Courtesans
The late 90s treated cinema audiences to the story of the 16th century Venetian courtesan, Veronica Franco; a film called A Dangerous Beauty, starring Catherine McCormack in the titular role. Franco has been historicised of note due to her poetry, her literary defence of courtesans, the infamy of her Inquisition trial (she was accused of engaging in magic) and her striking visage being committed to canvas by painter, Tintoretto. Her life trajectory also suffered from an arc riddled with pathos; she achieved the classically vaunted lifestyle of autonomy, wealth, beauty, prestige, and intellect associated with the courtesan of early modernity, but suffered under the weight of a growingly restrictive society that closed in upon her, ending her days in ignominy, obscurity, and poverty. For some, Franco’s life yields a harsh but necessary moral lesson to recalcitrant women; to others, it is a paragon of the libertine ideals of erotic and intellectual freedom being quashed by the hypocrisies of authoritarianism.
In the film, it’s an opportunity for lots of pliant, airbrushed flesh, bouncing about through an abundance of swelling strings. Her complex life is gunned through a gluttony of sentimental cliches filmed in soft focus; there is a duel, eyes meet across crowded rooms, she is doing it all for the love of a flouncy haired lothario. Had Venice a big sandy beach, they would have had a scene of them lapping across it to greet each other, arms akimbo. It’s surprising it’s not a parody. I keep checking the release literature just to check. Watch it as one and you might find it significantly more enjoyable, is my suggestion. I am reliably informed that Rufus Sewell, the Byronesque love interest, kept leaving filming, holding the project up, because he was anxious about how schlocky the film was turning out.
In any case, it is indicative of something; Courtesans of European modernity (16th- 20th century) are an interesting social phenomenon, and yet they are often given such lazy and hazy treatment in the cultural discourse, and A Dangerous Beauty is one the worst offenders.
There are some better examples; Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan never quite manages to bring her Venetian Renaissance character, Fiammetta, to multi-dimensional life through the narrative eyes of her greedy by troubled pimp, Bucino, but her distance from the reader is knowing, satirical and the story is rich, detailed, sensual. The dark comedy drama Harlots, influenced by the book Covent Garden Ladies by historian, Hallie Rubenhold, shows the complexity of a courtesan’s life, vis-à-vis her ability to trouble our understanding of class boundaries, particularly as they pertain to women, effectively giving narrative to the sex industry’s permeable membranes and challenging the assumption of a stark divide between ‘elite’ whores and the much-maligned rest.
To that end, one of the problems I see in many depictions of courtesans, is the way in which they are used to reinforce the notion that a woman’s value is within her sexual inaccessibility; unlike the cultural discourse around the ‘common garden variety prostitute’ courtesans are thought of as retaining a relative degree of sexual restriction. Though their job is to be available, and thus their position is characterised by a certain degree of sexual freedom, if they were deemed too available, then that would trouble the feminine value that endlessly attracts clients, historians and audiences to them. It’s a contradiction, in a fashion, and a popular one. Indeed, its peppered through one of the best books on the subject Courtesans, by historian Katie Hickman, featuring the biographies of five key figures of the British sex industry from Sophia Baddeley to Catherine Walters. It is a substantial, moreish book, but Hickman is keen to keep reiterating these women’s distinction from escorts more broadly, in a fashion that is not just about practical differences relating to wealth and its ability to give independent women a degree of freedom to set sexual boundaries, but has the inference of a more heavy moral load. The higher the escort’s esteem is deemed, not only the better kind of life she can afford to live, but, the implication is that she is a better person, fundamentally, on some abstract and esoteric level.
One of her figures of note, Cora Pearl, who ascended from being a working-class English girl to a member of the Parisian demi-monde, told of her brutal initiation into the world of sex, when she was coerced off the street as a girl, drugged and raped. Cora ran from home, and set herself up as a sex worker to survive, before rising through the slums to become a successful lover of wealthy men, who adored her ‘bathing in champagne’ antics, her fashionable excess and her sharp tongue. Cora was ambitious, and dressed for the job she wanted. And yet Hickman is keen to rehash the gossipy supposition that Cora might have been lying about her origin story, because she was accused of being ‘fanciful’ within her life and through her memoirs. But it strikes me that this denial of Cora’s complex story serves, most likely unconsciously, to sustain the intonation of the image of a kind of recherché unreachability, common to the myth-making around elite escorts of European modernity. In a funny way, recalibrating Cora herself as a myth-maker, gives her more of an allure to modern historians than making too much of the fact that she spent a deal of her time, ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and she was simply a tough cookie with enough intelligence and resourcefulness to make the best of her situation. Undoubtedly, Cora was not an upper middle class girl who lost her dowry due to rumours of barn-love making, and had to learn to show her wares at the opera (one road to early modern courtesanry); Cora was an upstart guttersnipe who had a fancy for ermine and pearls, and made no bones about her promiscuity and her worldliness; an anarchism that seduces and troubles even now, as Hickman’s polite, but ambivalent tone demonstrates.
The courtesan as a figure is still sometimes evoked in modern stories of escorts, called upon to give this elitist, paradoxical impression of sexual exclusivity. In the loose adaptation of London escort Brooke Magnanti’s diary, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, there is an episode wherein ‘Belle’ leaves an expensive escort agency for a sort of courtesan sisterhood (a fictional vignette that does not appear in the original memoir), and her first client, an American film producer, warns her to keep her client list short, so to keep her ‘value’ high. This is indicative of the classic courtesan-client relationship, which implied at some degree of long term arrangement or paid mistress keeping. These arrangements, at their most lucrative, could be worth millions. It is hard to justify that kind of danger money arrangement in an era of greater sexual permissibility; perhaps ironically, despite the courtesan being an emblem of sexual freedom, she is in many ways, one of its casualties.
But despite the tendency to use courtesans to serve an idealised “not like other whores” narrative, they have frequently been ‘bought to heel’ and punished for their independence, all the same, in life (as was Franco) and in the discourse. One of the most successful figures in expensive sex work was Russian-in-Paris, La Paiva, who was sometimes thought of as a woman of cold character, but may simply have been a dominatrix playing to the peccadillos of her clients with a theatrical toughness. Some commentators of the time seemed to enjoy highlighting, with vindictive zeal, the changes bought to La Paiva’s appearance due to age, and these bits of sexist gossip are still highlighted in biographies of her life, as though laments on women’s aging offers us some kind of meaningful insight. If someone were jealous or frightened of the sexual prowess and potency of a woman like her, it would be peevishly pleasurable to watch her lose it.
So too, are they sometimes given the full blame of excesses of some of their more troubled lovers. Cora was the victim of an obsessive interest by a client who would go on to plot to assassinate her on her doorstep, but thankfully for Cora, he was no marksman, and shot himself instead. Cora was thrown into further ill-repute for the incident; she was reported to have protected herself by going back into her own house to escape her assailant. This was almost mind-bogglingly framed as her cruelly leaving him to die. She was victim blamed, her reputation was tarred and seemingly some pleasure was had in framing her demise as a one laden by poverty; although there again lays an exaggerated morality tale, as she lived out her days in a less riche, but still pretty comfortable style, and certainly for a poor London runaway within the harsh, context of Victorian England, not noted for its social mobility.
It’s almost as though, despite whatever enjoyment audiences get from learning about the hijinks of ladies of pleasure, there is a need in petite-bourgeois society for them to have an ultimate downfall. The French author Collete, and fictionalizer of the demi-monde, played against this moralising ‘rags-riches-rags’ tale of sex work in her Cheri novellas. In her tale, a belle epoque 50-something courtesan, Lea, forms a love affair with a younger man, Cheri, the beautiful son of a retired fellow courtesan. The affair is passionate, but opaque, and ultimately troubled by his being torn between an obsession with her prettily adorned, hedonistic, interior realm, and his desire for the currency of heteronormativity; being a respectable husband with a younger, more obedient wife. In the books, Collete creates an ending for Lea as a retired, homely woman living a comfortable but less luxurious existence, who is taking her age and her reduction in fortune in comfortable stride. But Cheri is angry with her, for refusing to continue to fight against the turning of the tide (she won’t dye her hair anymore and this is most vexing) and for being so humourful about something he deems inexorably tragic. It is Collete pushing against the idea of the punishment of the fallen woman, Lea resists punishment; it is her former lover who suffers because he sees the passing of time, aging and the fading of love and desire, as some human, moral failing epitomised by the autonomous women around him, rather than simply some broad fact of life. Because he cannot be at peace with the facts of life and death, it depresses, and overwhelms him. But in the film, Lea ‘s cinematic ending has Michelle Pfeiffer looking forlornly at her own wrinkling reflection, as we hear of Cheri’s suicide, turning Collete’s lesson inside out.
Of course, courtesans are of their time, they don’t follow us from modernity into postmodernity. They were a consequence of a greater degree of social and physical danger associated with sexual freedom; though sexual stigma still prevails, in the 16th to early 20th century, if you were a woman associated with casual sex, the outsiderness would be absolute, the risks of pregnancy and venereal disease placed wholly on the woman’s shoulders. Therefore the danger money for the educated middle-class, young women who could foray with professional or aristocratic men, would have to be much greater. In the other direction, many courtesans were women who were accused of sex before marriage, and their ousting from ‘respectable’ society resulted in an opportunistic ixnaying of their exotic, ill repute. With the rise of sexual liberalism, sexual medicine, the welfare state and feminism, this social tension is less illustrative of our age in practice, though there remain corners of the internet dedicated to young, troubled men intimidated by women’s hard won greater sexual freedoms and a consequent new groundswell of idealisation of female virginity and restriction. Indeed, though the courtesan is a creature of the past, she continues to highlight something prevailing; the dissonance surrounding female eroticism; the allure is continues to compel, and fear it continues to provoke.
