The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was an English poet and critic best known for The Angel in the House, his narrative poem about an ideal happy marriage.-Youth:...

, first published in 1854 and expanded up until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular during the later nineteenth century and its influence continued well into the twentieth. The poem was an idealised account of Patmore's courtship of his first wife, Emily, whom he believed to be the perfect woman.

The poem

The poem is in two main parts, but was originally published in four instalments. The first was published with the main title in 1854. It was followed by "The Espousals" (1856), "Faithful for Ever" (1860), and "The Victories of Love" (1862). The latter two instalments are effectively a separate poem, related to the main text.

The first two instalments form a single coherent poem. It begins with a preface in which the poet, called Felix Vaughan in the book, tells his wife that he is going to write a long poem about her. The narrative then begins with an account of the poet's youth when he meets Honoria Churchill, the woman who is to become his wife. It proceeds in a series of short lyrics, representing Felix's reflections on his beloved, and on the nature of ideal femininity. There are also lyrics written from the point of view of Honoria. These reflective and lyrical sections are set into a narrative of the growing relationship between the couple, the emergence of a rival suitor, Honoria's cousin Frederick, who is rejected in favour of Felix, and the couple's eventual marriage.

The final two instalments, known together by the title The Victories of Love, are written mostly from the point of view of Frederick, the rejected suitor, who marries another woman, Jane, after his rejection by Honoria. Unlike the first part, this section is in the form of an epistolary novel

Epistolary novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...

. Each poem is presented as a letter from one character to another. The initial letters, between Frederick and his mother, reveal that Frederick admits to feeling dissatisfied with his wife, especially whenever he meets his first love and her husband. The poem describes his struggle to overcome these feelings and to concentrate all his love on his wife, who also expresses her own doubts in letters to her mother. The other characters express their anxieties and hopes about the relationship between Frederick and Jane. Honoria helps Jane by her own example, and in the end Frederick overcomes his doubts and feels complete devotion to his wife.

The ideal

Following the publication of Patmore's poem, the term angel in the house came to be used in reference to women who embodied the Victorian feminine ideal: a wife and mother who was selflessly devoted to her children and submissive to her husband. Adèle Ratignolle, a character in Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty , was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century....

's novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 The Awakening

The Awakening (novel)

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899 . Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers around Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the...

, is a literary example of the angel in the house.

Another example is in the What Katy Did

What Katy Did

What Katy Did is a children's book written by Susan Coolidge, the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, which was published in 1872. It follows the adventures of a twelve-year-old American girl, Katy Carr, and her family who live in the fictional lakeside Ohio town of Burnet in the 1860s...

novels of Susan Coolidge

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey was an American children's author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge.-Background:...

 about a pre-pubescent tomboy who becomes a paraplegic. They are based on her own life in 19th Century America. Katy eventually walks again, but not before she learns to become the "angel in the house", that is, the socially acceptable "ideal" of docile womanhood.

In Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

's The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. It first appeared in the magazine Belgravia, a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly installments from January to December 1878...

, Thomasin Yeobright is also described as 'the angel of the house'. Thomasin is the antithesis to Hardy's main female protagonist, Eustacia Vye, who is the opposite of the Victorian female 'ideal'.

Images were also created with this name, including Millais' portrait of Patmore's wife Emily, and Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....

's photograph of an enraptured girl.

Critics

Later feminist writers have had a less positive view of the Angel. Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 satirized the ideal of femininity depicted in the poem, writing that "She [the perfect wife] was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it ... Above all, she was pure." (Woolf, 1966: 2, 285) She added that she "bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her" (Woolf, 1966: 2, 285). Nel Noddings

Nel Noddings

Nel Noddings is an American feminist, educationalist, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.-Biography:...

 views her as "infantile, weak and mindless" (1989: 59). Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform...

 wrote a short essay entitled The Extinct Angel in which she described the angel in the house as being as dead as the dodo

Dodo

The dodo was a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall, weighing about , living on fruit, and nesting on the ground....

 (Gilman, 1891: 200).

More recently, the feminist folk-rock duo The Story

The Story (band)

The Story was an early 1990s folk-rock duo composed of Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball.-History:The folk-pop duo The Story consisted of Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball, who first met each other in 1981 while freshmen at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts...

 used the title in their album The Angel in the House

The Angel in the House (album)

The Angel in the House is the second album of folk-rock duo The Story.- Track listing :All songs written by Jonatha Brooke except where mentioned.# So Much Mine - 4:18# Missing Person Afternoon - 3:34# The Gilded Cage - 6:04...

.

Preface

There does, beyond desert, befall

The first of themes, sung last of all.

In green and undiscover'd ground,

Yet near where many others sing

I have the very well-head found

Whence gushes the Pierian Spring.

Then she: 'What is it, Dear? The Life

Of Arthur, or Jerusalem's Fall?'

'Neither: your gentle self, my Wife,

And love, that grows from one to all

The Wife's Tragedy

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;

Jane to her mother

Mother, it's such a weary strain

The way he has of treating me

As if 'twas something fine to be

A woman; and appearing not

To notice any faults I've got!

External links

• Text of "The Angel in the House" by Coventry Patmore
• Definition of angel in the house
• [] 1993 The Angel In The House full-length recording by The Story.
• Cameron's "The Angel in the House", 1871