rating: 5 of 5 stars
….Wow. Slammerkin is engaging, heartbreaking, bawdy, sometimes tender. It is based on the life of an actual young woman in Georgian England named Mary Saunders, and is peopled with a cast of real and fictional characters. Born to poor parents in Charing Cross in London, raised by her world-hardened mother and an uncaring stepfather, Mary lusts after the finer things in life. She often admires the finery of the whores who stroll the streets of St. Giles, especially the scarlet ribbing in the hair of one particular woman. One fateful night, Mary is raped by a peddler–the price of a single scarlet ribbon. He later writes to her family to tell them that she is a slut–and worse, pregnant. Her mother turns her out. Having nowhere else to go, Mary flees to St. Giles, where she is raped by a group of soldiers and infected with gonorrhea. The dazed girl is plucked from the streets by Doll, a streetwise “Miss” who answers to no one. Doll gives Mary a place to stay, treats her fever, provides for an abortion, and teaches her the tricks of the trade to which Mary is doomed. Before the girl is fifteen, she has become a full-fledged “Miss” herself, so much so that her period no longer comes.
Upon Doll’s anticlimactic death, Mary tries to make a new life in her mother’s hometown as a maidservant to her mother’s childhood friend, Jane Jones. She provides a fraudulent letter claiming that her mother is dead, and Jane takes her in. During her time in the Jones household, Mary learns to work fine embroidery, befriends a Barbadian slave, finds and rejects true love, and eventually returns to “the trade” on an occasional basis, in the hopes of eventually being able to afford fine clothes–and her liberty.
Mary is faced with a difficult choice at a much-too-tender age: life in servitude, or liberty through prostitution. Her ambitions to become “somebody” drive her to the latter choice. Although she cannot abide the touch of the male body–who could, after such a rough introduction to it–there is no other feminine occupation that will allow her to make such money while enjoying the freedom of being nobody’s servant. It is money that eventually brings about her downfall, and it is only at the very last moment, which comes far too soon, that she realizes that she has been chasing the wrong luxury. But she does achieve some degree of fame–as a whore and murderer sentenced to the gallows.
Donoghue does a spectacular job in this work of historical fiction. Mary is completely believable as a young girl compromised, but determined not to simply fade away in shame; she embraces and masters the act that ruined her life, occupying her time on the mattresses (or, more often than not, against stone walls in dark alleys) with thoughts of the next pretty dress the sex act could purchase. Yet we hurt for her, to hear such a young girl speaking of cunnies and cullies and the price of a fuck. All in all, it is a painful book, but completely enthralling–I finished over half of it last night, and the rest today. I’ll definitely seek out more of Donoghue’s work; she’s brilliant!
Tags: dark, Emma Donoghue, historical fiction, prostitution
rating: 3 of 5 stars
