Chelsea Swan

The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore is a Victorian poem that portrayed the ideal wife/woman, and it came to be that “the Angel in the House” was what women of the time were held up to and compared with. She was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure. Patmore holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women. She has no aspirations outside of the house or the raising of her children. Her professional life simply does not exist. She obeys everything the husband tells her, and she dedicates her life to making him happy; she exists to serve others. She has been reduced to the title of wife and mother with few distinguishable features besides these. 

In Professions for women 1931 Woolf states “I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money–shall we say five hundred pounds a year? –so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must–to put it bluntly–tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures.”

When speaking of the body and passions she states that she is still caught short and loses her train of thought as she has been trained to not shock “what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over.” And she goes on to say “These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first–killing the Angel in the House–I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet” From this we can infer that Woolf wished to speak honestly in her writing about such taboo topics as sex, morality, and human relations, but still struggled to break free of society’s norms and the roles she was expected to play. This could have possibly plaid a role in her depression, as we see time and again with women artist. It is starting to become clear to me that each has spoken a little of their truth and as such are in a position of turmoil.