Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

Download or read book Tainted Souls and Painted Faces written by Amanda Anderson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.