Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture

Amanda Anderson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501722684
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Mid-Victorian Conceptions of Character, Agency, and Reform: Social Science and the “Great Social Evil”

In the sixth and final book of his System of Logic, John Stuart Mill shifts his attention from the science of logic to “the logic of the moral sciences," setting forth a series of propositions for the development of a new science, ethology, which will establish the laws that determine the formation of human character. For Mill, the science of ethology will in turn provide the necessary foundation for a more broadly conceived science of society, insofar as the character of society ultimately derives from “the laws of individual human nature.”1 Mill’s remarks in Book VI of the Logic remain somewhat sketchy and tentative, more in the manner of a prospectus than a complete demonstration, and he had hoped to extend the ideas in a later work, which he never in fact wrote. But precisely because of the methodical way in which Mill circles round and never quite secures his new science, the beginning of Book VI serves as a particularly apt introduction to mid-Victorian conceptions of agency and selfhood, and of individual and social identity. Mill’s distinctive style of internal debate, his addiction to arguing both sides of the question, dramatizes the philosophical and social predicaments that inform Victorian debates on individual character and social reform.2

This chapter is intended to set the context for an understanding of the Victorian category of fallenness, which I identified in the Introduction as a historically determined, and typically gendered, conception of attenuated autonomy or fractured identity. In order to introduce the cultural context for the analysis of fallenness, I begin with Mill’s discussion of character, setting it in relation not only to the broader Victorian intellectual milieu but also to Mill’s approaches to selfhood and agency in On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and the Autobiography. I show how Mill negotiates the tension between materialist and idealist conceptions of the self, and I identify the assumptions about gender that underlie and trouble Victorian debates on the determinants of character and human action. In this context I then analyze nonliterary accounts of prostitution in the Victorian period.

A Science of Human Nature

Mill’s project in the final book of the Logic is to set the “sciences of man” on a firm foundation by applying “the methods of Physical Science” to the study of human nature and society. In order for this positivistic project to be possible, Mill tells us in his “Introductory Remarks,” a first and potentially fatal objection must be dispelled. “Are the actions of human beings, like all other natural events, subject to invariable laws? Does that constancy of causation, which is the foundation of every scientific theory of successive phenomena, really obtain among them?” Mill devotes the following chapter, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” to an extended demonstration that these questions can in fact be answered in the affirmative. In thus defending the doctrine of philosophical necessity, however, Mill takes pains to distinguish it from a mechanical determinism, with which it is often, in his view, erroneously equated. For Mill, the claim embodied in the doctrine of philosophical necessity is simply that any human conduct is ultimately intelligible as the effect of a complex interplay among disposition, character, and circumstances:

Correctly conceived, the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual’s mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred: that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event.

This doctrine, according to Mill, need not conflict with our “feeling of freedom,” our sense that we perform our acts voluntarily. Indeed, to know fully the circumstances and character of another person is precisely to know how he or she shall “will to act in a particular case”: “We may be free, and yet another may have reason to be perfectly certain what use we shall make of our freedom.”3

Although the doctrine of necessity need not conflict with our “feeling of freedom,” it turns out that it frequently does. For Mill, reason and analysis can demonstrate with clarity that the doctrine of necessity is not a fatalism, yet the imagination conceives the case differently and ascribes a “mysterious compulsion” to the relation between cause and effect, where all that really obtains is “uniformity of order” or “mere constancy of succession.” “Even if the reason repudiates, the imagination retains, the feeling of some more intimate connexion, of some peculiar tie, or mysterious constraint exercised by the antecedent over the consequent.” Ultimately, Mill insists that this melodramatic conception of causation, which is evoked most frequently by the critics of necessitarianism, does not obtain even in the physical world of inanimate objects, as “the best philosophical authorities” recognize (a reference to Hume and his followers).4 But of more interest is his remark that this misconception nonetheless “exist[s] more or less obscurely in the minds of most necessitarians, however they may in words disavow it.”5

That Mill himself was susceptible to an anxious fatalism is well documented in the Autobiography. While the famous mental crisis Mill describes undergoing in 1826–27 is not exclusively about questions of determinism, in looking back Mill senses that prior to his discovery of poetry and the “internal culture of the individual,” he had been a “mere reasoning machine,” his feelings worn away by “the habit of analysis.” Likewise, he is deeply impressed when he later discovers that his companions at that time had viewed him as a “‘made’ or manufactured man.” More important for present purposes, we also learn in the Autobiography that Mill was subject to subsequent periods of dejection in which “the doctrine of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an incubus. I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agendes beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power.”6 Mill goes on to report that, after devoting much time to the subject, he was finally able to see his way clear to the arguments that he would present most fully in the Logic, arguments that extend beyond the defense of moral freedom I have already sketched. Briefly, Mill cuts through the Gordian knot of necessity by asserting that although our characters are determined by circumstances, we ourselves are able to influence those very circumstances that determine us. As E. P. Thompson might put it, though we are all made characters, we participate in our own making.

Mill’s accounts of his own bouts of dejection in the Autobiography, as well as his sympathetic discussion of how liable even the most rational necessitarians are to feelings of fatalism, genuinely acknowledge the force of deterministic thinking even as they claim to have transcended it. Although he believes strongly that he has reasoned through the problem, Mill does not disavow his own grapplings with a dispiriting fatalism to which, in his view, everyone is vulnerable. Yet a strange gendered image appears in the passage from the Autobiography: the doctrine of philosophical necessity, we are told, “weighed on [his] existence like an incubus.” Originally a personified representation of the nightmare, an incubus is an evil demon supposed to descend upon people during sleep and especially to have sexual intercourse with women. The image thus casts Mill’s own apprehension of being a fully determined subject in explicitly sexual and feminine terms: for Mill, to feel that he lacks autonomy as a deliberative, rational subject is tantamount to being sexually ravaged while he remains unconscious and helpless. Significantly, Mill does not use the term succubus, which would have allowed him to retain a masculine subject-position.

Mill here produces an intellectualist version of the rhetoric of fallenness, which more generally constitutes fallen women as subjects whose characters have “been formed... by agencies beyond [their] control.” The supple logic that informs this rhetoric is most tellingly revealed in such reversals as this, where the experience of being determined is portrayed in sexualized, feminine terms. In fact, a muted version of this same rhetoric appears in the passage from the Logic in which Mill describes the erroneous apprehension of necessity. In the act of imaginative feeling that overshadows rational conviction, one conceives of the relation between antecedent and consequent as a “more intimate connexion,” a “peculiar tie,” a “mysterious constraint.”7 My suggestion here is not that Mill seeks to relegate fatalism to a discredited feminine realm of the imagination or feelings—after all, it is the insistent “feeling of freedom” that will require Mill’s own repudiation of a too-stark determinism. Rather, I wish to emphasize that Mill imagines determinism as a kind of excessive intimacy, which then transmutes, through the mediating word “tie,” into a form of constraint. One might be tempted to read this description of the power of antecedents over consequents as Mill’s displaced anxiety about deriving a little too directly from his own paternal antecedent, his experience of the filial “tie” as a little too constraining.8 But the evocation of a relation at once unfamiliar (“peculiar,” “mysterious”) and intimate conforms more generally to the rhetorical pattern I am identifying. In an oblique way, Mill here once again figures the alienating apprehension of oneself as the mere effect of prior causes in terms of an inappropriate intimacy.

Mill’s reelaboration of the doctrine of necessity, and in particular the form his theory of character begins to assume, further develops the ways in which gendered categories govern Victorian approaches to the question of agency. In the Logic Mill explicitly criticizes the Owenite doctrine of the formation of character; and, as I shall take up later, he also seeks to revise or recast principles that inform the associationism of his father and the Benthamites.

The Owenites were a group of early socialist reformers who subscribed to the writings of Robert Owen, a Welsh factory owner who first became known for his experiments in labor management at the Scottish cotton factory of New Lanark. Owen documents his transformation of the New Lanark factory in his Essays on the Formation of Human Character. As he tells it, when he first assumed the stewardship of the factory, the population “possessed almost all the vices and very few of the virtues of a social community. Theft and the receipt of stolen goods was their trade, idleness and drunkenness their habit, falsehood and deception their garb, dissensions civil and religious their daily practice; they united only in a zealous systematic opposition to their employers.” By Owen’s account, his managerial intervention is simple, bloodless, and instantly successful. He merely reveals to the workers that they will derive “immediate benefits” if they alter their conduct, demonstrating that their present behavior produces a host of evils. Appealing to their reason, Owen explains that a cultivated habit of industry, along with sympathy, friendship, and understanding, “would soon render that place a paradise, which, from the most mistaken principles of action, they now made the abode of misery.” These simple truths are adopted, and the community is transformed: the workers “became industrious, temperate, healthy; faithful to their employers, and kind to each other.” Or, more epigrammatically, “They were taught to be rational, and they acted rationally.”9

Owen primarily intends his utopian narrative to illustrate a radical conception of character formation, one that can justify the most ambitious and far-reaching projects of social transformation. As he puts it in the famous passage from the Essays,

Every day will make it more and more evident that the character of man, is, without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly created by his predecessors; that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it p...