La prostitution dans la poésie de Guy de Maupassant: genèse d’une notion clé de l’œuvre en prose.

Abstract

Prostitution, whether in the streets or in brothels, whether illegal or official, is a basic theme in Guy de Maupassant’s work. As an absolute governing principle, it appears not only in all his prose –short stories, novels, plays, travel narratives, letters, chronicles– but also in his poetry. Unfortunately, critics have largely neglected that aspect of the latter, so we propose here to study the different faces of prostitution in Maupassant’s early poetic works. In a collection of poems he wrote when young and published in Des vers (1880) –“Une Conquête”, “Au bord de l’eau”, “Propos des rues”, “Vénus rustique”– but also in his pornographic poems –“La Femme à barbe”, “69”– we will analyze the genesis of this theme as a key to understanding Maupassant’s poetics. We will see that all kinds of prostitution and most of the prostitutes in his future prose were already there in embryonic form in his early poetry.