Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England

The plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature. In notable examples, Julia Grella O'Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian fallen woman was associated with music, reviving an ancient tradition conflating the practice of music with sin and the abandonment of music with holiness. The prominence of music symbolism in socially-committed, quasi-religious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, and in...
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The plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature. In notable examples, Julia Grella O'Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian fallen woman was associated with music, reviving an ancient tradition conflating the practice of music with sin and the abandonment of music with holiness. The prominence of music symbolism in socially-committed, quasi-religious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, and in Catholic-Wagnerian novels of George Moore, gives evidence of the survival of a pictorial language linking music with sin and conversion, and shows this language translated easily into the cultural lexicon of Victorian Britain.