N AT I O N A L R E V I E W/A P R I L 7, 2008
No literary intellectual ever won his spurs by denouncing what everyone else had already denounced with pursed lips and a tut-tut. We do not think of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet as wicked, but rather as good-time girls with hearts of gold. Maupassant’s stories favor pros- titutes over their respectable, bourgeois clients. In Russian literature, fallen women serve to illustrate the possibility and pow- er of redemption (and the generosity of authors). The demand for paid sex has gen- erally been more severely condemned in literature than the supply.
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