The Respectful Prostitute
The Respectful Prostitute (French: La Putain respectueuse) is a French play by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1946, which observes a white woman, a prostitute, caught up in a racially tense period of American history.
The audience understands that there has been an incident on a train with said woman involved, but also a black man on whom the blame is laid by the prejudiced law enforcers.
The tale takes a brief look at the loss of freedom inside a cruel world, a subject that dominates Sartre's literary career.
When the play was produced in the United States, Sartre was accused of anti-Americanism.
[2] According to his partner Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre wrote the piece in only a few days to fill an entire evening at the theatre, because Morts sans sépulture [fr] alone was too short.
[3] Sartre's play is believed to have been based on the infamous Scottsboro case, in which two white prostitutes accused nine black teenagers of rape on a train traveling through Alabama in 1931.
The Negro escapes, and the other white men spread the rumour that he had raped Lizzie, so that Thomas shooting the other black man would become acceptable.
He asks her to testify for him that he did not harm her in front of the judge, because the Whites want to charge him in court.
She refuses to go to the police, but agrees that if they force her to testify, she will tell the truth, but when he tries to hide in her house, she sends him away.
He tries in many different ways to get Lizzie to go to the police and testify against The Negro, but Lizzie says no to everything and refuses to falsely testify that the black man raped her, when in reality, she was being harassed by white men on the train and the black men defended her.
Scene III features John and James, the two policemen who were previously only heard speaking from offstage.
Either The Negro, who "hangs around, robs and sings"[1] or Thomas, "an officer, Harvard student and good American".
Lizzie explains to the men knocking on the door that she has not hidden The Negro, because she was raped by him.
They talk briefly about the differences between black and white people, during which Lizzie also sees similarities between her and The Negro.
The Respectful Prostitute explores the theme of racism in the American South in the 1940s.
