Book Description

This dissertation examines the commodification of marginal women in nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture. Female characters that operate on the margins of society-prostitutes, courtesans, and kept women-move to the center of literary discussions on deviance, sexuality, consumerism, and desire. Looking at portrayals of such "fallen women," I show how writers and artists depict the influence of market demands on gender relations. By considering these depictions through performance studies and Foucault's theories on sexuality, I demonstrate how the age codified ideologies of gender, class, and commercial culture. The figure of the commercial woman appears in much of nineteenth-century Russian literature as a medium to explore deviant sexuality. Like their contemporaries in Western Europe, Russian writers take up the question of commercial sex within medical, sociological, religious, and aesthetic beliefs concerning how such women come to their trade, what to make of their appearance in public domains, and whether or not they deserve or are capable of rehabilitation. My analysis of the portrayal of prostitution demonstrates that authors like Nikolai Gogol', Fedor Dostoevskii, and Vsevolod Garshin investigate the commercial woman's narrative within the context of the Petersburg myth, stressing her need for salvation. Whereas writers see the prostitute as a physical representation of the darker side of capitalism and thus portray her sympathetically, the courtesan and kept woman are seen as dangerous exploiters of male sexual desire. By profiting from their sex and avoiding the traditional duties of wife and mother, women of the demimonde pose a serious threat to social and moral norms. Dismayed at the power such women could acquire, lithographers and caricaturists ridicule them as conspicuous consumers. In response to such negative conceptualizations of the fallen woman, Vsevolod Krestovskii and Dostoevskii imagine her within the confines of melodrama, stressing the tragic elements in a kept woman's narrative. Whether in art or in literature, the marginal woman reveals nineteenth-century anxieties about the commodification of sex and the fear of women's sexual and financial liberation.