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 37
... Women : “ All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men ; not self- will , and government by self - control , but submission , and yielding to the ...
... Women : “ All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men ; not self- will , and government by self - control , but submission , and yielding to the ...
Page 41
... women . Victorian domestic ideologues named particular feminine vices that women should guard against : vanity , caprice , self - indulgence , artifice.39 These vices evoke a prevalent cultural conception of the self - centered or ...
... women . Victorian domestic ideologues named particular feminine vices that women should guard against : vanity , caprice , self - indulgence , artifice.39 These vices evoke a prevalent cultural conception of the self - centered or ...
Page 42
... women cultivate faculties that extend beyond “ selfish gratification , " dedicating themselves to " the great end of promoting the happiness of those around them . " / 40 The doctrine of the separate spheres , and of women's role as ...
... women cultivate faculties that extend beyond “ selfish gratification , " dedicating themselves to " the great end of promoting the happiness of those around them . " / 40 The doctrine of the separate spheres , and of women's role 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