Women’s Bodies’ Transactions in the Home and the Marketplace from the 1860s to the 1890s
This paper critically discusses women’s gradual entrance in the public sphere by considering their bodies’ transactions in the home and the marketplace from the 1860s until the 1890s. This will be done through a detailed analysis of the particular historical and political contexts, along with considering the different genres, of the following three primary texts: Christina Rossetti’s fairy tale poem Goblin Market (1862), Frances Power Cobbe’s critical essay Wife-Torture in England (1878), and George Bernard Shaw’s unpleasant play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894). Particular attention will be given to the various political developments in the rights of women during the mid and late Victorian period and the growing anxieties of the Victorian patriarchal capitalistic society. During the 1860s, working-class maidens were firstly discovering the marketplace by falling onto temptations, finally deciding to go back to their sheltered home where they believed to be safe, as highlighted in Goblin Market, which also reflects the patriarchal anxieties of women’s growing influence in the marketplace. However, married women were legally prostituting themselves at home due to marital abuse, therefore leading the private sphere of the home to be perceived as increasingly dangerous. During the 1890s, women were ultimately choosing to sell their bodies and pursuing the “business of luxury” in order to enter the public sphere and go beyond their traditional image as homemakers, instead of surrendering to a life of hard work and atrocious conditions. This distorted choice was made because of the miserable living wages and by their gain of farther independence resulting from the late 1870s and 1880s campaigns for women’s property and marital rights. This paper finally argues that women’s “distorted” entrance in the marketplace (women’s decision about taking the opportunity to make a living through prostitution instead of dying away in factories) accordingly suggests a growing degeneration of the Victoria capitalistic system, symptomatic of a loosening of patriarchal control over women, observable from the 1860s to the 1890s and further beyond.
The 1860s: Rossetti’s Goblin Market
In the late 1850s and 60s, Christina Rossetti was a lay “Associate Sister” at St Mary Magdalene’s house of charity for fallen women in Highgate, London. This charitable institution was intended to redeem through spiritual reformation women who transgressed sexually and to keep them off the market until they had something to sell other than themselves.[footnoteRef:1] Indeed, women’s bodies were mended in the street, commodified, and exploited by the same sexual economy they sought to resist and evade.[footnoteRef:2] An effort to control women’s bodies’ transactions was made with a series of Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864 and 1869 with the aim to impose medical examination and treatment on any woman who was found in certain garrison towns and sea ports and who was suspected of prostitution. ‘Refusal to comply could result in imprisonment. More often, it resulted in police harassment.’[footnoteRef:3] The passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts suggests that, already in the 1860s, prostitution was increasingly perceived as ‘a dangerously contaminating form of sexual activity, one whose boundaries had to be controlled and defined by the state’.[footnoteRef:4] A mass anxiety about infectious diseases was thus emerging, leading the figure of the prostitute to be directly identified with contagion per se.[footnoteRef:5] The social and moral concern about the predominance of prostitutes who were enjoying economic and personal independence ‘masked an anxiety about the inability of society to control women’.[footnoteRef:6] [1: Elizabeth K. Helsinger, ‘Consumer Power and Utopia: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, ELH, 58 (1991), 903-933 (p. 908).] [2: Mary Carpenter, ‘” Eat me, Drink me, Love me”: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991), 415-434 (p. 417).] [3: John Allett, ‘”Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and the Politics of Prostitution, Shaw, 19 (1999), 23-39 (p. 24).] [4: Carpenter, p. 416.] [5: Allison Chapman, ‘Goblin Market’, in The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 2000), pp. 131-156 (p. 152).] [6: Maria Frawley, ‘The Victoria nage, 1832-1901’, in English Literature in Context, ed. by Paul Poplawski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 403-507 (p. 483).]
Concurrently, in the economic sector, ‘an unparalleled prosperity and an astonishing increase in population carried nation forward.’ The value of exports ‘more than doubled between 1855 and 1874; and so too did imports’, leading that period to be remembered as ‘the golden age’.[footnoteRef:7] The British empire was indeed unprecedently expanding by establishing legal aspects of domination in India, where, in 1858, the Government of India Act gave the British Crown the control of its trade. This led Britain to become a dominant empirical force which occupied a pivotal position at the centre of a global economy in a world of competition between empires. Accordingly, the 1860s denoted a new moment in the history of desire ‘in which consumer culture changed the nature of middle-class English femininity, both producing the desire for objects and structuring femininity in relation to that desire.’[footnoteRef:8] Women were slowly leaving the protected home to enter the marketplace, which epitomized ‘both economic and social transgression’, leading to the propagation of anxieties concerning the negative consequences of the market on women.[footnoteRef:9] [7: Edith Batho et Al., ‘The Background: 1830-1914’, in The Victorians and Afters 1830-1914, ed. by. Edith Batho et Al., volume IV (London : The Cresset Press, 1962), pp. 1-22 (p. 16).] [8: Carpenter, p. 416.] [9: Helen Pilinovsky, ‘Conventionalism and Utopianism in Commodification of Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, Extrapolation, 45 (2004), 52-64 (p. 54).]
In this context of the rise of the market and of an economy of prostitution, Christina Rossetti published her fairy-tale narrative poem Goblin Market in her first volume of poetry Goblin Market and other Poems (1862). Although the poem had originally been titled “A Peep at the Goblins”, ‘Rossetti’s revision to emphasize the significance of the commentary on commerce and commodity culture is noteworthy.’[footnoteRef:10] Undeniably, Goblin Market ‘inscribes consumption as multiple tropes: at once pathological (tuberculosis, the implied disease caused by the fruit), moral (sexual fallenness), and economic (commodification)’.[footnoteRef:11] For the purpose of this essay, only the two last interpretations will be considered: women’s first encounter with the market is indeed emphasized in the poem, making it ‘a tale of women’s survival in a world where the market offers itself to women and girls as a stage for the production of themselves as public beings, on particularly unfavorable terms’.[footnoteRef:12] Paralleling the relationship of the British empire to the rest of the world, Rossetti reproduced the encounter of women with the Victorian marketplace, showing how they were always in danger of being “consumed” because of men’s tendency to exercise their mastery of money through women. When leaving their domestic sphere, Victorian women were thus striving to be a consumer in a marketplace in which they were lacking bargaining power, thus being always at risk of sexual fallenness. [10: Frawley, p. 498.] [11: Chapman, p. 132.] [12: Helsinger, p. 926.]
Similarly, in Goblin Market Laura seeks to participate in the market but seems unprepared: ‘Good Folk, I have no coin; / to take were to purloin’ (116-117). To the goblins’ request, she agrees to offer them a ‘golden curl’ (125) in exchange for their fruit, accordingly allowing them to set the term of the bargain:
‘You have much gold upon your head,’ / They answered all together: / ‘Buy from us with a golden curl.’ / She clipped a precious golden lock, / She dropped a tear rarer than a pearl, / Then sucked their fruits-globes fair or red (123-128)
In paying for the purchase with her golden curl and hence falling to sexual seduction, Laura becomes both the buyer and the bought, the agent and the object of exchange. By substituting the usual economic transaction with a sexually suggestive part of her body, Laura accedes to ‘a process of dehumanization and commercialization whereby she becomes simultaneously a consumer and a commodity.’[footnoteRef:13] The poem therefore allegorically depicts both the increased entrance of women in the marketplace and the patriarchal anxieties of the negative effect of the market on women, where they risk becoming a commodity in a process of sexual vending. In fact, as suggested by Coulson, Laura’s golden lock could be also interpreted as a symbol of her virginity: ‘her surrounding of it to the goblins is a form of self-prostitution; her tear expresses her awareness of what figures as a nonreligious “fall”’.[footnoteRef:14] Accordingly, Goblin market draws attention to women’s plight as commodities in the linked capitalistic and sexual economies. [13: Bentley, p. 70.] [14: Victoria Coulson, ‘Redemption and representation in Goblin Market: Christina Rossetti and the Salvific Signifier’, Victorian Poetry, 55 (2018), 423-450 (p. 432).]
Goblin Market reveals thus that women cannot enter and compete with men on equal terms in the mid-Victorian marketplace. Yet the poem also suggests that ‘female interaction with the male tradition, however complicated and risky, is also inevitable.’[footnoteRef:15] Indeed, Lizzie and Laura ‘triumph over the market only to withdraw from it’, demonstrating how ‘at the point when women seem most empowered, the poem reaches the limits of its ability to conceive their relations to the market.’[footnoteRef:16] During the 1860s, the anxieties about both women’s entrance in the marketplace and women’s dangerous relation to both consumption and production (i.e. fallen women producing themselves and commodifying their bodies) were thus exposed in Christina Rossetti’s poem, which portrays them through an allegory presenting a fairy world in which the home is the only safe place for women. [15: Catherine Marxwell, ‘Tasting the « Fruit Forbidden » : Gender, Intertextuality, and Christina Rossetti’s « Goblin Market »’, in The Culture of Christina Rossetti – Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. by Mary Arseneau et Al. (Athens : Ohio University Press, 1999) pp. 75-102 (p. 84).] [16: Helsinger, p. 907.]
The 1870s: Cobbe’s Wife -Torture in England
However, during the late 1870s and the early 1880s, what was considered the safe household began to publicly be perceived by women as a dangerous place almost to the same degree as the marketplace. ‘Although marriage was seen to be a matter of survival for Victorian women, it provided nothing more than a new household with growing responsibilities but no real benefit or security.’[footnoteRef:17] Wive had no rights on their own properties or money, which belong exclusively to their husbands, who were also the unquestionable owners of the custody of their children and who were legally allowed to beat and abuse them, also known as “marital rape”. In Wife-Torture in England (1878), Frances Power Cobbe clearly contended that ‘the whole relation between the sexes in the class we are considering is very little better than one of master and slave’ (61). In being the legal properties of their fathers, husbands, and brothers, wives were indeed reduced to ‘the most abject condition of legal slavery’, leading the Victorian values of earnestness, refinement, and sexual prudishness to develop ‘into a form of slavery’ and, as Cobbe argues, to be ‘the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery’.[footnoteRef:18] [17: Askin Haluk Yildirim, ‘The Woman Question and the Victorian Literature on Gender’, 45-54 (p. 47).] [18: Yildirim, p. 46.]
During these specific decades of the Victorian Era, feminists began to increasingly engage in the public and political sectors in order to gain more legal rights and to outdistance the traditional patriarchal supremacy and their traditional image as “the Angel in the House”. Feminists were beginning to confront marital sexual abuse, ‘men’s use of prostitutes, the double moral standard, and the dominant assumption that men had “uncontrollable” sexual urges.’[footnoteRef:19] ‘The conflict between the sexes both in the domestic and in the political spheres was perceived as a threat by Victorian men whose supremacy was challenged by women’s emancipation, leading the already existing gender violence to become more intense.[footnoteRef:20] As indicated by Gorham, ‘it was one of the tenets of a patriarchal society that women could never be full members of the society.[footnoteRef:21] Cobbe clearly exposed this inequality by contending that ‘the position of a woman before the law as a wife, mother, and citizen remains so much below that of a man as husband, father, and citizen, that it is a matter of course that she must be regarded by him as an inferior, and fail to obtain from him much a modicum of respect.’ (61) [19: Lucy Bland, ‘Marriage Laid Bare: Middle-Class Women and Marital Sex 1880s-1914’, in Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, ed. by Jane Lewis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 123-148 (p. 124).] [20: Yildirim, p. 47.] [21: Deborah Gorham, ‘The « Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon » Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 1978, 353-379 (p. 363).]
The literature of the period on gender along with the new proto-sociological forms of knowledge such as journalism, appear to have been effective means of expression in favour of Victorian women’s struggle for emancipation. Cobbe was indeed a journalist, workhouse philanthropist, religious philosopher, and one of the best-known feminist activist and writers of the late Victorian period.[footnoteRef:22] Her social-scientific analysis of working-class distress, Wife-Torture in England, presented ‘an accumulation of detailed information about health, employment, living conditions, and education of the poor, gathered by eyewitness observers, civil servants, and statisticians’, in order to highlight the severity of the problem of domestic violence among working-class populations in England’s urban industrial centers. [footnoteRef:23] Cobbe aggregated women into numerical categories to render them abstract and quantifiable, therefore available for public use. Her engagement in patriarchal standards, along with her detached, impersonal language and her cold, scientific tone were Cobbe’s techniques in order to make her argument more pervasive and guide structural changes. [22: Susan Hamilton, ‘Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of imperialism’, Victorian Studies, 3 (2001), 437-460 (p. 441).] [23: Janice Schroeder, ‘Narrating Some Poor Little Fable: Evidence of Bodily Pain in « The History of MaryPrince » and « Wife-Torture in Englan »’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 23 (2004), 261-281 (p. 264-65).]
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Her article was her fourth to be published in the Contemporary Review, ‘following substantial pieces on vivisection, women’s healthcare, and a reply to criticism of the latter’, leading it to be identified as ‘the primary venue for Cobbe’s periodical writing’ during the late Victorian period, also due to its large scale of powerful and well-educated male readers.[footnoteRef:24] Cobbe was indeed writing ‘to persuade the “better sort” of gentlemen in Parliament to pass legislation needed by women who could not afford other protection’, while ultimately pushing for women’s right to vote.[footnoteRef:25] Indeed, in 1867, the Reform Act enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time, but not women. On the 17th of May 1878, the British Parliament accepted Cobbe’s drafted bill - The Matrimonial Causes Act - and wives obtained a legal separation from their husbands, a protection order, and a marriage settlement for control of their properties. Wife-torturing was undeniably one of the symptoms of a moral and social disorder, ‘a social crisis of national dimensions worthy of large-scale initiatives such as changes to married laws’, which degenerated utterly during the last decade of the Victorian era.[footnoteRef:26] [24: Hamilton, p. 446.] [25: Sally Mitchell, ‘Parliamentary Politics: 1875-1878’, in Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), pp. 229-266 (p. 261).] [26: Schroeder, p. 275.]
It is evident how prostitution, by which women were reduced to mere sexual bodies both legally in marriage and in the marketplace, hunted relations between men and women during the late Victorian era. The home, previously considered by the patriarchal ideology as the unique safe place where women truly belonged, was ultimately perceived by women as increasingly unstable and perilous. Therefore, women wanted to enter the public sphere in order to earn their livings and to go beyond their image of homemakers. Accordingly, early Victorian beliefs excluding women from the economic realm and positioning them as sexual objects and guarding of the household were being challenged in the political, economic, and legal circles.[footnoteRef:27] Women were beginning to obtain more legal rights and to enter the marketplace, as a way to both become economically independent and to escape from the terrors of the Victorian marriage market. Wife-beating was therefore presented as a symptom of the degeneration and of the failure of civilization since it was ‘a remnant of savages times, an ancient form of violence that was the antithesis of modern civilization’.[footnoteRef:28] [27: Yildirim, p. 47.] [28: Jo Aitken, ‘«The Horrors of Matrimony among the Masses» : Feminists Representation of Wife Beaing in England and Australia, 1870-1914’, Journal of Women’s History, 19 (2007), 107-131 (p. 115).]
The 1880s and the early 1890s: Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession
In 1885, W.T. Stead’s published a sensational exposé on the White Slave Traffic in The Pall Mall Gazette, to which George Bernard Shaw was a regular contributor. Stead’s articles marked the point when growing public attacks on prostitution reached its highest.[footnoteRef:29] Accordingly, Shaw began to severely criticize the economic causes of prostitution and society’s collective guilt with his publication of the Quintessence of Ibsenism and his section on the Womanly Woman in 1891.[footnoteRef:30] In 1894, with the publication of his controversial and didactic unpleasant play Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw denounced something Victorian society considered as ‘unspeakable, not to be discussed in polite society- the bartering of women’s bodies and lives condoned by the capitalistic ethic.[footnoteRef:31] Certainly, the vastness of prostitution as international commerce for profit was becoming uncontrollable. This was previously uncovered by the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that in 1857 ‘one house in every sixty in London was a brothel, and one female in every sixteen was a whore’, concluding that there were ‘more than 6’000 brothels in London and about 80’000 prostitutes.’[footnoteRef:32] [29: Philip Graham, ‘Bernard Shaw’s neglected role in English Feminism 1880-1914’, Journal of Gender Studies, 23 (2014), 167-183 (p. 174).] [30: Rodelle Weintraub, ‘The Root of the White Slave Traffic’, in Fabian Feminist – Bernard Shaw and Woman, ed. by Rodelle Weintraub (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp. 255-259 (p. 255).] [31: Dan H. Laurence, ‘Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Shaw, 24 (2004), 36-45 (p. 44).] [32: Laurence, p. 39.]
Shaw argued in the 1930 preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession and in his 1944 political commentary Everybody’s Political What’s What? that ‘prostitution is an economic phenomenon produced by an underpayment of honest women so degrading, and an overpayment of whores so luxurious, that a poor woman of any attractiveness actually owed it to her self-respect to sell herself in the streets rather than toil miserably in a sweater’s den sixteen hours a day for two pence an hour.’[footnoteRef:33] Shaw, with the use of hyperbole, frankly attacked the Victorian capitalistic system and ‘its underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking of women’ instead of accusing the prostitute’s own choice to vend herself and her ‘female depravity’.[footnoteRef:34] Because of its mass form of influence, Shaw’s play was therefore subjected to censorship and banned from the West End stage by the Lord Chamberlain for 31 years from 1894, when it was first written, until 1925, when it was finally produced on stage at Birmingham’s Prince of Wales Theatre after over three decades of censorship and the arrest of the cast of the first production in New York in 1905, along with the foundation of a campaign for the abolition of the White Slave Traffic by the League of Nations at Geneva.[footnoteRef:35] [33: Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What? (London: Constable, 1944), p. 196.] [34: Charles Berst, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession – Art over Didacticism’, in Bernard Shaw and the Art of Drama (London: University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 3-19 (p. 3).] [35: Bran Kent, ‘Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity’, English Literature in Translation 1880-1920, 57 (2014), 231-253 (p. 244).]
It is clear that, in a society that exploited and forced women into a position of economic dependence upon men, prostitution was almost inevitable. No effort was made neither to make the vending of bodies illegal nor to repress it, partly because of men’s belief that prostitution was the “necessary evil”, and therefore ‘inevitable’, ‘almost an organic part of society.[footnoteRef:36] Women were therefore conceptualized as ‘”the Sex”, as a sexual object to be bought and sold’.[footnoteRef:37] Previously concealed, The White Slave Traffic was uncovered in the press as ‘a small traffic in women between Britain and the continent’.[footnoteRef:38] Young English girls were procured from their families and decoyed to foreign cities such as Paris, Brussels, and Ostend and kept against their will to slave as prostitutes in brothels until their health or youth perished. It is thus evident why Shaw used Brussels as ‘Mrs. Warren’s operating base’, since Belgium was the center of that illicit trade.[footnoteRef:39] [36: Sonya Lorichs, ‘ « The Unwomanly Woman » in Shaw’s Drama’, in Fabian Feminist – Bernard Shaw and Woman, ed. by Rodelle Weintraub (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp. 99-111 (p. 101).] [37: Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The Politics of Prostitution’, Signs, 1 (1980), 123-135 (p. 125).] [38: Walkowitz, p. 126.] [39: Lorichs, p. 101.]
Even if led into prostitution by poverty and the lack of better opportunities, the revelation that young girls were enjoying prostituting themselves due to the luxurious side of that business is clearly presented in Mrs Warren’s defence for her decision to remain in that immoral and exploitative enterprise:
But where can a woman get the money to save in any other business? All we had was our appearance and our turn for pleasing men. Do you think we were such fools as to let other people trade in our good looks by employing us as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses when we could trade in them ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation waged? Not likely.[footnoteRef:40] [40: George Bernard Shaw, ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’, in Plays Unpleasant, ed. by Dan H. Laurence (London : Penguin Books LTD, 1980), pp. 179-288 (p. 249).]
Certainly, Kitty’s decision about capitalizing on prostitution grew from her painful experiences of her younger half-sister’s death caused by lead poisoning after toiling in a white-lead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week. It was thus the ‘brutal bleakness of their lives that probably led many young girls into prostitution.[footnoteRef:41] However, as Shaw acknowledged, ‘Mrs Warren’s defense of herself is not only bold and specious but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defense at all of the vice which she organizes.’[footnoteRef:42] Indeed, even after having long escaped from her impoverished origins by turning to prostitution as a more favorable option than marriage, and being therefore able to distance herself from that business of women’s sexual and economic exploitation, Kitty enjoys her 40 percent on the “hotels” she runs on the continent. As she states, her past has made her fit for that particular trade ‘and not for anything else’[footnoteRef:43], therefore craving the thrill and excitement of work.[footnoteRef:44] Accordingly, by presenting Mrs Warren’s defense of her social and moral transgressions of benefitting from the exploitation and deception of young girls, Shaw was exposing ‘a society in which women become not only instruments but executors of patriarchal power’, indicating, therefore, a degeneration in the access of women in the Victorian capitalistic society and its marketplace.[footnoteRef:45] [41: Gorham, p. 374.] [42: Shaw, p. 201.] [43: Shaw, p. 283.] [44: Kent, ‘Eighteenth-Century’, p. 159.] [45: Dierkes, p. 302.]
Young girls were therefore entering the marketplace via the business of prostitution. Yet they were not passive, sexually innocent victims, but experienced girls whose life gave them ‘little reason to believe that any genuinely satisfactory possibility existed’ for them, lacking self-worth and thus consciously choosing prostitution as the best option available, such as Mrs Warren did.[footnoteRef:46] Women’s bodies’ transactions were ultimately perceived to differ little from the ordinary market exchange. This distorted entrance of women in the marketplace, either due to marital abuse and to the unsafeness of their home or because of the unavailability of better options, was symptomatic of degeneration of the Victorian capitalistic society. [46: Gorham, p. 376.]
This paper has discussed women’s gradual entrance in the public sphere by considering women’s bodies’ transactions in the home and the marketplace from the 1860s until the 1890s through a detailed analysis of Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), Cobbe’s Wife-Torture in England (1878), and Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894). The various political developments in the rights of women during the mid and late Victorian periods and the growing anxieties of the Victorian patriarchal capitalistic society were outlined, while however shedding new light on the distorted entrance of women in the marketplace and its degeneration. Women’s final choice of prostituting accordingly suggests a growing degeneration of the Victoria capitalistic system, which is symptomatic of a loss of patriarchal control over women.
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