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 89
... reading the self , one loses the self . If we miss noticing this , that is because the Victorian fallen woman conventionally engages in tortured moments of self- reading : there is a perfect match here between a dominant conven- tion ...
... reading the self , one loses the self . If we miss noticing this , that is because the Victorian fallen woman conventionally engages in tortured moments of self- reading : there is a perfect match here between a dominant conven- tion ...
Page 126
... reading subject humanizes the text , the text humanizes the reading subject . Of course , the encounter that follows this idealized act of reading - embracing a corpse - is , as I suggested earlier , quite a different matter . The ...
... reading subject humanizes the text , the text humanizes the reading subject . Of course , the encounter that follows this idealized act of reading - embracing a corpse - is , as I suggested earlier , quite a different matter . The ...
Page 157
... reading in general . However , to the extent that the concrete delimited entity of the book — and not sheer language or text - figures the concrete other , the potentially precarious activity of reading and even distinguishing the other ...
... reading in general . However , to the extent that the concrete delimited entity of the book — and not sheer language or text - figures the concrete other , the potentially precarious activity of reading and even distinguishing the other ...
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