ABSTRACT
IF VICTORIAN patriarchs shared this concern with the father of criminal anthropology, the popular fare of the nineteenth-century melodramatic stage frequently allayed this anxiety by reversing the formula. For the most part, at their worst Victorian heroines were fallen but recuperable. In Lombroso’s typology of “female offenders,” most Victorian villainesses would have been categorized as “occasional offenders,” women like the immensely popular Lady Isabel of East Lynne (1862) whose unrestrained passion meets unparalleled punishment. After the spectacle of Isabel’s abjection, the explicit warning-“Lady-wife-mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake!”2-is almost subversive in its superfluity. It would appear to serve not only to remind female spectators of the shaky foundation upon which their own claims to respectability had been erected, but also to blur the distinction between “bad” and “good” women. The message that any woman might become a Lady Isabel if she lost her footing may have struck terror in the hearts of women, but it also might have provoked more anxiety in the eyes of men. The trajectory of “normal” femininity and that of “fallen” womanhood were not two parallel lines incapable of meeting; on the contrary, a slippery slope lay between the two states. This could not have failed to disconcert the keepers of a social order who relied on a stable and circumscribed image of woman. Like Lombroso’s troublesome occasional offenders, who were repentant and open to rehabilitation, fallen women differed only in circumstances from normal women.
