Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's Rise from Prostitution <i>Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's Rise from Prostitution</i> . By C <scp>arol</scp> M <scp>ossman</scp> . (University of Toronto Romance Series). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xiv + 196 pp. Hb CAD $50.00.

In the Introduction to Carol Mossman's fascinating study of the life and times of the Countess de Chabrillan, the author tells us that her subject ‘learns to write’ (p. 17). As the later chapters demonstrate, it is this process of learning to write that allows the Countess to rescue her sense of self from the shame engendered by that part of her life that she spent as a prostitute. Psychoanalytic theory has long proposed that art (in its various forms) gives individuals the chance to ‘repair’ themselves, and it became a practice in the twentieth-century West to encourage the traumatized to express and expunge their negative memories through self-expression. In this context the Countess was one of the many who followed a self-initiated path which others were to theorize later. However, the way that we look at prostitution (and what is now known as ‘sex work’) in the twenty-first century has shifted somewhat from those discourses of shame, condemnation, and exclusion that once created the boundaries through which sex workers were distinguished from others. One important aspect of these changed perceptions is the discussion of the ways in which those sex workers saw themselves: not necessarily, it is now argued, as people who regarded their work as outside ‘respectable’ society. Indeed, one of the results of the ‘making’ of the prostitute in the nineteenth century — in France this process was articulated through registration with the police and forced medical examination — was that it was assumed (and to some extent still is) that, once prostitutes had acquired an institutionalized identity, it would become increasingly difficult for them to move into other forms of paid work or into more conventional relationships. Yet what studies of prostitution in nineteenth-century Britain and America have suggested is that, despite the strength of punitive discourses about prostitution, there was a degree of toleration both for those who became prostitutes and for those who had once been prostitutes. This evidence seems to me to be important because it recognizes that the remarkable achievements of the Countess de Chabrillan did not occur in the face of overwhelming, homogeneous hostility. One of the many important aspects of Carol Mossman's book is that she demonstrates that writing by and about prostitutes in nineteenth-century France was much less rare than previously supposed. At the same time she is to be applauded for writing an account of a woman who was not destroyed by the deviant aspects of her life. The Countess de Chabrillan, rather than colluding with those forms of misogynist fiction that preferred to condemn the prostitute, was a testament to the ability of women to demonstrate their many possible realities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.