Cornell University Press
Tainted Souls and Painted Faces
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About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory and Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment and coeditor of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.
Reviews
Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties.
---As the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction
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1. Mid-Victorian Conceptions of Character, Agency, and Reform: Social Science and the “Great Social Evil”
22 -
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2. “The Taint the Very Tale Conveyed” : Self-Reading, Suspicion, and Fallenness in Dickens
66 -
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3· Melodrama, Morbidity, and Unthinking Sympathy: Gaskell' s Mary Barton and Ruth
108 -
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4 . Dramatic Monologue in Crisis: Agency and Exchange in D. G. Rossetti's “Jenny”
141 -
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5 . Reproduced in Finer Motions: Encountering the Fallen in Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
167 -
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Afterword: Intersubjectivity and the Politics of Poststructuralism
198 -
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Works Cited
235 -
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Index
245
