Abstract
In “A Harlot’s Progress,” William Hogarth illustrates the fallen woman’s characteristic journey from innocence to death. She begins as an attractive young woman who is brought into a house of ill repute where she loses her innocence and descends into the outwardly lavish yet inwardly degrading world of the eighteenth-century bawdy house. Before long, she is sentenced to prison, but after being released she returns to prostitution, contracts venereal disease, and dies. Journalists and novelists of Stephen Crane’s time, a century and a half after Hogarth, depicted the prostitute in much the same way. Crane’s contemporaries described her as a young woman seduced by a man who had promised her the world only to cast her by the wayside after corrupting her. Believing that no self-respecting man would want an impure woman, she turns to a life of prostitution. She first joins one of the finer parlor houses, but as her degradation continues, she descends to concert halls and, eventually, the streets. Finally, she kills herself.
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© 1999 Bedford/St. Martin’s
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Hayes, K.J. (1999). “The Painted Cohorts”. In: Hayes, K.J. (eds) Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). Bedford Cultural Editions Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10011-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10011-5_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-62050-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10011-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)