moment of near-constant demolition and many chantiers, was in perpetual flux, in process, and thus resistant to mimetic representation. The city of the day before was not the city of today was not the city of tomorrow. The new, less fragmentary city emerging slowly out of this dust and debris was not any more promising—its lines were too straight, forming “banal spatial unities” (40), and its streets lacked the kinds of twists, turns, and detours so full of literary potential. This dislocated Paris was not Balzac’s city, it could not be grasped in its entirety. As such, the prostitute proved to be an exceedingly useful literary figure. She was unruly, offering some good narrative chaos in a form that could, it seemed, be controlled, allowing authors to re-establish their authorial control over urban space.  

This control echoed the actions of the police des moeurs who attempted to regulate, control, and surveil women selling sex in the face of what was for them, too, an increasingly unreadable city. For the police, Paris was hard to read because the brothel form was in steep decline: consumer demand had changed and Haussmannization was demolishing the neighborhoods in which tolérances were the densest. In the process, the sites and signs of prostitution were blurred, changeable, fluid. Instead of carefully enclosed in the brothel and clearly marked with the grand numéro on the street, prostitution proliferated throughout the city, in a multitude of spaces and places including apartment-based maisons de rendez-vous, brasseries à femmes, maisons de passe, balls, music-halls, and the street. 

It is into some of these spaces that Tanner brings us across four loosely chronological chapters that move through post-Haussmannian Paris from the 1870s to the early 1900s: chapter one is located in the outmoded tolérance of early naturalist prostitution novels by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edmond de Goncourt, chapter two in the brasserie à femmes through Adolphe Tabarant’s Virus d’Amour and Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés, chapter three in the “novel-brothel” (148) that is Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, and chapter four on the street, through Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse.  

Despite the importance of power, control, and discipline to each of these chapters, in which controlling narratives of prostitution allows these authors to write themselves into a position of authority, Tanner is also committed to attending to unexpected forms of resistance, looking at “how prostitutes in nineteenth-century France, and in nineteenth-century French novels, negotiated space and narrative in ways that unsettled the disciplinary order designed to contain them” (27). Indeed, while, for many of Tanner’s authors, following in the footsteps of the vice officer offered a pattern for spatial control over Paris, it also introduced the difficulty of effectuating this control. The ability of the sex worker to disrupt the system, of course, took a different form for living sex workers than for their novelistic counterparts. And yet, while sex workers in nineteenth-century Paris actively evaded police control in ways that novel prostitutes—thoroughly generated and animated by their male creators—could not and cannot, Tanner nonetheless insists that these novels have the potential to disturb the regulatory logics they tactically employ. They do so in part, she argues, in the very act of giving registered and clandestine prostitutes a voice they—figured as an anonymous horde—were often seen not to have. By giving working-class sex workers a name—Marthe, Élisa, Alphonsine, Berthe—attached to a story, rather than simply a registration number, these authors in fact open up space for counter-readings, allowing readers to push back against and re-interpret these fictional sex workers, breaking them out of their imprisonment in a way that questions the social boundaries and authority they were created to hold up, allowing them to circulate without regard for the boundaries of police tolérance.  

In the end, then, the book, which charts the use of the sex worker to shore up male power over representation, forcefully argues for the resistant power we have, as contemporary readers, to question this authority. We, with our different ideas about the world and its hierarchies, with our feminism, anti-racism, anti-classism, anti-homophobia, etc., are an element that these long-dead authors cannot control. This concept of readerly resistance is an exciting one and a more in-depth and sustained exploration of the connection between reading and resistance and a clearer articulation of what this readerly power looks like and how it works would have been appreciated, at least by this reader. Nevertheless, Tanner’s own dazzling skill as a close and often resistant reader results in a theoretically sophisticated explanation for nineteenth-century authors’ sustained interest in writing about prostitution. 

This theoretical tour de force was sometimes somewhat overshadowed by one source of authorial authority that Tanner does not question or resist as a reader or writer: that of theorists, and especially of Jacques Rancière and Michel de Certeau. While their authority is not based on an attempt to control the representation of working-class women’s bodies, it is nonetheless striking that here, too, white men with status and the power that comes with it are given a significant amount of control over the story Tanner tells.  

In my own capacity as a resistant reader, I choose to strip them of the power Tanner gives them and listen, instead, to what she tells us; this, in her great attention to detail, often goes far beyond where more abstracted theory can. Tanner charts a new, unmappable, unbounded path through the city, through its history, and through literary study more broadly. It’s one that I want to follow.