A Study Of Prostitute Image In19th Century French Literature

Being a group of people depicted in literature, the prostitutes’ image has played an important role dueto the prostitutes’ social status and female identity in particular. Prostitutes are not only favored by writers,but also attracted multiple attentions by literary critics by its relative literature works.There are diversifiedimages of prostitutes in the19th century French literature. This paper focuses on them as a whole and triesto search for the living conditions, social and cultural characteristics, and changes in literary thoughtsbehind their image by doing researches on them.This paper contains introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction reviews the historical origins of prostitute images in western and eastern countriesand puts forward the purpose of this paper. Then the current condition of researches on prostitutes wouldbe introduced-------most analyses prefer to do research on the individual image rather than the wholepicture.The body contains three chapters. The first chapter classifies the prostitutes in19thcentury Frenchliterature and makes descriptions accordingly. These characters display a variety of styles in their writers’hands. Not only did they inherit the traditional image in western literature, but also expanded the range offemale images created in literature due to their career and special status. This provides the writers with abroader variety of social topics to choose from. The second chapter starts with the ideological point of viewand analyzes the humanitarian spirit and literary thought of prostitutes. These analyses show that on the onehand, writers combine humanitarian spirit with the social and political conditions of the19thcentury, whichis the accusation of the dark side, the praise for good moral characters, the pursuit of independence anddignity as well as the hope for social revolution. On the other hand, the views of different writers arecombined to describe their major thoughts in creating the prostitute image and their particular behavior.The third chapter analyzes the male writers’ characteristics and the prostitutes’ female identity from theperspective of gender. The descriptions of prostitutes as angels or devils reveal that male writers don’tstand in females’ shoes and cannot precisely hear the prostitutes’ inner voices. In a male-dominated culture,those prostitutes were embarrassed to be somebody else. Their self-respect and self-esteem were found andthey began to question their own identity. The conclusion provides a systematic summary of the ideas mentioned previously, meanwhile statingthat equity between men and women can’t be attained in a day or two. Even in modern society, feministsstill shoulder the historical responsibility of pursuing equity between men and women.