Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture
- Part I (Auto)Biographical and Classificatory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
- Part II Visibility and Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
- 6 Prostitutes and Erotic Performances in Eighteenth-Century Paris
- 7 Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and ‘A Harlot's Progress’
- 8 The Narrative Sources of Candide's Paquette
- 9 The Prostitute as Neo-Manager: Sade's Juliette and the New Spirit of Capitalism
- Part III The Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
- Part IV Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
- Notes
- Index
7 - Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and ‘A Harlot's Progress’
from Part II - Visibility and Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture
- Part I (Auto)Biographical and Classificatory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
- Part II Visibility and Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
- 6 Prostitutes and Erotic Performances in Eighteenth-Century Paris
- 7 Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and ‘A Harlot's Progress’
- 8 The Narrative Sources of Candide's Paquette
- 9 The Prostitute as Neo-Manager: Sade's Juliette and the New Spirit of Capitalism
- Part III The Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
- Part IV Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This collection argues that the visibility of prostitutes in eighteenth-century culture, both on the street and in cultural representation, contributed to their moral and political notoriety. This chapter looks at perhaps the most obvious and enduring English example of that visibility, William Hogarth's six-part A Harlot's Progress of 1732. Hogarth's harlot has remained a recognizable figure for nearly three centuries. Here I examine the nature of Hogarth's representation of the ‘Harlot’, arguing that while Hogarth clearly renders the prostitute visible, she is not always straightforwardly legible.
A Harlot's Progress is a dramatic playing out of a key narrative for the period, a defining, and widely recognized pivotal representation, not only of the prostitute in eighteenth-century England, but for visual culture in the period. Any account of A Harlot's Progress, as with any examination of Hogarth, has to acknowledge a debt to Ronald Paulson, whose first volume of his three-volume Hogarth, The ‘Modern Moral Subject’: 1697–1732 provides an apparently exhaustive account of the references in, and influences on, A Harlot's Progress. While Paulson's account traces the genesis of the series in the dense web of meanings and associations it provides and provokes, and emphasizes its topicality, recent critics have questioned the singularity and originality of Hogarth's series. Both Mark Hallett and Sophie Carter see Hogarth working in a tradition of popular prints, and their work has done much to re-place the Progress in a richer understanding of early eighteenth-century visual culture, allowing for a subtler reading of the nature of the Harlot's topicality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century CultureSex, Commerce and Morality, pp. 99 - 114Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014