“DARING TO PRETEND TO DARE”: Reading a Woman of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Prostitute Narrative, The Juvenile Adventures of Kitty F[ishe]r

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

1759 prostitute narrative The Juvenile Adventures of Miss Kitty F[ishe]r depicts the life of a notorious British courtesan named Catherine Maria Fisher. Kitty functions as a site for the representation of deviant adventures in the age of Enlightenment, demonstrating how a woman’s voyage to reason can occur for a girl of low birth and fortune, or how the characteristics of the Enlightenment can be explored and flourish outside the normality and normalcy of proper womanhood, and an alternative to the discursive realm of domesticity and private sphere. By exploring the female protagonist’s unconventional method of securing autonomy for her own body and voice by making herself an unflinching woman of her pleasure, desire, and business that places herself at the bottom/center of the sex industry and distances her from its predicament at the same time, this paper examines Kitty’s status as a so-called “fallen” woman that actively and willfully defies the social norms of womanhood and femininity in the Age of Enlightenment. In this gendered and hypersexualized exchange for sex and pleasure, Kitty can gain a dominant position by jettisoning the social illusion imbued to female minds that they must be yearning for holy matrimony and male companionship, as well as by pursuing her selfhood in a masculine proto-capitalist society. Kitty’s story may be that of a low-class woman, yet, as a self-made narrative, it is undeniably rooted in self-creation, utilizing an undesirable, contemptible way of selling her sexuality to make herself a famous and wealthy courtesan.