The Painted Girls Character Analysis

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” (Winston Churchill). The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is a novel told in the perspective of two sisters, Marie and Antoinette van Goethem, living in 19th century Paris as part of society’s lower class. The two are forced to go into various types of work following their father’s death and their lives spiral down from there. Meanwhile, Gas Girls, a play by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, follows two young women, Gigi and Lola, who work in the sex trade in Zimbabwe’s depressed economy. The two stories parallel each other in a variety of ways, including the fact that they both follow two young women as main characters, and that each of these women are part of the proletariat class. However, even though the characters in the novel and play are both extremely low in society, the Gas Girls act more optimistic about their life than The Painted Girls, giving them the potential to rise in society in the future. Gigi and Lola support each other when …show more content…
Parisian society believes that the low is low no matter what, but those that do not do ‘honest work’ are even worse. In The Painted Girls, Antoinette is acquainted with a girl named Colette who says she works at the house of Madame Brossard, and Antoinette discovers that she is one of these people that do not do ‘honest work’. Antoinette remarks about Colette that
She is not the smallest bit modest, the smallest bit shy about heaving breasts, her pretty calves, her plump lips. Not an hour ago she was lifting her skirts and taunting Pierre Gille and calling out for the world to hear, ‘It isn’t free.’ All of it says there is only one possibility: The house of Madame Brossard is a brothel, a shuttered house of Paris. (Buchanan