Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Academic Institute, Book of Proceedings: Education and Social Sciences, Hristina Rucheva Tasrev, Editör, International Academic, Barcelona, ss.192-199, 2020
Abstract
The weakest,
most broken and demoralised of society were deemed ‘The Great Social Evil’: the
hapless prostitute, historically criminalized and shunned, was ruthlessly
disaffiliated through Victorian hypocrisy and hysteria. With unrivaled
belligerence, the ‘fallen woman’ is diminished and estranged to a sub-species,
and treated as barely human. Patriarchal capitalism as the causative invariable
in prostitution, intensified during nineteenth-century industrialisation, when
the capitalist mindset determined to generate social and economic stability at
whatever human cost. Subsequently there developed a social environment that was
autocratic, intolerant and singularly manipulative of the individual across the
board. An artificial moral binary was generated to repel all strains contrary
to the patriarchal status quo: all diversity was held to be counter to the
stipulated norm and perceived as subversive and castigated. The female ‘Other’
was mercilessly categorized and allotted identity conditional to fulfillment of
designated sexual role. The prostitute was the female ‘uncontained’, the
dangerous transgressor and therefore a threat, if only in principle, to
patriarchal ideology. Victorian defense of the prostitute though not absent,
existed in a vacuum devoid of social culpability, so that the causative
influences of poverty, the drive of masculine appetite and oppression went
largely unaddressed as prejudicial to the establishment. This paper will
consider the issue of the prostitute as revealed within the confines of the
Pre-Raphaelite painter/poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lyrical poem Jenny
(1870). While the oddly fluctuating reception of the prostitute as both perpetrator and innocent victim complicates the argument, an unexpected elevation
of the ‘whore’ to equality with the Victorian lady, will be shown to reveal a
troubled substructure of masculine fragmentation. While the commodification of female
sexuality necessarily urges a Marxist-Feminist reading, an additional New
Historicist approach will also be deployed in order to explain the incongruity
of opposing sentiments in the representation of the prostitute.
Key words: Binary Opposition, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Nineteenth-century Poetry,
Pre-Raphaelite, Prostitute, Victorian