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 153
... relation between the sexual and economic re- mains fluid in the poem , and one category cannot be said to take precedence over the other , nor are they equated with one another in any simple way . On one level , the relation between the ...
... relation between the sexual and economic re- mains fluid in the poem , and one category cannot be said to take precedence over the other , nor are they equated with one another in any simple way . On one level , the relation between the ...
Page 171
... relation to poetry and thereby risks aestheticizing her , she uses the occasion not to reproduce but to interrogate and revise the distorting relation to the other that typifies Victorian inscriptions of impure femininity . By revising ...
... relation to poetry and thereby risks aestheticizing her , she uses the occasion not to reproduce but to interrogate and revise the distorting relation to the other that typifies Victorian inscriptions of impure femininity . By revising ...
Page 221
... relation is to the system and not to other subjects . Indeed , Foucauldian as well as Lacanian models fundamentally tend to read intersubjective relations as displaced confrontations between the subject and the system . The Lacanian ...
... relation is to the system and not to other subjects . Indeed , Foucauldian as well as Lacanian models fundamentally tend to read intersubjective relations as displaced confrontations between the subject and the system . The Lacanian ...
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