Well, not really. Just as Grover, the cuddly, cowardly, lovable monster of Sesame Street fame, turned out to be (SPOILER ALERT) the monster he feared was at the end of the book, I'm hoping that I will turn out to be the Victorian angel encased in this blog, bringing insight and wisdom and helpful loving-kindness to all who enter just as Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House was such an inspiring and tender helpmeet to everybody else in the house. I think. The problem with my analogy here is that I haven't really read The Angel in the House--I sort of skimmed it once when I was writing a paper and I wanted to make sure it didn't do some stuff that I was claiming was unique to the text I was writing about. But that's actually the goal of this blog: to read a lot of Victorian literature, and to tell you about it.
When I'm not an angel trapped in a blog (or being dragged out of the blog and killed by feminists, which, you know, is OK too) I'm a third-year PhD student reading for my oral exams. I've been hesitating for two years between specializing in Victorian women's writing and 20th-century American poetry, and when it was time to put together my orals lists I had to make a decision. So I sort of held my nose & jumped in with the Victorians (to mix my house metaphor with a pool metaphor--yikes!). I may or may not regret this decision as I make my way through 120 Victorian & Edwardian classics (& semi-classics/recovery projects/ephemera/trash), plus a few modernist texts to calm my inner proto-Plath, over the next twelve months. You may pass this blog on a street in Hampstead, or in a mew in Kensington, or in a depressingly regular brick-and-ironwork suburb of London, or even amid the gloriously decrepit American Victorian homes of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, and from the cheerful front door overhung with wisteria, or the charming windows sashed with William Morris curtains, or the little picturesque gable in the attic, you may hear my screams of despair, or my cries of delight, or my pleas to be released into the sharp, clear air of the twentieth century, or at least into the excitingly foggy, Marimekko'd interiors of the C20 angel in the house, with her gleaming washing machines and her cigarettes and her Papa's Panic Palace. I don't know. What kind of noises does an angel/madwoman make from inside a nineteenth-century blog?
Let's find out!
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