Marthe: The Story Of A Whore

Marthe: The Story of a Whore, by Joris-Karl Huysmans.  Huysmans’ first novel is also one of the first to attempt a realistic or *naturalistic* examination of prostitution. A struggling young writer and his cabaret dancer/prostitute girlfriend try to survive the grinding poverty and overflowing vice of Paris lower class life.  Loosely based on Huysmans' own misadventures in the gutters of Paris, this novella is limited by its artificial dialogue and character psychology, and somewhat clumsy plotting, this uneven story of a whore doesn’t quite measure up to Huysmans’ later work. Indeed, one contemporary critic rightly asked ‘what good does it do us to witness the blossoming of this venereal flower?’ BUT. . .Huysmans’ unmatched descriptive powers are already on display. No novelist ever saw the grimy truth of reality better, or could translate it so vividly. He wrote descriptions like Van Gogh painted the Night Cafe. Here is his rendering of the whore’s slum:

A rusty door streaked blood-red and ochre yellow, a long dark corridor the walls of which oozed black drops like coffee, and a sinister staircase that creaked at every footstep and was impregnated with the foul stench of drains and the smell of the lavatories whose doors swung open in the slightest breeze.

Also present is Huysmans’ remarkably blunt and still 149 years after its publication avant-garde assessment of the essential hopelessness of cohabitation:

He also had to put up with the smell of her cooking, the heavy odour of wine in the sauces, sickening stench of onions fried in a pan, and look at bread crumbs all over the rugs and bits of cotton thread all over the furniture; the sitting room had been overturned from top to bottom. On cleaning days it was even worse. The ironing board had to be balanced across his desk and another table, and the washing had to be dried on a clothes-horse in the hall. The puddles of water on the parquet, the stale smell of lye, and the streaming laundry that left damp-stains on his brasswork and tarnished his mirrors, reduced him to despair.

Page after page of both of the lovers’ resentments, which, stewing in poverty, turn the wine of love sour. As an indictment of carnality, Marthe makes Huysmans later turn to catholicism/spiritualism seem inevitable. Despite its flawed presentation of the anatomy of a prostitute, of which there is no need to detail, the book predicts Huysmans’ eclipse of other *naturalists* because his chief concern is the individual, and not the collective. He understood ruin is personal, not political:

The daylight which filtered its gold-dust through the curtains showed him a face bruised by the depredations of the night, and a posture that revealed a whore who had been dragged through every gutter in the city.