The crucial role that the prostitute played in the construction of bourgeois femininity in the second half of the eighteenth century has received considerable scholarly attention. Accounts of this uneasy relationship have traditionally focused upon the prostitute's symbolic function as the domestic woman's degraded other: a figure against which virtuous femininity and sexuality were defined and upon whose abjection the middle-ranking woman's respectability was parasitically dependent. More recent studies, such as those by Katherine Binhammer, Ruth Perry and Laura J. Rosenthal, have painted a more complex picture that emphasizes the disquieting similarities that eighteenth-century commentators observed between whore and wife and between sex for money and the legalized prostitution that was, in Binhammer's words, ‘mercenary marriage’. If, as Perry suggests, it became increasingly difficult by the mid-eighteenth century ‘to mention wives without mentioning prostitutes or prostitutes without mentioning wives’, then it was, in part, because the prostitute spoke to readers’ fears about themselves as much as to their fears of others. Although, as Rosenthal argues, prostitutes were, in many ways, ‘set apart from other women’ throughout the period, ‘in other ways, however, they came to seem more and more like everyone else’. Testifying to the pressures under which virtue and selfhood were put by a modern, commercial society, the prostitute was not only subject to anxious displacement, but also a provocation to uncomfortable self-recognition.