Tainted Souls and Painted Faces : : The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture / / Amanda Anderson.

• Superior document: Reading Women Writing
• VerfasserIn: Anderson, Amanda,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press,, [2018]; ©1993
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Reading women writing.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (251 pages).

Prostitute, 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Mid-Victorian Conceptions of Character, Agency, and Reform: Social Science and the "Great Social Evil" -- 2. "The Taint the Very Tale Conveyed" : Self-Reading, Suspicion, and Fallenness in Dickens -- 3· Melodrama, Morbidity, and Unthinking Sympathy: Gaskell' s Mary Barton and Ruth -- 4 . Dramatic Monologue in Crisis: Agency and Exchange in D. G. Rossetti's "Jenny" -- 5 . Reproduced in Finer Motions: Encountering the Fallen in Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh -- Afterword: Intersubjectivity and the Politics of Poststructuralism -- Works Cited -- Index