>NY Times, Sept. 19, 2000
>
>The Oldest Profession Seeks New Market in West Europe
>
>By ROGER COHEN
<snip>
>For Dr. Hana Duchkova, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases at Usti
>Hospital, the collapse of Communism and the order it imposed have been a
>"recipe for many problems." Foreigners have no medical records, and spread
>disease. Cases of syphilis at the hospital are up to 134 so far this year
>from 59 in 1999, she said, heaping blame on foreigners and a large Gypsy
>population she described in disparaging terms.
Dr. Hana Duchkova's prejudice is rooted in the old ideological
connection made between prostitution, disease, and foreigners,
immigrants, & oppressed races/ethnicities/nationalities. This line
of thinking has a fertile ground in the political economy of global
capitalism with its attendant immiseration on the periphery & migrant
labor.
***** Modern Fiction Studies 42.1 (1996) 31-60
Dangerous Liaisons: Prostitution, Disease, and Race in Frank Norris's Fiction
Stephanie Bower
Prostitution is pregnant with disease, a disease infecting not only
the guilty but contaminating the innocent wife and child in the home
with sickening certainty almost inconceivable; a disease to be feared
as a leprous plague; a disease scattering misery broadcast, and
leaving in its wake sterility, insanity, paralysis, and the blinded
eyes of little babes, the twisted limbs of deformed children,
degradation, physical rot and mental decay.
--Vice Comission of Chicago, 1911
By 1911, scientific advances in the understanding of venereal
diseases had significantly altered public perception of their
seriousness. No longer considered just punishment of the guilty,
these diseases were blamed for transmitting the wages of sin from
errant husband to virtuous wife and child, the newly discovered
venerealinsotium--infections of the innocent--deemed an insidious
threat to the beleaguered middle-class family. 1 But as this quote
from the Vice Commission makes clear, these philandering husbands
manage to evade the full impact of such condemnation, their guilt
eclipsed by the prostitute who, in the iconography of syphilis, gets
cast as the center and source of such infection. 2 According to the
imagery of this quote, prostitution breeds not healthy children but
gruesome deformities, a horrific picture that implicitly associates
venereal disease--the "family poison" that renders women barren, or
even worse, turns normal fetuses into subhuman monstrosities--with
"race suicide," that widely-circulated term used to describe the
declining birth rates among middle- and upper-class white Americans.
The causal connection between syphilis and race suicide made by some
venerologists represents only one aspect of a subtle yet persistent
tendency to identify disease with racial "others": namely, blacks,
Asians, and the "new immigrants" who flocked to American shores in
ever-increasing numbers. 3 Indeed, the undercurrent of disease that
informs virtually all discussions of prostitution reveals a pervasive
anxiety about the influence such others might exert on a
narrowly-defined "American" identity, the apprehension shared by many
native-born Americans that this influx of immigrants might weaken or
even contaminate cherished American ideals. Generations after
European "others" spread diseases that would decimate "natives" in
the New World, their descendents constructed a trope of disease that
reversed the flow of contagion, imagining themselves as the "natives"
imperiled by hordes of diseased "others." Indeed, these latter-day
"natives"/nativists inherited a racist ideology first articulated in
the beginning of the nineteenth century, when American politicians,
scientists, and cultural critics justified brutal policies toward
American Indians, African Americans, and Mexicans by describing these
groups as inherently inferior, obviously incapable of self-government
or even assimilation (Horsman). Turn-of-the-century nativists fiddled
with racial categories to apply this language to a new generation of
immigrants, classifying these racial others as "degenerates" and
worrying that an infusion of "inferior" races would fatally corrupt
the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock; the language of disease literalizes
these fears by constructing a rhetoric of contagion based upon the
biological model of germ theory, imaging race as a deadly virus
capable of passing from one host to another, infecting a previously
"healthy" organism.
Since prostitution was identified in the public imagination with
immigrants--those foreign pimps and prostitutes who imported an old
trade to a new country--and with venereal disease, it becomes a
crucial target of nativist attacks. In this essay, I explore the
complicated nexus of prostitution, immigration, and disease in Frank
Norris's studies of degeneration, for his version of literary
naturalism is at once dependent upon sexual liaisons and endangered
by them. In Norris's representations, the prostitute mediates the
novelist's engagement with the lower class by introducing him to the
brothels and tenements he claims as the proper province of art.
Rubbing elbows with these unwashed masses furnishes the novelist with
the inspiration of his calling and the material for his art, but it
also exposes him to the contagious diseases associated with the lower
class, particularly the racial others whose difference foils all
attempts to assimilate them into a comfortably American identity. And
the prostitute who facilitates his entrance into this alien world
proves a congenial host in more ways than one, her womb a fertile
breeding ground for germs passed from "new" immigrant to upper-class
Anglo-Saxon. Norris's tales of degeneration function on one level as
portraits of social and psychological pathology, but at the same time
they represent these racial others as the source of this pathology
and thereby racialize the language of naturalism.
* * *
Turn-of-the-century America witnessed the exponential growth of an
anti-prostitution movement that soon spread across the nation, its
appeal fueled by apparent increases in rates of venereal disease and
the dramatic rise in numbers of immigrants. Of course, the
correlation between prostitution and venereal disease was nothing
new--just a half century earlier, Henry Ward Beecher established his
reputation by likening the prostitute's body (and, more generally,
female anatomy) to a vestibule of contamination that tempted and
destroyed young men (Halttunen 113-17). What differentiated
turn-of-the-century imagery from that employed by an earlier
generation of preachers and reformers was its consistent
identification of both prostitution and venereal disease with new
immigrants. Although available data did not support a correlation
between these phenomenon, public discussion closely identified the
three issues, imagining prostitutes and their procurers as
disease-ridden foreigners who spread their infectious germs and their
inferior genes throughout their adopted country. Unwilling to
acknowledge the oxymoronic figure of a native-born prostitute--a
woman who contradicts symbolic representations of American purity and
innocence--most antiprostitution tracts describe the "typical"
prostitute as foreign-born, despite evidence from reformer's surveys
that indicate that immigrants, and especially "new immigrants," were
underrepresented in the prostitute population (Rosen 139-42). This
fallacious identification persisted throughout the antiprostitution
movement, its unfounded allegations given the authority of truth when
provisions excluding prostitutes were written into the immigration
acts of 1903, 1907, and 1910, making prostitution, or even
association with prostitutes, grounds for immediate deportation
(Connelley 48-57).
Perhaps the most vehement source of this xenophobic rhetoric were the
white-slave tracts of the early twentieth century, which blame
immigrants not only for supplying the raw material of
prostitution--the girls who fill the market with an inexhaustible
source of supply--but for the rise of the notorious "cadet," that
bloodthirsty predator who makes prostitution into a lucrative
profession. 4 These tracts virtually ignore the social and economic
factors that help explain prostitution's appeal, preferring instead
to blame this trade on the depraved foreigners who defile an
unsullied land with their deviant sexual practices (Connelley 115-39;
Rosen 112-37). In The Shame of a Great Nation (1909), for example, E.
Norine Law describes the "pimps" responsible for the loathsome
practice of white slavery with a telling parenthetical remark: "fetid
male vermin (nearly all of them being Russian or Polish Jews), who
are unmatchable for impudence and bestiality, and who reek with all
unmanly and vicious humours" (193). And in America's Black Traffic in
White Girls (1912), Mrs. Jean Turner Zimmerman rants to the point of
incoherence against the assorted racial others she blames for the
"Social Evil":
Please remember, as you read this, that America is becoming more and
more un-American every day. Each ship, each train Westward or
Eastward bound, is now daily dumping into our Land, so lately the
goal of the homeseeker from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, etc., the real
future citizen--thousands of the scum and vice and criminal element
of [End Page 34] South Eastern Europe, Asia and the Orient, and
remember, too, that a short five-years of residence here converts the
filthiest criminal . . . into an American citizen with the right to
vote into office men who will and are sworn to protect and aid in
every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French or Chinese
whore-master as he rents a shanty and proceeds to fatten on the very
life-blood of the young girlhood of this and other lands (7-8).
Zimmerman's rhetoric encapsulates some key nativist concerns, for she
links the deflowering of America's "young girlhood" with the apparent
venality of its municipalities, appropriating the rhetoric of sexual
defilement to describe the degradation of the upright American
"citizen."
Indeed, the "corruption of American purity" becomes a recurring theme
in the white-slave tracts, symbolized by vivid images of white women
raped by dark others and by the system of graft these others
supposedly introduce into city politics. George Kibbe Turner's
infamous article "The Daughters of the Poor" (1909) charts the
insidious influence of the "Jewish kaftan" (45) on cities across
America, the promise of easy profits tempting local politicians to
trade their influence and shield white slavers from the vigilance of
the law, in turn fostering the wholescale corruption of city
politics. 5 And such political corruption is only the most concrete
manifestation of the more general societal corruption attributed to
these decidedly "un-American" arrivals. In "The Tammanyizing of a
Civilization" (1909), for example, S. S. McClure blames the new
immigrants for nothing less than the decline of Western civilization:
"We are now permitting the country to become the Botany Bay of the
world. The most incompetent and vicious settle down in our great
cities; and there an army of political criminals, like Tammany,
trained by half a century of political crime, exploit, and degrade,
and corrupt them, and with them our whole civilization" (Law 58).
According to McClure, this metaphoric civic corruption manifests
itself physically in the spread of venereal disease, here linked to
both prostitutes and immigrants, as these corrupt politicians recruit
and maintain a standing army of "cadets and prostitutes, practically
all of them diseased" for the "perennial infection of the population"
(Law 63), disseminating mental and physical degeneration. [End Page
35] Once a white girl becomes the sex slave of the dark cadet, this
logic suggests, she participates in a deadly circulation that
transmits disease to the Anglo-Saxons who pay for her favors.
McClure's description of diseased foreigners who infect the American
body as well as the body politic is a standard trope in much nativist
rhetoric. In Silent Travelers, a historical study of America's
tendency to ascribe outbreaks of disease to recent immigrants, Alan
Brandt identifies the indigenous health attributed to native-born
Americans with an implicit faith in the "unsullied quality of the
American continent, an Eden of pure air and water that had nurtured a
pioneering race of remarkable physical fortitude who had cleared the
forests and founded the republic" (32). The immigrant enfeebled by
disease enters this paradise like the hateful serpent, spreading
deadly germs that introduce pain and death into this pristine
republic. During the last decades of the nineteenth century,
degeneration and syphilis, two "germs" commonly associated with both
prostitutes and racial others, spread from the pages of obscure
medical journals to mainstream magazines and newspapers, their sudden
preeminence a telling indication of their symbolic potency. Concern
over these two diseases gained currency at this time because both
were thought to endanger the physical and moral health of
Anglo-Saxons, and, more importantly, both were frequently identified
with prostitutes and their procurers. The discourse surrounding these
diseases "biologizes" nativism by locating the source of disease in
"new immigrants" and warning that contact with these
others--particularly sexual contact--could turn healthy men and women
into animalistic brutes.
Although theories of degeneration proliferated in fin-de-siècle
Europe, perhaps the text most responsible for introducing this
discourse into an American vocabulary is Max Nordau's classic work,
Degeneration (1895). 6 Nordau describes a disease that affects only
the "cultivated classes" (550) of the most advanced nations, an
insidious form of mental illness that reduces these icons of
"civilized humanity" (37) to "the type of the primitive man of the
most remote Stone Age; or, . . . an animal far anterior to man"
(556). Nordau and his American disciples account for this atavistic
reversal using the theory of degeneracy advanced by B. A. Morel in
1857. According to Morel's influential hypothesis, good genes go bad
when "poisoned" by the noxious influence of "intoxications, bad
social surrounding and unhygienic conditions, diseases, moral
defects, congenital or early acquired influences, heredity" (Meyer
347), their pathological deviation from the "norm" manifested by
various mental, moral and physical "stigmata." Indeed, American
scholarship on degeneration was preoccupied with the task of
classifying the signs of this elusive disease, using a misshapen
skull or propensity to consort with "low women" as conclusive proof
of humanity's reversion to its brutish ancestors. In this paradigm,
then, prostitutes become both the source and the sign of the
degenerate since they induce degeneracy in those who patronize their
"bad social surrounding[s]" and signal the disease of their clientele.
For Nordau, the danger posed by degeneracy lies not so much in the
degenerates themselves--their atavism will prevent them from
effectively adapting to their environment--but in the threat they
pose to the future of the race, both in the "fashion victims" they
convert to their cause, and in the genetic deficiencies they pass on
to their offspring. Attracted by the delusive brilliancy of madness,
many "weak-minded or mentally-unbalanced persons, coming into contact
with a man possessed by delirium, are at once conquered by the
strength of his diseased ideas, and are converted to them" (31),
their only hope of cure a "hygiene of the mind" (559) that wards off
mental "germs" capable of infecting and corrupting a healthy
organism. Another source of contagion lies in the transmission of
degenerate genes to future generations: "When under any kind of
noxious influences an organism becomes debilitated, its successors
will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with
capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species, which,
like all others, possesses the capacity of transmitting to its
offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities"
(16). Here, Nordau paints degeneracy in the proportions of a major
epidemic, its atavistic potential spread throughout an unsuspecting
population by the seductive allure of its philosophy and the
reproductive capacities of its genes.
If degeneracy threatens the population at large through this legacy
of genetic inferiority, another danger arises from a contradictory
symptom--the sexual, moral, and spiritual impotence of its victims.
In Nordau's paradoxical logic of sexuality, excessive sexual arousal
leads to flaccidity, an anatomical weakening that extends beyond the
procreative powers of an individual to encompass the productive
powers of an entire civilization, so that the "sexually
over-stimulated" society will "march to its certain ruin, because it
is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks" (557). According
to this logic, degeneracy represents a significant danger not only
because it turns men into beasts but because it has the even more
frightening consequence of turning men into women. 7
Diagnosing the "stigmata" of degeneracy, Nordau compiles a list of
attributes typically considered "feminine" including: "emotionalism"
(19); "a condition of mental weakness and despondency" (19);
passivity (20); and "the predilection for inane reverie" (21). And
though Nordau makes no such specific connections, the language of
degeneration was also applied to prostitutes, whose abnormal
sexuality indicated their atavism, and to blacks, Asians, and Jews,
those "inferior" races who were linked in the popular imagination
with both women and beasts. 8 As Dr. William C. Krauss notes in 1898,
"It may be some comfort to know that Talbot's investigations show
that, as compared with foreigners, Americans exhibit the fewest signs
of degeneracy, and that the most marked degenerate types found here
are imported individuals" (87). All the more reason, then, to stave
off relations between healthy, virile American males and their
corrupters. Eugene Talbot argues in Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and
Results (1898) that intermarriage between "inferior"--that is,
degenerate--races and those "superior" races further along in the
evolutionary process "would tend to degeneracy" (103). Indeed, even
innocent exposure to "inferior" races seems to produce degeneracy in
Anglo-Saxons, according to Talbot's interpretation of Darwin's
observation that "English dogs degenerate in India in a few
generations, losing the peculiarities of form and mental character
that distinguish their particular race, in spite of the greatest care
in selection and prevention of crossing" (131). In effect, then,
degeneration proved so worrisome to a generation of cultural critics
not only because its symptoms included the feminization of
upper-class white gentlemen, but also because this supposed
effeminacy both signaled and precipitated the breakdown of racial
difference.
Like degeneration, syphilis began to enter into public parlance at
the turn-of-the-century when physicians and social hygienists
launched a public campaign to stop the spread of this previously
unspeakable disease. Spurred into action by the "infections of the
innocent," these reformers defied the genteel proscriptions that
censored public discussion of this embarrassing disease, justifying
their indelicacy with dire predictions about the decline of the race
if venereal disease continued to spread unchecked. 9 According to
eminent venerologist Prince Morrow's article "Eugenics and Racial
Poisons" (1912), venereal disease would not only "produce a race of
inferior beings by poisoning the sources of life and sapping the
vitality and health of the offspring" (1) but would also produce the
phenomenon known as "race suicide" since it accounted for the high
percentage of sterility among Anglo-Saxon women (Brandt 24). And
Lavinia Dock notes in Hygiene and Morality (1910), "Taking [syphilis
and gonorrhea] together, they seem to exhibit the true race suicide,
and both . . . are intimately connected with the degeneration of
races and the downfall of nations" (52). Since prostitutes were
blamed for the spread of disease from philandering husband to
innocent wife, they bear the brunt of the blame for this catastrophic
conclusion.
Compounding such fears was the belief that immigrant populations were
especially prone to venereal disease. As Dr. L. Duncan Bulkey notes
in 1906, "[v]enereal diseases, with their manifold and direful
results so frequently reaching to and working havoc among those who
are innocent, will never be checked until in some way even the lowest
levels of society are influenced toward their prevention" (Brandt
23). Here, middle-class Anglo-Saxons get scripted as the "innocent"
victims of impoverished immigrants, whose unsanitary and immoral
habits manifest themselves as a loathsome, highly contagious disease
that spreads from the "houses of the poorest into those of the
richest, and forms a sort of civic circulatory system expressive of
the life of the body politic, a circulation which continually tends
to equalize the distribution of morality and disease" (Brandt 23). If
degeneracy turns virile gentlemen into impotent fops, syphilis
equates them with the racial others deemed responsible for its
transmission; both diseases enact the frightening spectacle of
self-made-other and, in so doing, validate fears that disease-induced
sterility will doom Anglo-Saxons to evolutionary defeat.
Xenophobes such as Henry Pratt Fairchild take this logic one step
further when he describes the immigrants who invade and corrupt the
American body politic in his aptly-titled The Melting Pot Mistake
(1926). In Fairchild's metaphorical language, not only do immigrants
spread germs, but they become the germ itself: "But in the case of
nationality the foreign particle does not become a part of the
nationality until he has become assimilated to it. Previous to that
time he is an extraneous factor, like undigested, and possibly
undigestible, matter in the body of a living organism. That being the
case, the only way he can alter the nationality is by injuring it, by
impeding its functions" (150). 10 These overlapping metaphors of
corruption and disease take physical form in the predicted darkening
of the American complexion, a mongrelization believed to be
inevitable whenever "superior" white races mixed with "primitive"
racial others. Once eastern and southern Europeans were classified as
racially distinct from those of "Teutonic" stock, scientific racists
such as Madison Grant predicted that the infusions of racially
different immigrants would lead to the degeneration of Anglo-Saxon
purity. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Grant writes:
"Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two
races in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient,
generalized and lower type . . . the cross between any of the three
European races and a Jew is a Jew" (16). Grant's influential
hypothesis repeats and embellishes the familiar stereotype of the
diseased foreigner, for here the disease that infects the American
body and character assumes visible form in the dark features of these
racial others. Sexual contact with these "aliens" thus becomes
fraught with danger for "pure-bred" Americans, since every liaison
jeopardizes their health, corrupts their principles, and weakens the
genes responsible for their racial superiority, a process of
un-Americanization signaled by a system of representation that uses
race as the external symbol of internal contamination. Here, then,
constructions of the other as diseased and theories about
mongrelization work together to create an image of race-as-disease, a
trope that equates an invasion of immigrants to an invasion of germs,
both figured as deadly viruses that threaten the disintegration of
the healthy organism, the transformation of self into other....
The full article is available at
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v042/42.1bower.ht
ml> *****
Yoshie
