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 18
... seen as a fantasmatic threat , the woman remains unheeded ; seen as a victim , she becomes an object of condescending pity . As I have indicated , such reifying representations helped to sta- bilize dominant models of selfhood , to ...
... seen as a fantasmatic threat , the woman remains unheeded ; seen as a victim , she becomes an object of condescending pity . As I have indicated , such reifying representations helped to sta- bilize dominant models of selfhood , to ...
Page 34
... seen why this is so : if the individual is not accorded primacy as the locus and agent of change , then character risks becoming something that is manu- factured externally . In laying the ground for a science of human nature ...
... seen why this is so : if the individual is not accorded primacy as the locus and agent of change , then character risks becoming something that is manu- factured externally . In laying the ground for a science of human nature ...
Page 116
... seen , despite its more obvious motive , as a function of her unassimilability to the more strictly economic per- spective he embodies . Barton reacts to Esther's " faded finery " and painted face but he fails to intepret them as ...
... seen , despite its more obvious motive , as a function of her unassimilability to the more strictly economic per- spective he embodies . Barton reacts to Esther's " faded finery " and painted face but he fails to intepret them as ...
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