Greg Winston
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813042404
- eISBN:
- 9780813043470
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813042404.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter investigates the connection between soldiers and prostitutes in 1900s Dublin and its particular effects on public health, residential space, and social control. Concentrating on ...
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This chapter investigates the connection between soldiers and prostitutes in 1900s Dublin and its particular effects on public health, residential space, and social control. Concentrating on streetwalkers, brothels, and their soldier clientele, in A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, along with more tacit forms of prostitution in the residential spaces of Dubliners, the chapter looks at the interrelation of the military and sexual economies in the Dublin red-light district known as Monto. As it was a boon to military recruiting, authorities did little to curb the night-time trade until the spread of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases presented a risk to troop safety and imperial security. Joyce's fiction leads us to think of soldier and sex worker as figures of surveillance and control both subject to the militarizing power of the state.Less
This chapter investigates the connection between soldiers and prostitutes in 1900s Dublin and its particular effects on public health, residential space, and social control. Concentrating on streetwalkers, brothels, and their soldier clientele, in A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, along with more tacit forms of prostitution in the residential spaces of Dubliners, the chapter looks at the interrelation of the military and sexual economies in the Dublin red-light district known as Monto. As it was a boon to military recruiting, authorities did little to curb the night-time trade until the spread of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases presented a risk to troop safety and imperial security. Joyce's fiction leads us to think of soldier and sex worker as figures of surveillance and control both subject to the militarizing power of the state.
