Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian CultureProstitute, 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. |
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Page 44
... Greg's account more generally works to attribute prostitution to social factors , holding up poverty as the prime determining cause . That is , Greg's dismissal of the woman's sexual agency is accompanied by a shift away from reductive ...
... Greg's account more generally works to attribute prostitution to social factors , holding up poverty as the prime determining cause . That is , Greg's dismissal of the woman's sexual agency is accompanied by a shift away from reductive ...
Page 54
... Greg underscores social inequities among the vicious . By the time we reach the emphatic " may not pause — may NOT recover , " we understand it as the potent force of opinion and social decree , and not as any natural moral law ...
... Greg underscores social inequities among the vicious . By the time we reach the emphatic " may not pause — may NOT recover , " we understand it as the potent force of opinion and social decree , and not as any natural moral law ...
Page 58
... Greg simultaneously accentuates the fallen woman's utter susceptibility to public opinion . On some level , in fact , the woman's own sense of unreclaimability must be inter- preted as false consciousness . For if the social discourse ...
... Greg simultaneously accentuates the fallen woman's utter susceptibility to public opinion . On some level , in fact , the woman's own sense of unreclaimability must be inter- preted as false consciousness . For if the social discourse ...
Contents
Social Science and the Great Social Evil | 22 |
SelfReading | 66 |
Agency and Exchange | 141 |
Copyright | |
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action aesthetic agency Annie anxiety approach argues Aurora Leigh autonomy Barrett Browning Barrett Browning's becomes chapter character Charles Dickens claim communicative conception consciousness constitutes critics critique David Copperfield desire determined Dickens Dickens's discourse discussion Dombey Dombey and Son Dombey's Edith Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elizabeth Gaskell encounter Esther face fall fallen woman feminine feminist fiction figure Gaskell's gender Greg Habermas human ideal identity individual insists insofar intersubjective Jenny Jenny's John Stuart Mill Laclau literary Magdalenism Mary Barton masculine melodrama Mill Mill's moral narrative normative novel perspective poem political poststructuralism poststructuralist precisely prostitute prostitute's purity reading reform relation representation reveals rhetoric of fallenness Romney Romney's Rossetti's Ruth Ruth's scene self-reading selfhood sexual social society speaker Spivak story strategic essentialism Subaltern Studies sympathetic sympathy systemic Tait tension theory transformation Urania Cottage Victorian culture virtue W. R. Greg women writes