The Arcades Project - Operi

ville, to make sure he will be recognized thereafter and kept from reentering the
room . ... Women, on the other hand, are not allowed to appear unless they are
masked." Ferdinand von Gall, Paris und seine Salons (Oldenburg, 1844,), vol. 1,
pp. 209, 213-214. [01 a,S]
Comparison of today's erotic fields of action with those of the middle of the
previous century. The social play of eroticism turns today on the question: How
far can a respectable woman go without losing herself? To represent the joys of
adultery without its actual circumstances is a favorite device of dramatists. The
terrain on which love's duel with society unfolds is thus, in a very broad sense,
the realm of "free" love. For the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties of the previous
century, however, things were entirely different. Nothing illustrates this more
clearly than the account of the "pensions" which Ferdinand von Gall provides in
his book Paris und seine Salons (Oldenburg, 1844-1845) .
cD,ere we learn that in many of these boardinghouses at the evening meal­
which, with prior notification, strangers too could attend-it was the fille to
bring in cocottes, whose job it was to play the part of girls from good families. In
fact, they were not disposed to let down their masks too quickly, preferring
instead to wrap themselves in endless layers of respectability and fanilly COmlec­
tion; to strip these away entailed an elaborate game of intrigues that ultimately
served to raise the womenls price. What is expressed in these relations, it goes
without saying, is less the period's pruderie than its fanatical love of masquerade.
[02,1]
More on the mania for masks: "We know from the statistics on prostitution that
the fallen woman takes a certain pride in being deemed by nature still worthy of
motherhood-a feeling that in no way excludes her aversion to the hardship and
disfigurement that goes along with this honor. She thus willingly chooses a middle
way to exhibit her condition: she keeps it 'for two months, for three months,'
naturally not longer. " F. Th. Vischer, Mode und Cynismus (Stuttgart, 1879), p. 7.
o Fashion 0 [02,2]
In prostitution, one finds expressed the revolutionary side of technology (the
symbolic side, which creates no less than discovers). "As if the laws of nature to
which love submits were not more tyrannical and more odious than the laws of
society! The metaphysical meaning of sadism is the hope that the revolt of man
will take on such intensily as to summon nature to change its laws. For, with
women no longer wanting to endure the ordeal of pregnancy, the risks and the
sufferings of delivery and of miscarriage, nature will be constrained to invent
some other means for perpetuating humanity on this earth." Emmanuel Berl,
"Premier Panlphlet;' Europe, 75 , pp. 405-406. And in fact: the sexual
revolt against love not only springs from the fanatical, obsessional will to pleas­
ure; it also ainls to make nature adaptable and obedient to this will. The traits in
question here appear more clearly still when prostitution (especially in the cynical
form it took toward the end of the century, in the Paris arcades) is regarded less
as the opposite than as the decline oflove. It is then that the revolutionary aspect