Tainted Souls and Painted Faces
The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture

Author(s)
Anderson, Amanda
Language
EnglishAbstract
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.
Keywords
Literature: history and criticism; Sex and sexuality, social aspectsISBN
9781501722677, 9781501727733, 9781501722684, 9780801427817Publisher
Cornell University PressPublisher website
cornellpress.cornell.eduPublication date and place
Ithaca, 1993Imprint
Cornell University PressSeries
Reading Women Writing,Classification
Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900
Gender studies: women