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 6
... social control directed at the prostitute but also the forms of social protest and critique = focused on this figure . But while their approach reconfigures the fallen woman's position within the social field , it does not directly ...
... social control directed at the prostitute but also the forms of social protest and critique = focused on this figure . But while their approach reconfigures the fallen woman's position within the social field , it does not directly ...
Page 45
... social data , monitoring the poor , and influencing the development of policy . The Statistical Society of London , founded in 1834 , included Edwin Chadwick , who prepared the Poor Law ... Social Science and the " Great Social Evil " 45.
... social data , monitoring the poor , and influencing the development of policy . The Statistical Society of London , founded in 1834 , included Edwin Chadwick , who prepared the Poor Law ... Social Science and the " Great Social Evil " 45.
Page 46
... social problems be significantly challenged . 50 It is certainly true that the category of character was prominent in social reformist literature , yet to interpret this literature too ex- clusively from the vantage point of developed ...
... social problems be significantly challenged . 50 It is certainly true that the category of character was prominent in social reformist literature , yet to interpret this literature too ex- clusively from the vantage point of developed ...
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