Slammerkin: a noun, eighteenth century, of unknown origin.
1. A loose gown. 2. A loose woman.
Slammerkin was another novel I found on the discount table at Chapters, and having enjoyed Room by Emma Donoghue when it first came out, I picked this up despite the cover blurbs that promise "a colorful romp" and "an absorbing, bawdy novel". Needless to say, bodice rippers aren't my thing, but I trusted Donoghue to elevate the material, and that she does.
(S)he was never in a hurry to get home. If it was still light when Mary reached the family's two-room cellar on Charing Cross Road, she knew what she'd see through the low scuffed window: her mother shipwrecked in a sea of cheap linen, scaly fingers clinging to the needle, hemming and cross-stitching innumerable quilted squares while the new baby wailed in his basket. There was never anywhere to sit or stand that wasn't in the way or in the light. It would be Mary's job to untie the baby's foul swaddlings, and not say a word of complaint because, after all, he was a boy, the family's most precious thing. William Digot - the Digot man, as she mentally called her stepfather - wouldn't get home for hours yet. It would be up to Mary to stand in the pump queue on Long Acre till nightfall for two buckets of water so he could wash his face white before he slept.
Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls, heaped with silks and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the pedlar with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like fresh butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoke long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack?This sets the scene for 13 year old Mary Saunders, poor but surviving in the harsh conditions of 18th century London. Because of her dead father's wishes, Mary is sent to school instead of out to work, but by the time she is 14, her mother thinks it's time the girl decided whether she would like to become a seamstress or a maid. Insisting that she was meant for a better life, Mary runs into the night, where she trades her virtue for a piece of ribbon and is set on a path that leads inexorably to a life of prostitution. Leave aside the coincidence that it's Doll, the red-ribboned prostitute whom Mary has always secretly admired, who finds and rescues Mary from the ditch, I never understood Mary's motivation in the first place. Having gone to bed hungry every night of her life, I think that Mary would understand how finely her family walked the line of survival. Dreaming of a life of ease and beautiful possessions is understandable, but Mary insisting it was her right didn't feel honest. I also didn't believe that her mother and stepfather would wait until she was 14 before insisting that Mary find a way to contribute to the household.
If I were to ignore those criticisms, though, there's an understandable logic to a homeless 14 year old girl becoming a prostitute in 18th century London; the way Donoghue writes it, it was an easy and fun lifestyle as well (which also didn't feel honest). For a young woman from the underclass, even one with an education like Mary, there were few means of support, and the only way she could have absolute control over her own life was to trade the only thing she had absolute control over-- her own body. Even later in the novel, when Mary is comfortably situated as a maid and seamstress in the Jones family, she can't help but desire more and falls back into prostitution. Again, I didn't completely understand Mary's motivation-- after a lifetime of being cold and hungry, and finding Doll dead in an alley, I didn't believe that the girl still thought that if she had a few coins in her pocket she could just step into a better life. Maybe, with the clue that her father was impulsive and unmindful of consequences, we are supposed to think that Mary has some mental issues, some psychopathic disorder that would lead her to eventually murder for a gown, but the groundwork isn't really laid for that case. Three times Mary is given a safe and secure home and three times she rejects it-- if this is due to a character flaw or a mental flaw, maddeningly, I can't source either in the story itself.
In the big picture, Emma Donaghue writes a fascinating world; you can smell the filth and despair of London, the clean and wholesome air of Monmouth. From class struggles to daily routines to politics, the research is evident. As a comment on sexism, Slammerkin is bleak: all women trade their bodies to survive, whether as mistresses to the rich or as vessels for creating sons for the common man, or as slave labourers, as wet nurses, as prostitutes.
As I said, I can understand the logic of Mary becoming a prostitute, in her time, when she was first kicked out of her home (even if I don't understand why she didn't hang on to later secure opportunities). But in today's world, in Canada, I'm of two minds: naturally, underage prostitution is never acceptable, and anyone who turns to it out of desperation, or to support a drug habit, should be taken in by social services. But what if a grown, mentally stable woman wants to be a prostitute, to trade her body, on her own terms? I don't know what's wrong with that. It's been in the news much lately that we're getting closer to striking down anti-prostitution laws, and if that somehow provides security for the women who freely choose the lifestyle, then fine. I understand the criticism, however, is that legalization will lead to a cover of protection for the pimps and others who would coerce women into selling themselves-- not fine. Amsterdam, with its red light district, looks from the outside like a good model-- the women are healthy and safe and appear to be in control, which affords dignity, almost respectability. But then you hear that most of the prostitutes there are from foreign countries, unable to speak the local language, and held as sex slaves. I do believe in moral absolutes (there is never an acceptable excuse for slavery or rape or blowing up an airplane), but I have no absolute moral objection to prostitution. The fact that I would find it an unacceptable profession for my daughters, however, makes me a bit morally squeamish to admit that I think it's fine for one of yours.
In writing Slammerkin, Donoghue apparently started with an old newspaper article about a servant named Mary Saunders who killed her employer with a meat cleaver. The girl was either sixteen or seventeen, she was either hanged or burned or both for the crime, and in her defense, Mary was either after her mistress' savings or she did it because she longed for fine clothes. With this scrap of inspiration, the author worked backwards to create a real and believable world, but in the end, I didn't find Mary herself to be 100% real and believable.
