Previously: Heaven Is Missing An Angel.
There are some idioms in this great big English language of ours that sound a great deal more exciting than they have any right to be. “The Angel in the House” is one of them. You’ve almost certainly heard of it, even if it’s not a phrase you find occasion to regularly deploy; you’re on a website for excitable and bookish women.
The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be “the Angel in the House”; 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. The phrase “Angel in the House” comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women.
Believing that his wife Emily was the perfect Victorian wife, he wrote “The Angel in the House” about her (originally published in 1854, revised through 1862). Though it did not receive much attention when it was first published in 1854, it became increasingly popular through the rest of the nineteenth century and continued to be influential into the twentieth century.
What a disappointment! An Angel in the House is nothing more than a fancy title for a cheerful, industrious housewife who represents then-popular middle-class values (all together now: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”), when by rights it should refer to the localized and deeply strange phenomenon of Victorian gentlemen taking angels of the Hosts of the Lord to wife. Picture this: an average middle-class husband and father of mid-19th-century Britain living in constant fear and awe of the terrifying light-beast that constantly sweeps up and down the stairs, shouting “FEAR NOT” at semi-regular intervals.
(An aside: if we think of angels at all in Our Modern Society, our thoughts tend to drift towards square-jawed-looking dudes with eagle wings, or oddly sexualized tattoos, or that one episode of Dr. Who. This is a real shame, because biblical angels are terrifying and inhuman beasts of fire and wheels and animal-faces that blaze across the sky and wrestle patriarchs almost to death. Age, thou hast lost the breed of noble angel representation.)
Picture the befuddled family man as his wife wafts dreamily through the furniture, her robes trailing flames and glory behind her, spinning endlessly around a fiery wheel that hovers just over the dining room table, chanting HOLY HOLY HOLY with a gaping mouth through all hours of the night, never eating or sleeping.
“I say, chaps, has your wife taken to bursting into flame at the hour of the crucifixion and roaring IT IS FINISHED too?”
The poor things would be exhausted. After a long day of Victorian Business, the last thing a harried dadhusband needs is to coax his spouse into a corporeal form long enough for the children to hug something substantial goodnight. He’d stagger through the door, removing his hat as he crossed the threshold, say, “Oh, Ada, you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had at w–” only to be met by a blinding flash of light and a thousand blazing trumpets as she announces, “I BRING YOU TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY.”
“Oh, ah,” he replies weakly. “Splendid. Is there anything for supper?”
“GOD SHALL MAKE HIS COVENANT BETWEEN THOU AND HE, AND HE SHALL MULTIPLY YOUR DESCENDANTS EXCEEDINGLY.”
“Descendants — where are the children, darling?” he would ask hesitatingly, before the four-fold faces of a woman, a lion, an ox and an eagle rotated slowly to fix him with their piercing gaze.
“Do you know,” he’d say, edging slowly toward the door, “I think perhaps I have left the children at work. I had better go look for them there,” and then he became a dot moving fast out toward the horizon.
Very common problem, Victorian house angels. Damned difficult to get rid of them, until Virginia Woolf successfully killed all of them in 1922.
[Images via Wikipedia and Victoriana]
Tags: cosmology, fun with idioms, the angel in the house, victorians
Angel in the house, doling out the psalms
Ready with a healing salve of Gilead’s Balm
Ack, stupid commenting system.
Angel of the house, doling out the psalms
Ready with a healing salve of Gilead’s Balm
Tells a solemn tale, sings an allelu
Husband might prefer a wife who was a shrew
Everybody fears an angel! Holy fire on their breath–
God knows what they’re doing, smothering our patriarchs to death
I just reread A Wind in the Door and was delighted anew at how dang weird the cherubim are.
This sounds like the premise for the best sitcom ever conceived. “Honey, I’m home! What’s for dinner? Awww, fiery wheel again?” “IT IS FINISHED.”
Would also watch/read every second of “Virginia Woolf: Angel Hunter.”
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Vr53QO8wWaQ/T7Es2e1XbyI…
I love this post so much I could cry.
Is Mallory a *gasp* Supernatural fan???? ONE OF US. ONE OF US.
Oh man can we have a SPN thread pleeeeease? I am almost to the end of Season 5 (a late bloomer, I know) and have just started reading slashfic, because obviously.
This is causing me to consider “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton in an unsettling new light.
By the way, did Virginia Woolf learn her angel-killing moves as a girl in China, or…?
I wish I had something clever to say, but really I just love this whole-heartedly.
Samesies.
Me toooooo!
This + the post about shoes in walls makes me think of angels wafting into houses, then slipping off their shoes so they can tiptoe around without waking anybody up.
Pressing this post dreamily to my Victorianist heart. I wish it would go steady with me.
Harpy in the streets, angel in the sheets. BAM.
[By which I obviously mean that my bellowed “IT IS FINISHED” destroys the senses of mere mortals, and that I leave a trail of purifying fire in my wake.]
I am a nurse and have always hated the “nurses are angels” meme. This idea fits way better with my view of nurses as vital, underappreciated badasses rather than subservient altruistic handmaidens. I think I need some fire and trumpets up in my workplace from now on:
“SEPSIS, IT IS FINISHED. LEAVE THESE HALLS AND NEVER DARKEN MY ICU AGAIN!”
“CANCER, RELEASE THY FOUL GRASP ON THOSE LADYPARTS AT ONCE!”
Mallory!!! Can we please have a short story (or novel, really) detailing Virginia Woolf’s angel crusade of 1922? Or is The Toast gradually creating its own sub genre of fan fiction? How meta.
Tangentially related, I posted the “Mallory w miniature horse” pic to Pinterest and its quite possibly my most popular re-pin.
Yes.
I have nothing today except how much I LOVE THIS
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
All angels go by the name Erika, with a K. That’s, like, the first thing you learn in seventh grade transmigration studies.
Thank you for this.
One of my favorite things about this is that there’s a long tradition of human/angel gettin-it-on. Part of the reason for the Flood for which Noah built an Ark was that angels were hella bonin’ human ladies and they were giving birth to GIANTS. I don’t know how a lady would successfully copulate with a spinning wheel of fire with 57 faces and multiple sets of wings, or how dire her human male options would be that she’d turn to THAT, but there you have it. The Angel Of The House used to be a deadbeat dad.
I want to say something about how this is so similar to the Greeks and how gods + mortals = demigods but in the end, it’s all religion giving reasons to things we don’t really know how to explain.
So, there’s that.
If anyone can figure out how to copulate with a wheel of fire with 57 faces and a large number of wings, it is the internet. There is almost certainly a website dedicated to it already. A website other than this one. It’s probably under a paywall.
Can I just say how much more awesome this post is because of the Biblically accurate angels? I appreciate those details so much. I love an accurate, pointed satire, and THIS IS IT. 🙂
What can i say Angel in the house or whatever it is. we dont know exactly,
Many stories are often in circulate in this area
Many stories are often in circulate in this area
I heard lot of stories like spiritual Surrounding of this area.
I heard lot of stories like spiritual Surrounding of this area.
Actually that site is wrong (the phrase “Angel in the House” doesn’t refer to Emily Patmore or her avatar in the poem, Honoria, but to the spirit of love in marriage or something similarly abstract) and The Angel in the House is quite a bit weirder than it gets credit for. It has four big sections and the first half is about the courtship between a very-like-Patmore poet who courts the minister’s daughter who is so perfect. But the entire second half is about a guy Honoria rejected, who goes to sea and marries a sea captain’s daughter, Jane, on the rebound. Jane is convinced she will never be as amazing as Honoria, being small and quirky and working-class, and that Frederick only regards her as a consolation prize but then it turns out they really love each other and that perfection is not required of wives.
And then she dies, because it is a Victorian religious poem, but not before having some really wacky religious visions that don’t seem the slightest bit canonical.
I don’t exactly recommend anyone read the whole poem–it is 275 pages or so and pretty sticky in places–but I always feel the need to correct the mistaken impressions people have about it via Virginia Woolf.
I love this post so much I could cry