Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture

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Cornell University Press, Mar 15, 2018 - Literary Criticism - 250 pages

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
1 MidVictorian Conceptions of Character Agency and Reform Social Science and the Great Social Evil
22
2 The Taint the Very Tale Conveyed SelfReading Suspicion and Fallenness in Dickens
66
3 Melodrama Morbidity and Unthinking Sympathy Gaskell s Mary Barton and Ruth
108
4 Dramatic Monologue in Crisis Agency and Exchange in D G Rossettis Jenny
141
5 Reproduced in Finer Motions Encountering the Fallen in Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh
167
Afterword Intersubjectivity and the Politics of Poststructuralism
198
Works Cited
235
Index
245
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About the author (2018)

Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory and Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment and coeditor of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.