Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s

Abstract

change both in ways of representing prostitution and in public opinion about ways of dealing with the sexually deviant woman. Since the 1 860s the police had been granted the power under the Contagious Diseases Acts to apprehend women of doubtful virtue in the streets and insist that they be medically examined; if found to be diseased, they could then be detained in lock hospitals. Once these acts were repealed in 1885, prostitutes had greater freedom but were also kept under surveillance by philanthropists and the medical profession. A variety of discourses constructed the prostitute either as an innocent victim of male lust or as a 'demon' and 'contagion of evil'.1 Judith Walkowitz has argued that such an ideological framework excluded the experience of women who drifted into this lifestyle temporarily, and provided 'a restrictive and moralistic image' of the fallen woman.2 Arguably, literary representations of prostitutes tended to flesh out the potentially restrictive images used in feminist, medical and periodical writing on the subject, though no form of discourse was immune to the strong influence of the language of purity used by the members of the National Vigilance Association (NVA) and its advocates. In this article I will consider representations of the prostitute and her relationship with the philanthropist or New Woman in fiction and drama of the late- Victorian period. Novels that flirted with the concept of a prostitute heroine, such as George Gissing's The Unclassed (1884) and Annie Holdsworth's New Woman novel, Joanna Traill, Spinster (1894), were perceived to be rather scandalous, particularly if they bordered on the sexually explicit. George Bernard Shaw's attempts to dramatize a discussion about prostitution and the existence of brothels had to be banned from the late- Victorian stage. According to Frank Mort, 'positive representations of active female sexuality' were extremely rare in debates on prostitution,3 an additional constraint on writers in an age of censorship. Borrowing from feminist accounts © CS 2003