The Whore’s Love

The Whore’s Love Katherine Binhammer (bio) By the time the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes opened in Goodman’s Fields on 10 August 1758, the sentimental portrait of the prostitute had taken shape in British culture: a prostitute painted in these terms was a seduced victim forced to sell her body for bread and not a sexual agent who whored for sexual pleasure.1 Her sprightlier sister, the non-penitent prostitute and lover of luxury, remained in circulation throughout the period (for example, in the scandalous memoirs of Maria Brown and Ann Sheldon), but most scholars agree that the second half of the eighteenth century witnesses the emergence of the prostitute as primarily an economic victim, not a sexual predator.2 [End Page 507] A proper object of pity as well as a victim of a libertine seducer, the sentimental whore beckoned public sympathy, but she could only do so if she could be under stood as an unwilling agent in sexual commerce. Thus, the new image required a redefinition of prostitution from an act of sexual volition to an act of economic necessity, a turn from sex to money. Laura Rosenthal, in her recent astute book on the figure of the prostitute in the eighteenth century entitled Infamous Commerce, argues that “prostitution took on its modern form during this period” and that what is “modern” about prostitution is the focus on sexual commerce as a form of labour: “in the eighteenth century we can see a shift in representations from early inscriptions in which prostitutes embody insatiable desire to later configurations in which the economic meaning of the transaction of prostitution becomes increasingly prominent.”3 Both Rosenthal and Tony Henderson link the shift from lust to money to larger transformations in gender symbolized by the rise of bourgeois femininity.4 The redefinition of the wife’s sexual role under domestic ideology has implications for the role of the prostitute as well. The emergence of companionate marriage, with its concomitant sentiment that affective feelings should be merged in monogamous marriage, [End Page 508] provoked the repeated comparison between mercenary marriage and prostitution. “Legal prostitution,” the new catch-phrase for mercenary marriage, nicely captures the overlap between the sexual and the economic in the new commerce between the sexes.5 While many have noted the similarities between mercenary marriage and prostitution, less discussed is the significant overlap between the whore’s love and affective marriage. In this article, I will read Magdalen narratives to detail the contribution that the figure of the sentimental prostitute makes to a history of love, not a history of commerce or illicit sex.6 Early narratives of the Magdalens, most particularly the anonymous novel The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760), represent the penitent prostitute as best encapsulating the ideal of non-mercenary love, and the seduced woman who is forced into prostitution provides a better model for a love divorced from commerce than the chaste wife.7 While courtship novels [End Page 509] 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 firmly separate affective and economic relations. By telling the tales of women who only turn to the sex trade out of economic necessity, after being abandoned by the men they loved for free, these narratives provide an important initial exploration of the dangers and difficulties women faced in negotiating an easy convergence of sex, love, and financial support under a rubric of a post-Hardwicke institution of marriage. This article ultimately demonstrates that the figure who best exemplifies the commercialization of sex—the prostitute— refashioned in her Magdalen dress, provides a strong example in the mid-eighteenth century of love without interest. In doing so, Magdalen narratives, such as The Histories, 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 control...

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