In contrast to Hetty and Esther, Lydia's fallen state does not render her a victim, but an aggressor. Like a black widow spider she devours the men in her path, from triggering the death of her music teacher at the tender age of thirteen, to poisoning her first husband and sadistically marking Allan Armadale as her next victim.
Characterised as a devious, flame-haired and mercenary, she is described as having the "sexual sorcery" of a "siren" (383). While Hetty and Esther provide the tragic beginning and end of the "fallen woman," Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866) functions as a far more portentous figure. Similarly, Aunt Esther encapsulates the idea of a fallen woman's fate: we learn that she dies in desolation, "nought but skin and bone," desperate for a "spot to die in peace" (377). Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) is the quintessentially Victorian "fallen woman," that is, a lower-class maiden who is seduced by the idea of a life of "lace satin and jewels," and is sexually corrupted by a man above her station who has no desire to marry her. Each of the novels discussed here portrays a different interpretation of the "fallen woman." Essentially, any deviance from the paragon of ideal Victorian womanhood, the "angel of the house," insinuated that a woman's fall was imminent. During the Victorian period a woman's identity was indisputably intertwined with her sexual status a woman was either an untainted "maiden," a wife or mother (which placed her sexuality safely in the domestic sphere), or she was vilified by labels such as "spinster" or "whore," both of which had negative connotations, the former with sexual atrophy, the latter with deviant promiscuity. The term "fallen woman" refers to an irrevocable loss of innocence, a concept originating in the biblical fall in the Garden of Eden the characterisation of Eve as temptress inextricably links her fallen state with the loss of sexual purity. Click on them for large images, and for more information about them.
The illustrations all come from our own website.
0 kommentar(er)
