The Angel in the House

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The Angel in the House is a poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and revised up until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular during the nineteenth century and its influence continued well into the twentieth. The poem, an account of Patmore's wife, Emily, whom he believed to be the perfect Victorian wife, described the perfect Victorian wife: "She 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)

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's novel The Awakening, is a literary example of the angel in the house.

Later feminist writers have had a less positive view of the Angel. Nel Noddings views her as "infantile, weak and mindless" (1989: 59) and Virginia Woolf famously wrote that she "bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her" (Woolf, 1966: 2, 285).