Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson.