The prostitute like the artist being one of the oldest professions, there has been limited study of her changing social role, although it is easily arguable that the relationship of the prostitute and her upper-middle-class client changed substantially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with most social relations. Unfortunately, the nature of the change has been mystified through the tradition of seeing her as an archaic, or at least changeless, figure, an abjected version of the timeless and mythic Ewig-Weibliche. Thus she is often simply interpreted as an inevitable social response to the debased, animal aspect of men who are perpetually torn between ape and angel, between sensual and spiritual impulses. For one thing, such an assumption ignores the wealth of social and functional gradations suggested by the rich choice of terminology employed in nineteenth-century France, from the simple putain to demi-mondaines, cocottes, grisettes, morves, grues, poules or poulettes, marmites, and midinettes, without even beginning on circumlocutions such as péripéticienne or terms of affection such as bichette. Each term denotes or at least connotes a different social relationship, and a different status for the woman concerned. If there was no such wealth of terminology used in the United Kingdom, that was more a measure of cultural denial than of a lesser amount of sexual activity in exchange for money.

From the mid- to the late-nineteenth century there was a flowering of writing addressing the situation of prostitutes, starting with mid-century sentimental treatments owing their inspiration to the romantic movement, such as Thomas Hood’s poem “The Bridge of Sighs” (1844), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) and, perhaps most significantly, La Dame aux camellias (1848) by Dumas fils. By the late nineteenth century naturalist treatments such as Zola’s Nana insisted upon a different approach in which the role of sentiment was more indirect, as it was in a flurry of novels such as Huysmans’ Marthe (1876), de Goncourt’s La Fille Elisa (1871) and de Maupassant’s Boule de suif (1880). Starting from a survey of (mostly French) naturalist and impressionist works, both novels and paintings, Robert Scholes in a recent essay entitled “In the Brothel of Modernism” has argued that Modernist artists, had a special relationship to “the brothel as an aesthetic space.”

Indeed, he suggests that the prostitute comes to serve as a figure of the Modernist artist, especially in the work of Joyce and Picasso, in the “Circe” episode and “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). I agree with him that there is something novel about the relationship between the artist and the prostitute under modernity which is more significant than what can be explained by simple social slippage in the twentieth century. But at the same time, I believe that to equate the modernist artist and the prostitute—even as a heuristic metaphor--is a mistake: simply on the surface of aesthetic discourse, it was precisely the Modernists who distinguished themselves from bourgeois popular or commercial artists, who they claimed were prostituting themselves by offering their work as commodities. Whatever the complexities of the Modernist self-image, the rebellious artist from his position within the alternative exchange system developed by Modernists strongly abjected commercially viable works of art in terms that identified the “false artist” with the harlot. Whatever the complexities and contradictions of the Modernist self-image, I think it unlikely that the critic will find it useful to construct him as the diametrical opposite of the Modernist vision.

Like Scholes, though, I think the most useful way to approach this topic is through “early Modernist” or “pre-Modernist works. Sholes does so through considering impressionist painters such as Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the photographer E. J. Belloq, who painted and photographed brothels and their denizens; while I intend to do so through an examination of one representative book from the turn of the century dealing with the relationship between an upper-middle-class British gentleman and a German-born prostitute in Paris. This book, a succès de scandale entitled The Sands of Pleasure (1905) by Filson Young, is one of a large group of British and European novels from the turn of the century to explore the boundaries between physical and spiritual love and the relationship of both to social convention. In the final chapter of my book Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature I discuss a number of these books, most of them from Joyce’s Trieste library(1), including Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, the notorious novel about an otherwise virtuous and intelligent woman who pursues a romantic relationship outside marriage, Charles Albert’s L’Amour libre, and Marcelle Tinayre’s The House of Sin.(2) Joyce knew that Filson Young was Grant Richards’ reader for Dubliners and had considerable praise for the book; he probably either purchased or (more likely) was sent the book for this reason. Clearly Richards was considering publishing Joyce’s stories as one of a series of books like his own that were “advanced,” sexually challenging to a bourgeois readership, but were written with serious intent, however salaciously they might be received. Of course, Richards’ ambivalence about these issues and his fear of lawsuits have become familiar elements in the Joycean mythology. Still, it seems obvious that Richards meant Joyce to learn from Filson Young’s effort, and I would argue that, in unexpected ways, perhaps he did; whatever its limitations the book earned praise from Jean Rhys.

Young did not turn out to be the literary figure that Richards hoped for, although for a period he was a significant figure as an essayist, adventurer, and journalist. After publishing a couple of novels and a volume of poems he went on to write books on flying, the Irish political situation, and an extremely popular guide to motoring. But in The Sands of Pleasure there is no question that Young is approaching his subject—the Parisian demi-monde and the higher class of courtesans that inhabit it--seriously. In fact, he has read his Flaubert, and in an introduction argues, “there is every reason why mature people should read. . . about it not bitterly or unpleasantly, but as pleasantly as possible, in a mirror of a page written without moral preoccupations.” Although his book has a moral, he writes, “it comes assuredly from the incidents themselves, and not from my view of them,”(3) which suggests that there may be an element of autobiography in the book, since otherwise the “incidents themselves” would simply be another function of the author’s view. It is difficult to tell against what literary approach Young is quietly arguing here, but I would guess that he has in mind the “unpleasantness” of Zola and his followers. Certainly The Sands of Pleasure, which is dedicated to Grant Richards, has little of Zola’s corrosive materialism (or Joyce’s scrupulous meanness); the third-person indirect narration reflects the innocence and idealism of the protagonist, modified somewhat by the sophistication of his well-born friend, a former artist and habitué of the Parisian demi-monde.

The novel is divided into three obviously symbolic books,” “The Builder,” The House on the Sands,” and “The House on the Rock.” The protagonist Richard Grey is a serious young man who has inherited his father’s business of building lighthouses. He is skilled at the trade and in an Ibsenesque way is engaged in finishing a particularly monumental one on the bleak Cornish coast at the novel’s beginning. He has become acquainted with the nearest neighbor, a somewhat older man named John Lauder, who feels Grey’s education needs broadening and so determines to take him to Paris to experience the nightlife. Lauder’s sister Margaret is an attractive and intelligent woman but it seems that Grey needs to experience more personal development before he will be ready for the serious relationship between them whose possibility is suggested. After the first book introduces Grey as a dedicated worker whose lighthouses with their “virginal form[s]” (27) are, as Lauder insists, romantic “children of beauty and utility” (98), the plot progress is slow. A great deal of description is lavished on the sea, a blind, uncontrollable force that is still beautiful, and epitomizes the “vital force of the world” (82), as Bergson might agree. In a passage reminiscent of the opening of “Nausicaa” the sea is described as kissing the land, but here the act is sometimes tender, sometimes savage and violent (20). As “the great disturber” (94), the sea is clearly a trope for untamed female sexuality, opposed by the emphatically phallic lighthouse that embodies Grey’s dead father’s presence (28). Grey and Lauder discuss life at length and Lauder enjoys teasing Grey with his occasional unconventionalities and sub-Wildean pronouncements. In addition, Grey visits a Church of England service and a Trappist monastery, neither of which seems to have any decisive influence on his state of psychological disturbance.

“The House on the Sands” takes place in Paris, as Lauder introduces Grey to the bohemian area of Montmartre and to the great gathering places of the demi-monde, such as Maxim’s restaurant, a world of beauty and pleasure for which Lauder has an “Alexandrian respect” (117) and within which he is a familiar figure. The Englishmen soon become flaneurs: “They loitered over their cigars and sauntered in the boulevards until eleven o’clock. What a throng of searchers for the hidden treasure of joy were there!” (123) As the men sit and observe from their café table, “there was no distinctive class of cocottes indicated either by dress or behavior; every women seemed a possible cocotte, or else an entirely virtuous and domestic creature; it depended, you felt, on circumstances” (127-28). As Lauder explains, here in the evening social scene in Montmartre nobody has a sense of sin or evil, which would make the entire scene insupportable: the sexual parade is independent of moral judgment. This is a new concept for Grey, but he is open-minded in this unfamiliar and stimulating setting.

Soon Lauder introduces him to Toni, a demi-mondaine who frequents Maxim’s who is rather paradoxically described as a young apparent innocent who cares for little but money; she has the pure and beautiful face of a virgin but with a “little red mouth, alluring and repelling in its perversity, [that] reminded him of a childish vampire—childishly greedy, childishly cruel” (179). Lauder assures Grey that Toni is “one of the aristocrats” of the demi-monde; she is fiercely intelligent, addicted to pleasure but only happy when money is being spent upon her, and at the same time somewhat self-destructive, since she has had several chances to be supported in lifetime comfort as a mistress but has always torpedoed the arrangement. Indeed, while both Lauder and Grey insist upon her intelligence, we never really see that quality in operation. Toni lies freely, with or without occasion, but always embodies a spontaneous vitality that suggests to Grey the “vital force” of the sea, not to mention its destructiveness. He tries to be frank about the “fascination of the flash” that he develops for Toni; “he liked to call things by their true names, and to douche himself with the cold aspersion of facts” (195). Along with Toni, Lauder, and a couple of other cocottes Grey spends some time in a rural town outside Paris and the way in which the women are able to act “naturally” intensifies his infatuation.

Toni is happy enough to be with Grey, but is dissatisfied with his financial resources and is insulted when he gives her antique jewelry instead of new and obviously expensive bijoux. Still, Grey finds himself falling in love with her, and baffled by the fact that his offer of marriage is refused by Toni without even taking it seriiously. Lauder has pointed out that in this world, “honorable intentions” mean the provision of a house and money rather than marriage. Increasingly dissatisfied, Toni continues to flirt with other men, driving Grey into a jealous rage and eventually precipitating a break between them. Lauder returns home, where the lighthouse in just about to be put into service. This is described at length in the third book, “The House on the Rock,” where Grey’s determination to reach the lighthouse on its first night despite a violent storm and high seas mirrors the violence of his emotions on leaving Toni, to whom he is clearly addicted. Having done so and later visited Lauder and his sister, as well as spending some time in the Trappist monastery he had visited earlier, Grey determines to see Toni one more time. He returns to Paris and finds her in Maxim’s with an unattractive man, which helps him realize that his relationship with the demi-mondaine is finished. He also overhears her referring to a young man she loved for a period, takes this to refer to himself, and returns to Cornwall comforted. On his return he concludes that “everything in her was flawed somehow” (274), often through an extremity of social consciousness, a dependence upon her appearance in the eyes of others. She feels neither gratitude nor duty (294), he realizes, and indeed “came of a different race” from his, she being in some way a creature of nature, he of civilization (357). One of the more important realizations to which Grey comes, although he barely acknowledges it, is that a particular prostitute with whom he becomes acquainted has become one by accident, not nature (223). Indeed one theme of the book might be that there is no hard and fast distinction between women who occupy different rungs on the scale of social acceptability. Another is that Toni “had made something of him that was not there before, something new that was her own and that he could not destroy or take away even if he would” (395); in other words, she is not simply an episode to be dismissed but has had some kind of constructive effect on Grey.

So on the surface, Toni is meant to serve as a catalyst for psychological change in Grey, although it is far from clear how this happens or in what the change consists. Certainly he emerges with experience of a different “race,” a different “world” that has different mores and often inverts the bourgeois values with which he has been raised, but at the same time he realizes that this other world is alien to him. The book’s narrator insists on the opposition of the lighthouse, painfully phallic and patriarchal as it is, redolent of usefulness and duty, with Toni, who is figured as natural, beautiful, a locus of extreme pleasure, but at the same time untrustworthy, vampiric, and unable to participate in spiritual love. It may be useful to set this against the experience of Stephen and Bloom in Bella Cohen’s brothel, in that both men (ike Grey) experience extremes of emotion they do not feel in their daily life and are forced to confront fundamental issues in their own psyches.

There is a strong homosocial element in both fictions—the union in Joyce’s chapter, of course, is really between Stephen and Bloom, while in Sands of Pleasure Grey’s closest friend is always Lauder, unless we count the lighthouse that Grey embraces at the end. In both Joyce and Young the prostitutes are not so much separate characters as joint inhabitants of a distinctive world, with characteristics that reflect their surroundings—in “Circe,” for instance, the three whores all are described with details of appearance and dress that reflect either the brothel or the men’s shared Oriental fantasy. In Young’s book Lauder, the Virgil in this underworld tour, insists on the fact that you cannot interpret the meaning of any act by the demi-mondaines without knowing their place in this inverted social order. In both fictions, of course, the prostitutes appear to have no agenda of their own, aside from prostitution; they function as distorting mirrors for their clients, and their acts (including Bella’s treatment of Bloom) says everything about their client’s desires and nothing about their own. I want to suggest that it is within the space opened by this mediating function that the new relationship between the prostitute and the modernist artist is staged, and that as these two self-acknowledged marginal figures come to recognize one another across the social gulf of the Edwardian age. In neither fiction is the nationality of the prostitutes very significant; they are international figures, as are modernist artists themselves. But unlike the artists they are granted little autonomy or agency, either socially or within the fictions. What would have been shocking to its first readers about The Sands of Pleasure is that neither Toni nor Grey is punished for their sexual and sensual indulgences; indeed, they seem to have made a man out of Grey. He has come to a kind of epiphany about himself, even if it is the sort of epiphany that Gunsmoke watchers of my generation experienced when we first realized what Miss Kitty did for a living. This is what makes Young’s novel an anticipation of Modernist themes, while its vagueness and confusion about values, epitomized by the nagging references to a Christian faith that never finds a significant role to play, demonstrate that we are not yet in full-blown Modernist territory.