Working Women

What is represented by the MTIA-MAGA-America First discourse is the impossible promise to retrieve the unretrievable. The poesis of a nostalgia constructed out of the ruin of late industrial capitalism, a ruin such as only PEF can make out of industrial capitalism. A ruin that bears within it the traces of a labor force ruined by PEF.

A rhetoric composed of ideological fragments and stray ends selectively stitched together out of the economic devastation borne by human beings now thrown aimlessly adrift in that de-based manufacturing world. Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” Eliot’s “burnt-out ends of smoky days.” Such a ruin that James Morse will avoid, at least temporarily, but that remains economically inexorable because all we can excavate from the ruin that is industrial capitalism is what we already expect to find. Eliot’s poem comes quickly to mind, again, because it lays before us as a moment of splendidly desolate destruction; “Preludes” as an unsentimental testament to modernist conformity and ennui. Eliot’s metaphor made all the more grim by an industrial pollution that hangs like a pall over the inscape of his poem.

Who can labor under such a pall? What can the working man produce in this degraded air? And what of the working woman, hardly a type with which Eliot is overly familiar and certainly not a type who occupies him in his oeuvre? Nevertheless, Eliot gives us just such a figure. Trapped in a dingy apartment, a woman—white, no doubt—of the English lower classes, a woman on the verge of physical ruin:

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.1

How is the world to be held in such “soiled hands?”

Or, it may be that only if the PEF world is held in hands deemed ethically “soiled” that the advance of finance capital can be stayed. Vulture capitalism, of the Wall Street variety, can only be thwarted with hands that know, intimately, the place of labor in the history of capital. Only the woman who works (walks) the streets for a living could possibly know the streets, can even hope to have “such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands.”

While we could say that the economy of the street depends on its own triangulated hierarchy (pimps ↔ prostitute ↔ johns), the greater majority of that economy is transacted not vertically but horizontally. The johns pay the pimps, hand to hand, the hookers get their money from their pimps. Hand-to-hand exchanges, to say nothing of that stock-in-trade use of the prostitute’s hand.

All that remains from these exchanges is paper (money) and the transmission of bodily fluids. On the one hand, there would appear to be not a lot to “understand” about the “street.” On the other, how can we tally with any precision just how much needs to be “understood” about the “street,” everything that has to be seen in order to transact, survive, and if at all possible (should the prostitute or the pimp so decide) to extricate the self from the “street.”

What is the effect, as Randy Crawford sings in 1987 (fronting The Crusaders, a jazz trio), of living a “street” as a life sentence. To not be able to live life off the streets. To know the “street” as erasing any sustainable difference between life and death. In a boppy voice, just barely tinged with regret, Crawford sings,

I play the streetlife, because there’s no place I can go

Streetlife, it’s the only life I know

Streetlife, and there’s a thousand parts to play

Streetlife, until you play your life away

The prostitute, dead in a dumpster.

“Streetlife, for a nickel or a dime.”2

Homicide, life on the streets.

There are hints, and not, on the face of it, subtle ones, that there is reason for ethical caution around the working woman of Eliot’s poem. Her profession may be an aged one. The oldest one, as we are wont to say: “You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands” is as close to calling a woman a prostitute—directly, that is; there are other poems where his allusions are more middlebrow—as Eliot ever gets.

However, where Eliot hedges his bets ever so slightly, Pretty Woman pulls no punches. Vivian is a prostitute stereotypical in her self-presentation—cheap wig, short skirt, heavily made-up, always chewing gum. Vivian is nonetheless very attractive, worthy of being paid tribute by the warbling voice of Roy Orbison, the writer of the song from which Marshall’s movie takes its name. Vivian, by all accounts, is very good at her chosen profession.