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12 Introduction

forced by her circumstances to think about profit rather than virtue. In this letter, Franco makes very elear the difference between the opportunities that her city makes available to a wealthy man and a poor woman. She re-minds her friend that she has promised to help place her daughter in one of the few refuges the city offered unmarried girls at risk of losing their vir-ginity: the Casa delle Zitelle, where, after a period of residcnce, girls be-came eligible for respectable marriages. Franco s generous, even insistent offer of assistance makes this a familiar letter with an urgent, practical mo-tive: she wants to protect not only the daughter but the mother, who will ruin her own reputation and lose her daughter s lovc if she becomes her go-between. Yet the woman to whom the letter is addressed appears to have rejected Franco s help. As a result, Franco composes an eloquent warning against the dangers of the prostitute s life to which poor women in the city could be driven. She stresses the risk of physical violence and disease as much, if not morę, than spiritual damnation, and she insists on the finan-cial instability of such a life and the practical requirements for succeeding in it.

Readers of this letter often ask, “Is this Franco s despairing denuncia-tion of her own life as a courtesan?” We think not. She never names herself specifically as the victim of the dangers she describes, and she never men-tions her own mother as a go-between or declares any intention of leaving her profession. Indeed, her practical commcnts on the girls lack of what it takes to succeed as a courtesan—beauty, “grace and wit in conversation,” and “style, good judgment, and proficiency in many skills”—suggest that she is distinguishing herself from the lower ranks of sex workers which this daughter is likely to join. Rather, Franco is constructing a portrait of herself as a realistic, honest advisor to her friend. She does refer to the religious ca-tastrophe of a prostitute s life, but her principle concern is pragmatic: the predictable social consequences of the decision this mother is about to make.

In addition, Franco is revising literary portraits of prostitution written by men. Piętro Aretino, for example, in his Dialogues (1556), had pre-sented convcrsations between an aged prostitute, Nanna, and her daughter, Pippa, in which, with a certain sympathy, hc ventriloquized the older womans complaint about the lack of freedom that such a woman suffers. Nanna says, “She must, whether she likes it or not, sit with someone else s buttocks, walk with someone else s feet, sleep with someone else s eyes, and eat with someone elses mouth.”¹⁹ But a main reason for Aretinos hatred of this lack of f reedom was that he saw it as an analogy to the strict social requiremcnts confrontcd by małe courtiers; to him, these physical con-19. Piętro Aretino, Dmlo^ues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Marsilio, 1994), as cited in the epilogue by Margaret Rosenthal, 396.