The Whore’s Love
Katherine Binhammer, University of Alberta
Volume 20, no. 4, Summer 2008
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In this article, I read Magdalen narratives to detail the contribution that the figure of the sentimental prostitute makes to a history of love. While courtship novels like Burney’s Evelina confuse “marriage for love” with mercenary marriage by rewarding the heroine with money at the end, sentimental prostitute narratives prioritize love over money in the victim’s initial loss of virtue and separate affective and economic relations. This article demonstrates that the prostitute, refashioned in her Magdalen dress, provides a strong example of love without interest. In doing so, Magdalen narratives expose the founding aporia in the bourgeois marriage plot: unlike Evelina and many of her courtship narrative sisters, these women trust that their sexual desires speak a truth about their emotional attachments, and they claim a right to act upon that knowledge rather than having to learn to silence these desires. Ultimately, the whore’s love renders the economics of love within bourgeois marriage visible.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Female Sexuality” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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