Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde5/31/2023 Certainly the theme of the fallen woman may be said to have interested Dante Gabriel Rossetti almost to the point of obsession. Fallen in the feminine, however-understood as any sort of sexual activity on the part of women out of wedlock, whether or not for gain-exerted a peculiar fascination on the imagination of nineteenth-century artists, not to speak of writers, social critics, and uplifters, an interest that reached its peak in England in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and that perhaps received its characteristic formulation in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends. In art, fallen in the masculine tended to inspire rather boring sculptural monuments and sarcophagi. “It's a queer thing,” muses a young woman in one of Rose Macaulay's novels, written shortly after the First World War, “how 'fallen' in the masculine means killed in the war, and in the feminine given over to a particular kind of vice.” The sexual asymmetry peculiar to the notion of falling is worth considering, especially in the nineteenth century, when both aspects were taken more seriously than they are today.
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