Progress of Misogyny: Representing Prostitutes and the Pox in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This study investigates how early eighteenth-century representations of London prostitutes captured the concomitant progress of the expansion of street prostitution and feminization of venereal disease onto the diseased prostitute body. The number of urban prostitutes, especially streetwalkers, sharply increased as they emerged as a compelling presence in London’s nightscape in this period, giving birth to the prototype of “Covent Garden nymphs,” the common subject of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Jonathan Swift’s prostitute poems. Hogarth’s pictorial narrative of Moll Hackabout pursues her progress from arrival in London to syphilitic death in six densely historicizing images, each centering on Moll’s body, inevitably diseased and degenerating. The diseased prostitute body appears larger than life in Swift’s “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731) and “Progress of Beauty” (1719), where the “rotting” flesh and “running sores” threaten to liquefy the venereal bodies of Covent Garden prostitutes, similarly to that of Hogarth’s dying Moll. In both Hogarth’s and Swift’s representations, the London prostitute is no longer the archetypal whore or the Restoration courtesan but one among the legion of poor and diseased streetwalkers. The dominant image of the diseased prostitute body evolved alongside a new theory of venereal disease, which pathologized the (overheated) womb as ‘cause’ of venereal disease by mixing and thereby ‘putrefying’ semen from numerous men. This theory, informed by the new science of iatrochemistry of the late seventeenth century, quickly displaced Renaissance venereological discourse and myths with a ‘Modern’ and essentially misogynous view of the female, implicitly prostitute, body. The unnerving parallels between Hogarth’s Harlot and the Lady in Marriage à la Mode and between Swift’s nymphs and the Lady of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” show how the progress of misogyny reached much farther than the precincts of Covent Garden.