Abstract
The conclusion discusses de Pougy’s life after her exit from prostitution and ties questions about courtesan novel authorship to Elena Ferrante’s discussion of “the invention of women by men” in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Issues such as the problematical boundaries between marriage and prostitution and questions about sex worker agency versus exploitation addressed by the courtesan novelists are still being debated in contemporary works such as Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Théorie, Nelly Arcan’s Putain, and the film Party Girl. Dialogues on sex work and efforts to destigmatize it promise to resurface in literature, theory, and film for years to come, yet the courtesan novelists pioneered these issues well over a century ago.
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Notes
- 1.
Neither novel features any demi-mondaines, although in Yvée Jourdan (1907), a character named Flossie teaches the innocent Yvée about sensuality and eventually tries to seduce her.
- 2.
Although writing about la Païva, what Virginia Rounding says about the impossibility of escaping one’s personal brand also aptly describes de Pougy’s situation (270).
- 3.
According to Mesch, de Pougy’s “first novel L’Insaisissable (1898) went through over twenty editions and sold over eighteen thousand copies in two years” (45).
- 4.
See Donadio, Rachel. “Elena Ferrante, Author of Naples Novels, Stays Mysterious.” The New York Times 9 Dec. 2014 and Davies, Lizzy. “Who Is the Real Italian Novelist Writing as Elena Ferrante?” The Guardian [London] 15 Oct. 2014.
- 5.
See Donadio article.
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Sullivan, C. (2016). Conclusion. In: The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_6
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