For Bourgeois, the image of the fallen woman had associations with helplessness or failure. The idea first emerged in a painting she made in the 1940s. Returning to the subject in the early 1980s, Bourgeois produced this small sculpture in carved marble, and later cast it in bronze. Without arms or legs, the woman’s body has been turned into a club handle. This image appears threatening but may also suggest immobility and isolation. The ‘fallen woman’ in nineteenth-century Victorian culture was a marginalised figure, the victim of hypocritical moral society, used and abandoned to her fate.