Sexuality and Danger Theme Analysis

“Not but what beauty is a sad snare. Here was Esther so puffed up that there was no holding her in.”

So with this consciousness she had early determined that her beauty should make her a lady; the rank she coveted the more for her father’s abuse; the rank at which she firmly believed her lost Aunt Esther had arrived.

“Tell me, Margaret,” said Mary, taking her apron down from her eyes, and looking at Margaret with eager anxiety, “what can I do to bring him back to me? Should I write to him?”

“No,” replied her friend, “that would not do. Men are so queer, they like to have a’ the courting to themselves.”

“How can I keep her from being such a one as I am; such a wretched, loathsome creature! She was listening just as I listened, and loving just as I loved, and the end will be just like my end. How shall I save her?”

What were these hollow vanities to her, now that she had discovered the passionate secret of her soul? She felt as if she almost hated Mr Carson, who had decoyed her with his baubles. […] She had hitherto been walking in grope-light toward a precipice; but in the clear revelation of that past hour she saw her danger, and turned away resolutely and for ever.

For, be it remembered, she had the innocence, or the ignorance, to believe his intentions honourable; and he, feeling that at any price he must have her, only that he would obtain her as cheaply as he could, had never undeceived her[.]

To whom shall the outcast prostitute tell her tale? Who will give her help in the day of need? Hers is a leper sin, and all stand aloof dreading to be counted unclean.

The corner of stiff, shining, thick, writing paper she recognised as a part of the sheet on which she had copied Samuel Bamford’s beautiful lines so many months ago—copied (as you perhaps remember) on the blank part of a valentine sent to her by Jem Wilson, in those days when she did not treasure and hoard up everything he had touched, as she would do now.

Gentle, reserved, and prudent herself, never exposed to the trial of being admired for her personal appearance […] Margaret had no sympathy with the temptations to which loveliness, vanity, ambition, or the desire of being admired exposes so many; no sympathy with flirting girls, in short. Then, she had no idea of the strength of conflict between will and principle in some who were differently constituted from herself.

“I almost misdoubt thee, thou’rt so pretty. Well-a-well! It’s the bad ones as have the broken hearts, sure enough; good folk never get utterly cast down, they’ve always getten hope in the Lord; it’s the sinful as bear the bitter, bitter grief in their crushed hearts, poor souls; it’s them we ought, most of all, to pity and help.”

“You’ve set up heroine on your own account, Mary Barton. How did you like standing witness?”