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 72
... seems to deny the woman any mediating consciousness . 13 The policy of forbidding reference to the women's histories thus repeats the same fantasy of severance that the policy of emigration does : both attempt to separate a self from ...
... seems to deny the woman any mediating consciousness . 13 The policy of forbidding reference to the women's histories thus repeats the same fantasy of severance that the policy of emigration does : both attempt to separate a self from ...
Page 76
... seems to delegitimate , the desired conversion to a stainless life . The prostitute seems at times to have 22. See Clive Emsley , Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 225–38 ; J. J. Tobias , Crime and Police in England 1700-1900 170 ...
... seems to delegitimate , the desired conversion to a stainless life . The prostitute seems at times to have 22. See Clive Emsley , Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 225–38 ; J. J. Tobias , Crime and Police in England 1700-1900 170 ...
Page 120
... seems to be written in the minor key ; indeed , the very design seems to me to require this treatment . I acknowl- edge the fault of there being too heavy a shadow over the book ; but I doubt if the story could have been deeply realized ...
... seems to be written in the minor key ; indeed , the very design seems to me to require this treatment . I acknowl- edge the fault of there being too heavy a shadow over the book ; but I doubt if the story could have been deeply realized ...
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