representation of the courtesan in Balzac's "La Cousine Bette", Flaubert's "L'education Sentimentale" and Zola's "Nana"

Unlike the courtesan of romantic fiction, depicted as a sentimental and pitiful victim of social mores, the courtesan of French realism is rendered through the eyes of the nineteenth-century male bourgeois as a commodity to be consumed. Her body is objectified and fetishized, just as is her milieu of pleasure designed as legitimate compensation for the social delimitation of sexuality to reproduction. Through different direct and indirect narrative modes, Balzac as well as Flaubert and Zola often dehumanize, even demonize the courtesan for her power over male senses, overtly rendering her a scapegoat for society's decaying values and an open threat to patriarchal control over financial patrimony, the family, and the church.