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 7
... agency within our current disciplines can sometimes mask the historically specific concerns with agency that the debates on fallenness were themselves enact- ing . While Walkowitz , Nead , and Mahood all point to tensions be- tween ...
... agency within our current disciplines can sometimes mask the historically specific concerns with agency that the debates on fallenness were themselves enact- ing . While Walkowitz , Nead , and Mahood all point to tensions be- tween ...
Page 144
... Agency The speaker of this poem does not simply refuse to talk to Jenny ; he has impulses to engage her that are checked by the apprehension that she is not a conscious , possibly not even an animate , being . Thus this poem does not ...
... Agency The speaker of this poem does not simply refuse to talk to Jenny ; he has impulses to engage her that are checked by the apprehension that she is not a conscious , possibly not even an animate , being . Thus this poem does not ...
Page 160
... agency is conflated with the possi- bility that the speaker cannot answer her desire : she is revolving his graces ... agency . To cede or to deny agency to Jenny , depending on its context , can be an attempt , on the speaker's part ...
... agency is conflated with the possi- bility that the speaker cannot answer her desire : she is revolving his graces ... agency . To cede or to deny agency to Jenny , depending on its context , can be an attempt , on the speaker's part ...
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