Ami McKay’s second novel, The Virgin Cure, is a finely crafted and remarkably researched tale of twelve-year-old Moth, a girl born into poverty in nineteenth-century New York, deserted by her father and sold into domestic work by her mother. Moth comes to understand that beauty is her commodity, and she finds eventual escape in a brothel that delivers virginity to well-paying men. “We eat, drink and sleep like royal mistresses, and care for nobody on earth,” a young woman explains to Moth, when she invites the starving, homeless girl to join her at Miss Emma Everett’s house as a “gentleman’s companion.”
Despite experiencing manipulation and exploitation at every turn, and a life lived under the threat of disease, rape, and death, Moth is never painted as a victim; her grown-up agency to survive without support is as apparent as her hope for the kind of familial love that can protect a child. She serves her unworthy mother with fierce, blind loyalty, yet longs for The Good Mother of her invention, where she “could hardly breathe for the warmth of her embrace.” All of Moth’s longings are for better options than she has been given, whether stealing, begging, serving, or selling her “purity” to the highest bidder.
Most vital to McKay’s narrative is the assertion that Moth is not a girl to be saved, despite the best efforts of Dr. Sadie, the female doctor who serves the brothel’s inhabitants and offers piercing historical insight into the sexism and suffering of their time. The girls the doctor attends have fates like this one, used as a cautionary tale to dissuade Moth from her chosen profession: “She hid in the draperies and cried, begging him to leave her alone, but he grabbed her from where she was hiding and forced himself on her.” Even after the doctor takes Moth to visit this girl, now suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, Moth remains eager to return to the brothel.
McKay is not preoccupied with Moth’s mistakes nor her downfall, but rather with how she navigates a terrain of injustice — a unique achievement when our modern narrative makes victims of sex workers. While set in the past, the book informs the modern dialogue on feminism, the sex trade, and choice, summed up by the madam’s refrain that “clearly the girl knows her own mind.”
