Agnès Is Not a Prostitute

Synopses of the plot of Les dames du bois de Boulogne usually describe Agnès as a prostitute. A prostitute is one whose business is providing sex to clients who pay a specified fee (or so I am told). The film goes out of its way to demonstrate that Agnès is not in that class. A repeated theme is the many bouquets she receives from admirers. Does a man send flowers to a prostitute? The character of her mother also refutes the label of prostitute. After Agnès’s dance in the cabaret, her mother urges her to hurry because men are waiting in their apartment. If Agnès were a prostitute, her mother would be acting in the despised role of procuress. Yet the mother is portrayed throughout as a dignified and loving parent, whose wise guidance leads to Agnès’s spiritual redemption. The film offers no hint of an ironic contrast between those noble qualities and the repugnant action of selling her daughter.

In reality, Agnès occupies an intermediate role, between respectable woman and prostitute. Such a role no longer exists, and we have no word for it. In Agnès’s society, a certain type of woman might keep her home open to well-to-do men and accept expensive gifts from them. Such a woman would imply that she might extend sexual favors to the visitors who pleased her, but she would guarantee nothing. The men would enjoy the challenge and competition in this arrangement, more exciting than a commercial visit to a prostitute. The symbolic scene where Agnès is locked in her bedroom and the men pound on the door suggests that she never even reached the point of sexual liaison with any of her admirers.

It’s true that Hélène tells Jean that Agnès is a “grue” (“tramp”) who has a crowd of “amants” (“lovers”). Hélène is trying to put the situation in the worst light to wound Jean. And yet even this accusation does not mean that Agnès is necessarily a prostitute. Agnès is indeed a tramp, a woman of loose morals: her conduct is shameful and will ruin Jean socially after the marriage. But a woman could be a “grue” in this way without being a prostitute. And “lover” had more shades of meaning then than it does now: it applied to mere suitors, just as “to make love” could mean merely to woo. The main difference between Agnès’s conduct and that of a respectable single woman is that Agnès doesn’t require her suitors to promise eventual marriage and doesn’t promise it herself.

There is an even more decisive reason why Agnès isn’t a prostitute: the film’s genre excludes that possibility. The film, while an artistic masterpiece, is also a sentimental work of entertainment. Sentimentality requires that Agnès be no worse than the plot mechanisms demand. The assumption that she is a prostitute -- which ignores the evidence on the screen, the nuances of her society, and the codes of the film’s genre -- is an instance of the crude knowingness we adopt today in an attempt to appear sophisticated.