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 6
... question of agency itself , ones that include but are not exhausted by apprehensions of the power of environment ... questions of agency , although within the context of American naturalism and turn - of - the- century American culture ...
... question of agency itself , ones that include but are not exhausted by apprehensions of the power of environment ... questions of agency , although within the context of American naturalism and turn - of - the- century American culture ...
Page 18
... question : are we to interpret Victorian fallenness as a distorted and false understanding of human agency , or ... question whether or not to endorse the model of fallen subjectivity dovetails with another question of theoretical import ...
... question : are we to interpret Victorian fallenness as a distorted and false understanding of human agency , or ... question whether or not to endorse the model of fallen subjectivity dovetails with another question of theoretical import ...
Page 27
... question of agency . In the Logic Mill explicitly criticizes the Owenite doctrine of the formation of character ; and , as I shall take up later , he also seeks to revise or recast principles that inform the associationism of his father ...
... question of agency . In the Logic Mill explicitly criticizes the Owenite doctrine of the formation of character ; and , as I shall take up later , he also seeks to revise or recast principles that inform the associationism of his father ...
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