The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Jane Rendell
price of the piece you admire is one guinea.” A purchase was made to
their mutual satisfaction. 50
During the early nineteenth century, the word commodity was commonly
used to describe a woman’s genitals—a modest woman was a “private
commodity” and a prostitute was a “public commodity.” 51 But particular
kinds of commodities had stronger connections with sexual licentiousness
than others. By spatial analogy, the “snuff box” or “reticule” served to represent
female genitalia, often embellished as an “embroidered snuff box,” or
a “fine fancy gold worked reticule.” 52 Reduced to articles or pieces, conflated
with the commodities they were selling, bazaar women are also represented
in the rambling tales as self-determining in their eagerness to display themselves
for sale on the commodity market, in place of, or as well as, the commodities
they were selling. They were active agents in the commodification
of their own bodies: “Mr. Dick asked her rather impertinently, as she leant
over the table—’Do you mean, my lady, to offer yourself or the article for
sale?’—’Both,’ she answered. ‘Some of my friends here can testify, that me
and my article always go together.’” 53
Given the low wages and narrow scope of employment available to
women, many female workers did gain extra income from prostitution, and
some commentators recognized these material reasons for female prostitution:
“It is disgraceful the manner in which the poor girls are kept at work
at these places: it is no wonder, indeed, so many of them die in decline, and
others go on the town.” 54 But in the rambling tales, discussions of prostitution
were more speculative; they served to arouse and entertain. Reading
about women in public spaces, a position indicative of their subversive sexuality
or role as prostitutes, was transgressive. The placing of women outside
the home, the protected territory of the private patriarch—husband,
father, or brother—posed an exciting threat to the constrictions placed on
young men by patriarchal order. In public space, the patriarch’s female
property—mothers, wives, and daughters—is visually and sexually available
to other men, including those of different classes. In bazaars, where
women were exposed, unprotected, and often in close physical relation to
strange men, their sexual reputations were open to lurid speculation.
Women working in public spaces of commodity consumption were considered
to be prostitutes and described as cyprians.
RAMBLERS AND CYPRIANS
The word cyprian is defined as “belonging to Cyprus, an island in the eastern
Mediterranean, famous in ancient times for the worship of Aphrodite or
Venus,” goddess of love, and as “licentious, lewd”; and, in the eighteenth