THE DECORUM OF A PROSTITUTE

Abstract

Among the changes that rocked the sensitive landscape of late nineteenth-century Europe, one of the most disquieting concerned the literary fabulation of the prostitute. The general view on venal love had accompanied the changing taste of a public that identified less and less with the virtues of romantic heroines. During the Second Empire, the French capital saw the advent of a new line of sexual supply to meet the bourgeois demands for consumption and pleasure: the modern Parisian streetwalker was recognized, above all, for her spectacular theatricality. These transformations resonated in Brazilian literature in a very particular way. After all, in the 1800s, the country was far from sharing the sociability that had provided the bedrock for these changes in France, and the old patriarchal, Catholic and slave-owning values were holding firm against the more modern equations between literary form, eroticism and morality. It is against this backdrop that this article interprets Machado de Assis’s 1883 short story “Singular ocorrência” (A Singular Event), perhaps the first literary text in Brazil to register a change in the way the prostitute was represented. In this apparently banal story of a relationship between a powerful man and a strumpet, what calls attention is the protagonist’s performance, a “discreet theatricality” that echoes the attributes of the European courtesans.