The "Oldest Profession" Made Modern

Abstract

In an important new study, Laura Rosenthal takes up the question of why prostitutes and prostitution figure so prominently in so many restoration and eighteenth-century narratives. Drawing on a wide body of varied materials, Rosenthal traces how prostitutes shifted over time from being considered exclusively as figures of sexual pleasure and moral degradation to being represented more liberally as figures of commerce. She demonstrates that for writers who were concerned or anxious about the growth of a social and economic system which demanded self-division and the alienation of labor in the public marketplace, prostitution provided an exemplary point of entry for exploring both the limits of commodification and the threat posed by self-commodification to the integrity of the individual. The proliferation of prostitute figures in eighteenth-century narratives can thus be understood as a function of the extent to which they served as figures for exploring the contradictory conditions of modern identity. To deny the prostitute her market, as Rosenthal demonstrates, would be to nullify something fundamental not only about modern capitalist conditions but also about the necessary and sustaining fictions of modern subjectivities and modern identities