American Religion, American Literature

The Church and the Whorehouse: Prostitution and Redemption in O'Connor's Wise Blood and Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain

"The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing." --John Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 19.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

• pp. 4 -- "These men and women they passed on Sunday mornings had spent the night in bars, or in cat houses, or on the streets, or on rooftops, or under the stairs. They had gone from cursing to laughter, to anger, to lust. Once he and Roy had watched a man and woman in the basement of a condemned house. They did it standing up. The woman had wanted fifty cents, and the man had flashed a razor. John had never watched again; he had been afraid. But Roy had watched them many times, and he told John he had done it with some girls down the block. And his mother and father, who went to church on Sundays, they did it too, and sometimes John heard them in the bedroom behind him, over the sound of rats' feet, and rat screams, and the music and cursing from the harlot's house downstairs."
• pp. 33 -- (movie watched by John) "The woman was most evil . . . She had a great many boyfriends, and she smoked cigarettes and drank. When she met the young man . . . she took his money and she went out with other men."
• pp.68 -- (concerning Deborah)"Since she could not be considered a woman, she could only be looked on as a harlot, a source of delight more bestial and mysteries more shaking than any proper woman could provide."
• pp.78 -- (Florence, considering Frank's mistress) "And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men."
• pp. 90 -- (concerning Gabriel) "He would escape into the starry night and walk until he came to a tavern, or to a house that he had marked already in the long daytime of his lust."
• pp. 91 -- "Thus when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow--feeling himself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could only die."
• pp. 127 -- "It was in the womb of Esther, who was no better than a harlot, that the seed of the prophet would be nourished."
• pp. 130 -- "How you going to be ruined? When you been walking through this town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture?"
• pp. 131 -- "I reckon you don't want no whore like Esther for your wife."
• pp. 132 -- "I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore."
• pp. 136 -- "There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did not call out, unceasingly for blood; no woman . . . who had not seen her sister become part of the white man's great whorehouse, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that house herself.
• pp. 147 -- (Gabriel) "But I didn't want no harlot's son"
• pp. 147 -- (Deborah) "Esther weren't no harlot."
• pp. 155 -- "For her father ran what her aunt called a "house" -- not the house where they lived, but another house, to which, as Elizabeth gathered, wicked people often came.