Slaves to fashion : dress and the "fallen woman" in the novels of George Eliot

Mariana Valverde's article, The Love of Finery and the Fallen Woman," explores the intimate connection Victorian moralists often made between a girl's descent into prostitution and her desire for elaborate dress. Though Valverde's analysis focuses on middle-class attempts to control working-class morality, her observation that virtue and dress were closely linked in the Victorian Mind pinpoints a key association in the works of George Eliot an author who was especially interested in investigating how women might and should live their lives.For Eliot, the connection between a woman's failure to develop the mature quality of "moral sympathy," the ability to empathize with those around her, was often tied to an exaggerated interest in dress and appearance, an interest encouraged by women's social and financial dependence. Drawing on the writings of earlier women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft andMargaret Fuller, Eliot suggests again and again in her novels that society's reluctance to educate women or to encourage their economic productivity relegates women to the position of children,creatures unable to consider the welfare of others. For Eliot, these women are "fallen," and they occupy the status typically relegated to the "fallen woman" figure in other Victorian works: they often are or become sexually promiscuous or engage in coquettish behavior and their role is often destructive.I relate references about dress to Eliot's presentation of the "fallen woman" as presented in her novels. I assert that through these references, Eliot condemns Victorian society's acculturation of women, a process which, Eliot implies, leads specifically to women's "immorality." Eliot's Denouncement of female education reflects her awareness of the social forces that limited women's ability to make moral choices. Feminine obsession with dress and appearance epitomizes these failures in both the individual and society.ivI analyze the changes in Eliot's treatment of the "fallen woman' In the later novels. ThatEliot moves from primarily focusing on working-class girls, who are led astray by wealthy gentlemen, to examining the issues of middle-class women who are seduced by middle-class materialism and feminine narcissism, indicates Eliot's increasing awareness of the complex forces which compelled women to "fall.'