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The fallen woman, long existent in patriarchal discourse and intensified by Victorian sexual ethics, succumbs to seduction or sensual desires, suffers social condemnation and ostracism, and eventually dies, either repentantly or shamelessly. The questions of female sexuality and feminine virtues are dealt with in The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and The Awakening. Daisy Buchanan, Jordan, and Myrtle, all three sexually 1 This paper was presented at the 11 International conference on World Literature held at North Dakota State University, U.S.A. from April 4–6, 2008. The paper is a continuation of an earlier paper entitled “Bad Girls, Food and Female Position in Contemporary World Literature Bestsellers” presented at the 10 International Conference on World Literature also held at North Dakota State University, U.S.A. from April 20–22, 2007. I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Allen Wittenborn, San Diego State University, for his generosity in providing me with useful materials, CDs and DVDs. I also wish to thank Dr. Ingo Peters, my colleague, for his valuable advice and constructive suggestions. 2 Associate Professor of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok transgressive women, are punished, with Myrtle, the most sexually aggressive, being subjected to an outrageous death penalty. Daisy Miller, upon engaging in acts of self-presentation and female appropriation of male space, undergoes social disapprobation and dies an untimely death. Edna, though boldly adopting a single sexual standard for both men and women and awakening to life’s independence and sexual freedom, eventually realizes there is no space for her and submerges herself in the ocean. In contrast, the recent contemporary narrative pattern deconstructs the myth of the fallen woman and allows the fallen woman to live and prosper. The fallen woman, traditionally a secondary character who is considered a threat to the virtuous heroine, has emerged as a major or central character with a revolutionary power that both conquers and heals. Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café acknowledge female mobility and sexual freedom and appropriate a space hitherto denied to fallen women. Eva Bates and Gertrudis, satiating female sexual desires and representing eroticized female bodies, overturn the traditional narrative of falling and dying by becoming competent and worthy members of society. Tita and Vianne are central heroines who challenge the cult of true womanhood, embody the sexualized New Woman and display strength and personal power, making them pillars of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how selected contemporary popular novels overthrow the myth of the fallen woman and explore how these literary works defy feminine virtues set by patriarchal gender rules, appropriate female space and mobility and assert female sexual freedom. Three novels From Whore to Heroine 25 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, namely, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and The Awakening are selected and discussed concurrently so as to provide a background, set the tone and illustrate earlier-ultimately-unsuccessful attempts of varying urgency to challenge the status quo. The unresolved issues raised by these novels have led to the growing intensity and culmination of female defiance and the smashing of the tradition in three contemporary works, namely, Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, all of which can be considered as representing fully-fledged feminist discourse. The paper focuses on the dialog these contemporary texts have with one another and illustrate how they concertedly deconstruct the myth of the fallen woman and redefine female sexuality. Laura Esquivel, a Mexican, Joanne Harris, who is British, and Fannie Flagg, an American, are contemporary women writers whose works are best-selling contemporary popular fiction and have been made into globally successful films. Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café have enjoyed a worldwide readership and, simultaneously, have been taught either as fiction or film adaptations in a number of schools and universities. Originally published in 1989, Laura Esquivel’s first novel, Como Agua Para Chocolate, became a bestseller in the author’s home country, Mexico. It has been translated into thirty languages and the English version, Like Water for Chocolate, enjoyed similar success in the United States as well as in many other countries. Based on the book, the film with a screenplay by Esquivel herself, swept the Ariel awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, winning eleven in all, and went on to become one of the most popular international films of the past few decades. In 1994 Like Water for Chocolate won the prestigious ABBY Award, which is given annually by the American Booksellers Association. The book and the film have won Esquivel rapid international acclaim. Subsequent to her two obscure early novels, Joanne Harris published Chocolat in 1999. The novel immediately made her one of the most celebrated contemporary British novelists. Chocolat became a bestseller not only in the United Kingdom but also in the United States. In 2000, the novel was made into a successful motion picture which artfully combines sensual evocativeness and touches of the supernatural. Often described as folksy, Pulitzer Prizenominated Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, written by comedian, actress, producer and author Fanny Flagg, in 1987, remained for thirty six weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller charts. This second novel brought Flagg unexpected overnight success and was released as Fried Green Tomatoes by Universal Studios in 1991. The script, co-written by Flagg and Director/Producer Joe Avnet, received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay based on material previously published. Fannie Flagg also narrated Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café for an audio edition in 1992 and received a Grammy Award for her recording of the novel. All these three bestsellers subtly interweave the issues of female position and examine them from a female MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities 11.2, 2008 26 perspective. Prevalent in these works are female identity, sexuality and autonomy. These authors have repudiated the patriarchal notion of feminine nature as binary. They have explored to a great extent the frame of female identity, the pattern of female sexuality and the possibility of female autonomy. Together they have deconstructed the long-running myth of the fallen woman and have redefined female sexuality so that it truthfully and realistically reflects the true nature of women. Throughout male literary history, woman has been depicted as the embodiment of either virtue or evil. As Abrams (1999: 90) puts it, images of women are often represented as tending to fall into two antithetic patterns. On the one side are idealized projections of men’s desires— the Madonna, the Muses of the arts, Dante’s Beatrice, the pure and innocent virgin and the “Angel in the House.” On the other side are demonic projections of men’s sexual resentment and terror—Eve and Pandora as the sources of all evil, destructive sensual temptresses such as Delilah and Circe, the malign witch and castrating mothers. Lois Tyson (1999: 88) agrees that there are only two identities a woman can have. She can be either a “good girl” or a “bad girl.” These two roles, as referred to in more modern terms as “angel” and “bitch,” define women in terms of male desire and sexuality. The two opposing images of women as “good girls” and “bad girls” were further fortified by the Victorian feminine ideal and the cult of true womanhood in the nineteenth century. The ideal woman was viewed as submissive, modest, unassuming, self-sacrificing, pious and above all, pure, while the perfect wife was made to be submissive to her husband, selflessly devoted to her children and excelling in the arts of family life. Her principal virtues included submission, the man dictating all actions and decisions; domesticity, the home being the woman’s domain where she made “a haven in a heartless world”; piety, the woman having a strong faith in God and leading a religious life; and, most importantly, purity, the woman being spiritually and bodily pure and innocent. Victorian sexual and marital ideology reinforced the discrimination between men and women earlier instituted by science and the church. Science analyzed women as intellectually and emotionally weak and the church believed women needed the strong guidance of morally superior men to attain spiritual development. This consensus produced a code of etiquette which rigidly protected women from their inherent weaknesses. Victorian sexual purity and propriety not only strengthened the edicts of science and the church but also exerted a significant influence on women’s lives and women in literature. Living in a male-dominated society, women were forced to be weak and passive. Women were looked on as unnatural if they were too forceful in their actions and emotions. Worse, they were frowned upon if they expressed their sexuality too blatantly. Battan elaborates on the misbelief of female sexuality: The cornerstone of this interconnected set of beliefs (of science and the church) was the “passionless” woman. Rejecting the long-standing belief in the insatiability of women’s sexual desires, nineteenth-century ministers, moralists, and physicians argued that the sexual drives of women were much weaker than those of men. Unlike the raw sensual urges From Whore to Heroine 27 that drove male desire, they insisted that women’s erotic impulses were shaped by maternal instincts and a social conscience, and were spiritual in nature. (Battan 2004: 603) The Victorians believed passion to be deviant; thoughts of sexuality would cause insanity and,

From Whore to Heroine: Deconstructing the Myth of the Fallen Woman and Redefining Female Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fiction