The ‘Fallen woman’: pure and impure bodies in the Victorian England

The 'Fallen woman'

Image: G F Watts, Found Drowned, c.1848-1850, © Watts Gallery

This image depicts a ‘fallen woman,’ a genre that once prevailed in the art and literary realms of Victorian English society. Throughout the historical period, these ‘fallen women’ drastically transformed society’s conception and understanding of the body. These paintings and literatures often lacks a specified name, but all falls all under the same category of 'fallen women'. The scenes described and portrayed in these arts are real-life resemblances of women rejected by and excluded from society due to different circumstances of sexual ‘impurity'. The categorical classification of these paintings evident by the lack of an individual name obliterates and de-individualized the personal identity of the subject being depicted, as all 'fallen women' are invariably judged and executed under the same gender virtue with no exception, which made their individuality insignifcant in the Victorian Age. As this image displayed, the woman is lying on the ground lifelessly, facing-up but with her eyes closed. The lower part of her body is ambiguous and obscure, as her dress sinks into the darkness of the water that may represents the desperate, irrevocable abyss, the legitimatized punishment she deserves, which is also the ultimate, absolute end of all 'fallen women' like her. 

The Victorian Age established vastly different gender virtues for men and women. While men are expected to be physically strong and allowed to be morally weak, women are always expected to be the direct opposite, physically weak but morally strong to provide emotional support for their mentally vulnerable husbands. Thus, the Victorian gender ideology forms a segregated society between men and women, purity and impurity, and public and private life. Men are legitimized for their morally corrupted behaviors, such as getting drunk and being unable to resist external sexual temptations (like promiscuous sexual practices and prostitution), whereas women are restricted to morality and motherhood only, with any other inappropriate sexual attempt or action all recognized as the failure to defend sexual profanity and the loss of gender virtue, integrity, and purity under the judgment of bodies by the society (Braun 2015: 352, 356).

According to Douglas, the concept of purity and impurity works similarly to “primitive” (“modern”) rituals and body politics. Physical bodies were given symbolic meanings, incorporating all separate elements and diverse experiences into the same framework of social hierarchy and sexual value. During the Victorian era in which these images were popularized, a subsequent system of social hierarchy is invented base on body values, with reinforcing orders and rules placing all ‘fallen women’ automatically onto the lowest level of both the social and the purity scale. Moreover, as Douglas argues, the resulting punitive purification of impure bodies are not punishments, but a positive contribution to the ultimate atonement, a necessary exercise to relate bodily forms of life to functions (Douglas [1996] 2013:142). While middle- and high-class young girls are nurtured in accordance with the purity scale to become ideal women who restrict themselves only as faithful housewives and are morally strong enough to defend against sexual seductions, lower-class women who are forced to survive through prostitution are constantly attacked and disgusted, both as the deserving outcome of their dirtiness, moral corruption, and the lack of purity that constructed them as ‘dirty bodies’, and as exemplifications of necessary acts that are positively encouraged to maintain systematic order through disposing these bodies. Thus, social values and virtues are being visualized, painted into arts and written into the literature to be publicly displayed, which can always incite wide attention and spark discourses to enforce the functional understanding of bodies expected by the society.

English society at the time operated in a similar manner as the Indian caste system, with all women heavily burdened by the sexual ideology to remain the ‘purity’ of their bodies that has been bundled into social orders and laws to enforce hierarchy, privileges, and rights. As Douglas states, sexuality for women is always the dangerous boundary placed under constant surveillance, as the caste membership of an individual depends on the mother, restricting women from any sexual activities with men from a lower caste to protect both the caste status and purity of the lineage. Female purity is carefully watched and guarded, with women who conduct sexual practices with lower-caste men brutally punished under the name of impurity (Douglas [1996] 2013:155). Likewise, despite the thriving and proliferation of prostitution during the period, as this image explicitly illustrates, women who fall under this domain that are unable to resist sexual seduction and temptation, are denied status and rights, banished from the higher society, and left abandoned to death due to their self-indulgence and disrupted purity as ‘matters out of the social place'. 

Douglas’s work transformed the meaning of bodies, gender and sexuality under the social institution of value and hierarchy. Through the scale of sexual purity, disparate bodies and different experiences are placed onto a standardized, universal scale, which sets the boundary of social systems and code cultural values to generate and attribute different meanings to every single body. Under the interconnected mechanism of gender and sexual purity that operates within the society, biological binary becomes the social category that produce structural privileges and rights. Although men in the caste system are also strongly exhorted to avoid any sexual contact with women regardless of their caste status, women in both the Indian caste society and Victorian England are judged with harsher, more rigorous moral standards rooted in the constructed notion of body purity. Within both contexts, referring to Douglas's argument, the transformation of social worthiness and value into gendered bodies and ritual practices enacted upon them became the pathway to create, maintain, and enforce hierarchy and status differences in the symbolic reality (Douglas [1996] 2013:158-159). 

Source:

Douglas, M. 2013. Purity and danger. Routledge.

Braun, G. 2015. “untarnished purity”: Ethics, agency, and the victorian fallen woman. Women’s Studies 44(3): 342–367.

Sennett, A. 2022. Purity in Victorian England. ArcGIS StoryMapsAvailable at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2e258784cbf0461eb56abe55e64d714a (verified 21 April 2025).