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Women's Studies

Journal

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

18th-Century Autobiography

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Beautiful Soul In The Confessional: Crafting The Moral Self In Friederike Helene Unger's Confessions Of A Beautiful Soul Written By Herself, Michelle A. Reyes Oct 2014

The Beautiful Soul In The Confessional: Crafting The Moral Self In Friederike Helene Unger's Confessions Of A Beautiful Soul Written By Herself, Michelle A. Reyes

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article examines how Unger’s Confessions of a Beautiful Soul written by Herself creates a new model of moral acquisition. This model finds its place between religious morality and moral performance, calling for the novel’s protagonist, Mirabella, to cultivate a moral self through the spiritual practice of reading. Such a model still revolves around moral transformation, but it is no longer of her soul, but rather her thoughts; that is, Mirabella must first collect various depictions of morality from a wide scope of literature, then choose from these which ones she deems as of greatest importance to her, namely virginity …