Given all our recent discussions about the dang “mommywars” nonsense, I thought it was a good time to bring up Emily’s discussion of the “Angel in the House” trope. Whatever the status of our money earning labors, I think we can all relate to being tormented by this angel. Which is one of the reasons why those ridiculous mommywars still exist. That and, you know, to distract all us women folk with something shiny so we won’t notice as the rug is ever increasingly pulled out from under us. – RD
By EmilyS
It’s been a number of years since I could call myself a scholar, and I know a few of you are accomplished Victorianists, so please feel free to correct and/or supplement the following overview.
The concept of the Angel in the House–the popular Victorian notion of the feminine ideal–has its roots in a poem by Coventry Patmore that was first published in 1854. Patmore’s poem about his (apparently ideal) wife, Emily, didn’t receive much attention when it was first published, but became immensely popular through the rest of the nineteenth century and continued to be influential into the twentieth century. Some of the discussions we’ve had here on FMH indicate that vestiges of this ideal are alive and well in our own culture today (which I don’t think surprises anyone).
So who and what is this Angel? What does she do in her House? Well, essentially, she is patient, kind, longsuffering, completely unselfish, and utterly pure. She is the moral compass of the home, there to charm, chide (gently!), give, and forgive. None of which are precisely bad things to do or be. However, the poem itself, together with the spectre of an ideal woman it raises and the male-female relationship it espouses, is intensely unsettling–at least from today’s perspective. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress’d,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she’s still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
What do you make of that?
Writer Virginia Woolf, in her 1931 essay “Professions for Women” wrote about the Angel in the House, a spectre by which she felt haunted, and described her thus:
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it – in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all – I need not say it – she was pure. (p. 168)
Woolf describes her intense struggle with the influence of this Angel, feeling as though, whenever she sat down to write, the Angel would appear and say such things as:
‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ (pp. 168-170)
In the same essay, Woolf describes how she struggled to murder this Angel who troubled her so, who attempted to keep her from moving beyond the accepted domestic sphere, who attempted to charm and chide (gently!) her into writing only what one might expect a young woman to write. Woolf says the Angel, as a phantom, was much harder to kill than a reality.
We know that this Angel lived strong in literary and popular ideology for quite some time (and I would argue that she is not yet dead). What evidence have you see of the Angel in books and in life? How does this Angel haunt your life today?
(If you’d like the read the poem in its entirety–we’re talking several cantos–you can find it here, along with some related commentary.)
