CW: mentions of violence against sex workers in fiction.
When I look at my bookcase right now, most of what I see is novels. Novels are everywhere – from cheap paperbacks at the dentist, to taking up the bulk of bookstores. Reading a novel has become synonymous with reading a book.
So it might be surprising to learn that novels are a relatively new invention! Quick history lesson: before novels, in England at least, literate people mostly read pamphlets and religious texts. In the 1500s and 1600s, England was colonising the world, and a key player in the trans Atlantic slave trade. Ordinary English people became slave owners in Bristol, sugar traders in Liverpool, cotton traders in Leicester, and the like. By profiting from colonial trade, they came into their own wealth and formed the new middle class. It's from this class conflict that the first novel emerged.
Novels are so ubiquitous that it can be hard to define them. Looking at what is considered the first modern novel helps. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe chronicles the life of titular protagonist, Robinson, on his travels as an Englishman castaway on a remote island. Although it’s fictional, the book uses realism to depict Robinson’s journey, and eventual triumph over middle-class Protestant moral conflicts, “foreign” islanders, and more generally, his world. This is the first novel as we know it: a fictional book that depicts the protagonist journeying through real life, implicitly tied to class commentary.
This style of novel eventually developed into some of the most recognisable types of novels today: 19th century Victorian novels. Charles Dickens depicted his protagonists journeying through Victorian life in order to critique his society’s class system. Unlike Robinson, Dickens’ protagonists don’t triumph at all. They often succumb, in a variety of ways, to the violence of class inequality. And if there’s any archetype of a character who represents this, it’s Dickens’ criminal underclass – the predatory thieves, and the fallen sex workers.
Victorian novels often reflected Victorian morality, in which sex workers were seen as “fallen women” who needed to be rescued. At the same time, sex workers were seen as dirty, criminal purveyors of disease. Dickens depicted the reality of Victorian life to critique it, but in doing so, replicated those Victorian morals too. Take for example, Martha in David Copperfield. She contemplates jumping into the Thames because she feels that being a “fallen woman” has made her irredeemable, and perhaps dying in the river might be a way for her to find redemption. Then, there’s Nancy in Oliver Twist. She’s a sympathetic “fallen woman”, but after continuing with her life of “crime”, she is murdered violently by Bill Sikes. Sex workers in Dickens’ novels don’t get their own protagonist journeys through Victorian life. They’re robbed of complex characterisation and agency, and sidelined into symbols of degradation instead.
Victorian novels often reflected Victorian morality, in which sex workers were seen as “fallen women” who needed to be rescued.
Contemporary novels have exploded in variety since Dickens’ time. There are novels that play with multiple narratives, unreliable narratives, and sometimes no protagonist at all. But from what I can see, the depiction of sex workers in novels – as one-note characters who don’t get to journey through their world – hasn’t really changed.
Maybe this is especially so in feminist contemporary novels. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the story of Ifemelu, who moves from Nigeria to the US. She is pushed by her lack of income and social support into non-full service sex work. The moment in which she must touch a white tennis coach to make rent is one of the lowest points in her journey through America.
What stuck out to me when I read this wasn’t this particular presentation of sex work – it is, after all, the circumstance in which many people sell sex. It was the pure disgust with which the character responded to one instance of selling sex, with no exploration of the lives of full time, full service sex workers. This could have been an opportunity to explore the complex responses of migrant sex workers to sex work. I would have loved for Adichie to bring a sex worker to life, and delve into the nuances of race, choice, and money for a well rounded character. Yet the depiction of sex work in Americanah simply stops there. Selling sex just becomes a metaphor in the protagonist’s journey – not something real people do, as part of real life.
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes non sex workers try to be just a little too realistic when they depict sex workers. I recently read 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak. Not knowing what it was about when I picked it up, I was dismayed when I quickly realised it was about a sex worker, Leila, who had just been murdered by her client, reminiscing about moments in her rapidly fading life.
On paper, 10 Minutes does everything right in its depiction of a sex worker. Leila is a well rounded protagonist, with a history, friends, a journey through life, and a complex set of experiences and feelings around sex work. She’s not just a metaphor, and Shafak references anti-sex worker laws in Turkey that inspired her to write the book. The novel is clearly intended to give depth to a sex worker character, as well as highlight whorephobia in society.
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes non sex workers try to be just a little too realistic when they depict sex workers.
Yet it was still hard to read. It’s not that novels about marginalised people should always be positive; novels are doors to exploration, after all. It’s that I found it painful to read about a dying sex worker because there aren’t many other options to choose from. If we lived in a world with a glut of novels about well rounded sex worker protagonists, some silly, some graphic, some fantastical, and some violent, 10 Minutes would be another brilliant addition to the crop. Considering that depictions of sex workers that aren’t graphically violent are still so rare, this novel just couldn’t feel right to me.
That’s another, more subtle thing that non sex workers can’t usually get right about sex workers in their novels. As well as novels about us travelling through the world as three-dimensional protagonists, sex workers also want novels with variety. I personally crave short stories, poems, science fiction, horror, weird postmodern stuff, and more, featuring sex workers – not just depictions of our pain.
I’m still on the hunt for the ultimate sex worker novel. One with sex worker characters who are just as alive and complicated as the friends and colleagues I know in real life. And even more than that, one that I can choose from out of a huge range of sex worker novels. Perhaps there’ll be a day I can go to the dentist and see three novels to choose from, each featuring a completely different type of sex worker, in a completely unique literary world. That’ll be the day novels will be truly getting us right.
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We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
