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 23
... reason . Raymond Williams , for example , devotes a chapter of Culture and Society to Mill's essays on Bentham and Coleridge , noting that “ Mill's attempt to absorb , and by discrimination and discarding to unify , the truths alike of ...
... reason . Raymond Williams , for example , devotes a chapter of Culture and Society to Mill's essays on Bentham and Coleridge , noting that “ Mill's attempt to absorb , and by discrimination and discarding to unify , the truths alike of ...
Page 24
... reason to be perfectly certain what use we shall make of our freedom . " ' 3 Although the doctrine of necessity need not conflict with our “ feel- ing of freedom , " it turns out that it frequently does . For Mill , reason and analysis ...
... reason to be perfectly certain what use we shall make of our freedom . " ' 3 Although the doctrine of necessity need not conflict with our “ feel- ing of freedom , " it turns out that it frequently does . For Mill , reason and analysis ...
Page 40
... reason for the profound tensions and problems generated whenever sympathy and fallenness were spoken of together . The extreme model of determined selfhood represented by fallenness itself derives from an atomistic and sometimes even ...
... reason for the profound tensions and problems generated whenever sympathy and fallenness were spoken of together . The extreme model of determined selfhood represented by fallenness itself derives from an atomistic and sometimes even ...
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