Gendered Spaces in Early Modern Rome and Edo Period Japan

Subjugated, enslaved, marginalised, disenfranchised, consumed yet made invisible – historically women have been relegated to the sidelines of public urban spaces, leaving the home as one of the rare, prescribed domains where they possessed a certain level of control. However, to attain control over a domestic space, most women in the early modern world had to be either wives or widows. The realms of prostitutes in early modern Italy and the Tokugawa era in Japan present an opportunity for multilayered and nuanced comparative case studies of urban spaces, which were deliberately segregated along gendered lines beyond the boundaries of households. The ephemeral notion of ukio (the floating world) – a world of fleeting pleasure, carefree indulgence, and refined pursuits, can serve as a potent metaphor for heteropatriarchal gender stereotypes of femininity.[1] The female other as the object of transient beauty, eroticism and desire has been identified as a “sexed being” throughout history and across cultures.[2] Notably, female sex workers and the places they inhabited, whether in Counter-Reformation Rome or early modern Edo, were mythologised and abstracted from reality for conspicuous consumption. Such mythologies obstructed the very concrete experiences of women’s daily lives within these spaces, concealing “the harsher realities experienced by those who served its purposes”.[3] Despite their vastly different modus operandi, the Roman and Edo sex workers, constrained within patriarchally regulated structures, were able to accrue a certain level of agency while embodying these spaces.

The historiography of the identities of the women engaged in sex work in the early modern era was often either fused with the spaces that they were associated with or erased entirely.[4] Ordinarily, the details of their existence retained in the visual archive privileged the male gaze by design, leaving their unobjectified selves obscured by the shadows of time and the artifice of the imagery. A strictly enclosed, moated pleasure quarter called the Yoshiwara in Edo was a licenced gendered space where women’s services were exploited by means of governmentally sanctioned prostitution contracts.[5] In the seventeenth century, the number of prostitutes in the district reached three thousand reflecting the gender imbalance in the population of the “largest city in the world” dominated by male samurai and merchants.[6] In 1656 Yoshiwara was repositioned away from the city centre and thus travelling to it “required purpose and effort”, which, as Julie Nelson Davis suggests, was “essential to its success”, making it more desirable and setting it apart from the many unlicensed sites of the sex trade.[7] The nature of the quarter was such that the “blurring of fact and fiction” constituted “a mythology of the Yoshiwara” necessary to uphold its status of privilege and exclusivity.[8] The ultimate mythologising, glamorising and othering of the famous prostitutes within the quarter validated the effort, the expense and sometimes the risk involved in engaging their services. In Kitao Masanobu’s Yoshiwara Courtesans: A New Mirror Comparing the Calligraphy of Beauties (1784) (Figure 3) the yujo of the highest rank are depicted in an idealised manner, wearing garments of luxuriously elaborate brocades displayed against supposed samples of their own calligraphy as a testament to their erudite sophistication.[9] The women are surrounded by a multitude of luxury objects serving the purpose of signifiers and visual clues for the astute and initiated cognoscenti to be able to discern their status and rank. Davis notes that despite the constructed fantasies of the Yoshiwara ukio-e prints this abundance of carefully placed material details imbued the images with an illusion of a mirror reflecting reality.[10] Thus, by adding numerous layers of polished materiality to these images, fictitious worlds were made to seem real, while real, and undesirable worlds were masterfully concealed.

Not all consumers of ukio-e were sophisticated and refined connoisseurs, adept at decoding veiled clues of elegance and rank. As an inexpensive and egalitarian medium, it enabled all classes of Japanese society (from privileged elites to the merchants to the simple country folk) to partake in and explore these constructed previously inaccessible realities.[11] The “seizure of the unfamiliar” was also made possible through travel along the roads such as Tokaido, connecting the capital Kyoto and Edo intersected by post-stations that provided sites of relaxation, pleasure and wonder.[12] In Akasaka: Inn with Serving Maids (circa 1833-1834), Utagawa Hiroshige presents a small vignette from the life of women called the meshimori onna who worked at station inns serving meals and often providing sexual services for travellers.[13] A level of reciprocity existed in such exchanges as the women who worked at these sites were able to gain access to a degree of social mobility and economic independence, contrasted to their lives in remote villages.[14] Hiroshige definitively partitions the pictorial space into autonomous male and female realms by angling the inn wall and dissecting it via the placement of an imposing phallic sago palm tree. Considering that East Asian scripts run from top to bottom and from right to left, it can be conjectured that Hiroshige intended the viewer to focus on the women’s space first. The edge of the roof in the foreground gives us an intimate voyeuristic gateway into a private feminine sphere, seeing the women in their daily routine of putting on make-up, dressed in their simple robes, a stack of mattresses signalling the work that awaits them. The women’s room lacks luxurious objects that might act as anchors for the connoisseurial gaze and thus, in place of objectifying consumption, the print allows the viewer a moment of simple observation.[15] The multitude of extending parallel lines on the walls, sliding doors and floorboards of the inn segue the viewer into the male realm, where women’s private lives end, and their work begins.

Although Roman prostitutes did not occupy a designated space within the city similar to the Yoshiwara in Edo, they did collectively associate themselves with particular places of prostitution that were referred to as “i luoghi or il bordello”.[16] Unlike the Japanese yujo, the Roman meretrice were not tied down to brothels with inhumane, exploitative contracts that could last up to ten years.[17] Yet, they were also inscribed into the urban landscape and employed as a useful strategy for regulating unbridled sexual masculinity with controlled sin in the city where males largely outnumbered females.[18] Idealisation and mythologising of their depictions often took on a literal meaning with images of fetishised beauty presented to the viewer in the guise of or alongside the ancient and mythological subjects. Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia, (circa 1530-3) (Figure 4) depicts its enigmatic seductress rather scornfully pointing at a drawing of Lucretia – an ancient Roman woman, who killed herself after she was raped by a son of an Etruscan king. Similar to Masanobu’s lavishly adorned yujo the cortigiana wears a luxurious silk dress and an elaborate headpiece, while the tongue-in-cheek reference to an ancient subject of chastity speaks to her cultured refinement.[19] A diaphanous yellow shawl and an expensive bejewelled necklace carelessly tucked into a bodice are the only clues of her profession but otherwise her identity is concealed.[20] These multivalent representations of beauties were collected by men who used them to assert themselves as aesthetes of idealised femininity.[21]

In a paradoxical display of religiously driven hypocrisy, despite their acceptance by the city authorities, the meretrice were also actively encouraged and often coerced to reform and abandon their profession. In her seminal essay titled Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, Joan Scott identifies a number of socially constructed fundamental signifiers of gender that can often be oppositional in nature, presenting “Eve and Mary as symbols of woman, for example, in the Western Christian tradition – but also, myths of light and dark, purification and pollution, innocence and corruption.”[22] Through the ages, women were forced to navigate these contradictory dichotomies and a Roman courtesan procuring a space within a Catholic church for her atonement is a case in point. Sixteenth-century Rome could afford a successful cortigiana honestae sufficient financial freedom to commission an individualised space of devotion in a form of a private chapel within a public church.[23] However, to obtain permission from the Catholic authorities to build it a courtesan had to repent – retaining her economic and social autonomy and building a space for the salvation of her soul were mutually exclusive concepts.[24] Sometime between 1520 and 1524 a chapel in SS. Trinita dei Monti was designed for a cortigiana famosissima by Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni.[25] Marcantonio Raimondi’s Martha Leading Mary Magdalene up a Flight of Stairs (c. 1520–25) print (Figure 2) captures a lost fresco that appeared above the chapel’s arched entrance. The fresco plays a pivotal role in the iconographic program of the space, illustrating an episode of Mary Magdalene’s conversion with the aid of her sister Martha, who convinces Mary to go and hear Christ preach.[26] The exaggerated scale of the two female figures, visibly larger than the seated Christ, draws the viewer’s gaze directly to them, emphasising the significance and primacy of their symbolism for the female patron. Martha’s gaze, in turn, is directed towards her sister, denoting her as the focal figure of the work. In stark contrast to Mary’s lavishly billowing tunic and a contemporary-styled elaborate coiffure topped with an extravagant jewel, Martha dons a cloak that covers her hair and drapes over her left pointing arm, modestly covering her torso. Christopher Witcombe argues that this representation may suggest a tribute to a pious Roman noblewoman who may have aided the cortigiana famosissima in her moral conversion.[27] Around the time of the completion of the courtesan’s chapel, the identity of Mary Magdalene as the reformed sinner in gospel texts was a topic of intense debates among the scholars of the Catholic Church.[28] Thus, this iconographic centrality of Mary Magdalene in the fresco is simultaneously a nod in support of the argument of her identification as a repentant prostitute and a declaration of theological legitimacy for the possibility of salvation of a woman previously engaged in sex work.

A number of other rather ambiguous expressions of empowerment existed among the high-class prostitutes of both cities giving the women an ostensible level of control over their working environments. The concepts of tsu in Edo and virtu in Renaissance Italy – strikingly similar phenomena of cultivated status, effortless elegance, charm, and grace among men, were often used as selection criteria, allowing the women to reject clients that were less than desirable.[29] The men had to strive to attain various qualities associated with tsu or virtu in order to avoid being turned away by courtesans and thus risk disgrace or loss of social status. The Yoshiwara courtesans were also esteemed for their intentionally cultivated trait known as hari – a particular brand of proud spirit that allowed them to reject clients as part of their seduction game.[30] The Roman prostitutes commonly embraced the slightly different concept of donna libera wherein they asserted freedom of their own bodies in view of being free rather than married women.[31] Although most of these apparent assertions of agency served greater promotional rather than protective functions, they nonetheless gave the women some power of choice. The notable absence of any trace of such agency in the depictions of sex workers such as the example by Kitao Masanobu and Lorenzo Lotto speaks to the purpose and the intended audience of the imagery itself. It is also important to note that such well-defined freedom of choice was most likely entirely absent from the lives of the sex workers of travel station inns such as the ones depicted by Hiroshige or less than illustrious prostitutes working the Roman streets.

It is tempting to evoke the metaphor of the ukio once more, while reflecting on the ephemeral nature of the two prints compared herewith – one, capturing a perished fresco in a courtesan chapel, the other – the elusive identities of the meshimori onna. The worlds of sex and pleasure afforded by prostitutes were contingent upon the construction of contrived fantasies. Sex workers in both Rome and Edo were seen by governmental and religious patriarchal structures as what Witcombe calls “a necessary evil” – tolerated and utilised yet sanctioned and strictly regulated within these cities.[32] The spaces that the sex workers embodied became inextricable from the mythologies generated around them for the purposes of maximising their consumption. Yet, these spaces also constituted tangible, material sites of existence for the women who inhabited them. Directing our investigative gaze away from the visual and literary evidence of their commodification and centring it on the women’s lived experience will ultimately assist in reframing the discourse on gendered spaces around women’s agency.

[1] Donald H. Shively quotes Asai Ryoi, the author of a c. 1665 ‘kana booklet’, who poetically describes the floating world as follows: “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maples, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves just in floating, floating, caring not a whit for the poverty staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: This is what we call ukio.” Asai Ryoi, “Ukiyo Monogatary (A Tale of the Floating World),” circa 1665, quoted and translated in Donald H. Shively, “Popular Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4: Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall (Connecticut: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 730. [2] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 6. [3] Julie Nelson Davis, Picturing Beauties: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 64. [4] For instance, in the Yoshiwara, in place of surnames prostitutes had to adopt the names of the pleasure houses where they resided, Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), xiii. [5] Seigle, The Glittering World, ix. [6] Teruoka Yasutaka, “The Pleasure Quarters and Tokugawa Culture,” in 18th Century Japan Culture and Society (1st ed.), ed. C. Andrew Gerstle (London: Routledge, 2000), 8. [7] Davis, Picturing Beauties, 63. [8] Seigle, The Glittering World, xii. [9] Davis translates yujo - the period term referring to Edo sex workers as “women for play”, distinguishing it from its common substitute ‘courtesan’ as yujo were not associated with a court or courtly love. Davis, Picturing Beauties, 63-64. [10] Davis, Picturing Beauties, 93. [11] David Bell, Ukio-e Explained (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2004), xi. [12] Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 171. [13] According to Amy Stanley, meshimori onna (or meal-serving girls) was the term used by the shogunate to designate prostitutes who worked outside the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters at post station inns. Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 15. [14] Stanley, Selling Women, 137. [15] Davis, Picturing Beauties, 94. [16] Tessa Storey examines various sixteenth-century criminal tribunal archives where Roman prostitutes frequently refer to themselves as being associated with i luoghi (the places) or il bordello (the brothel), suggesting that this formed a part of their collective identity. Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 124. [17] Timothy Clark, “Utamaro and Yoshiwara: The ‘Painter of the Green Houses’ Reconsidered,” in The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, 2 vols, ed. Asano Shugo and Timothy Clark, Vol. 1 (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 36. meretrice – prostitute (Italian). [18] Witcombe, L. C. E. Christopher, “The Chapel of the Courtesan and the Quarrel of the Magdalens,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 2 (June 2002): 275. [19] cortigiana – courtesan (Italian). [20] Knauer presents a great summary of how yellow scarves were used in Renaissance art to signify prostitutes. Regina Elfriede Knauer, “Portrait of a Lady? Some Reflections on Images of Prostitutes from the Later Fifteenth Century,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 47 (2002): 113. [21] Patricia Simons, “Portraiture Portrayal, and Idealization,” in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 288. [22] Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1067. [23] cortigiana honestae were popular, well-paid, respected courtesans who paid their annual dues to the city. Storey, Carnal Commerce, 116, 123. cortigiana honestae were able to earn 1-2 scudi per sexual encounter, greater than the monthly salary of a skilled artisan. Storey, Carnal Commerce, 168. [24] Witcombe, “Chapel of the Courtesan,” 279. [25] cortigiana famosissima – a very famous courtesan (Italian). Witcombe, The Chapel of the Courtesan, 273. [26] Witcombe, “Chapel of the Courtesan,” 280. [27] Witcombe, “Chapel of the Courtesan,” 281. [28] Witcombe, “Chapel of the Courtesan,” 280. [29] On the concept of tsu see Seigle, The Glittering World, 136. For a definition of virtu please refer to Guido Ruggiero, “Who is Afraid of Giuliana Napolitana? Pleasure, Fear and Imagining the Arts of the Renaissance Courtesan,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (Oxford University Press, 2006), 285. [30] Seigle, The Glittering World, 44. [31] donna libera – free woman (Italian). Storey, Carnal Commerce, 121. [32] Witcombe, “Chapel of the Courtesan,” 275.

Figure 1: Utagawa Hiroshige, Akasaka: Inn with Serving Maids, circa 1833-1834, colour woodblock print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (https://collections.lacma.org/node/214993).

Figure 2: Marcantonio Raimondi after Giulio Romano, Martha leading Mary Magdalene up a Flight of Stairs, circa 1520–25, engraving, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/342536).

Figure 3: Kitao Masanobu, Yoshiwara Courtesans: A New Mirror Comparing the Calligraphy of Beauties (Yoshiwara keisei: Shin bijin awase jihitsu kagami), 1784, polychrome woodblock printed book; ink and color on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/45278).

Figure 4: Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia, circa 1530-3, oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London (https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/lorenzo-lotto-portrait-of-a-woman-inspired-by-lucretia).