Exposing the Whore: Misogyny in Prostitute Narratives of Restoration England

Abstract

Although the prostitute became a fairly common figure in eighteenth-century prose fiction, there were already narrative texts dealing with that type of character in Restoration England, although most of them have been largely disregarded. This article will focus on three of  those texts: 1) The Crafty Whore (1658), an anonymous dialogue between two courtesans that is framed between a preface that presents it as a cautionary text, and an epilogue entitled “Dehortation from Lust”; 2) Richard Head’s The Miss Display’ d (1675), a narrative in the picaresque mode introduced by an admonitory preface and told by an intrusive third-person narrator that is often critical of prostitutes and women in general; and 3) the anonymous The London Jilt (1683), another picaresque novel presented as a cautionary tale to warn readers against the deceit and corruption of prostitutes, but with an autodiegetic narrator who interlaces the relation with social and moral comments. In these texts the female agency and voice are often curbed by a male authorial voice that uses a misogynistic discourse in an alleged attempt to expose the crafty contrivances of prostitutes in order to ensnare men.