The Angel in the House, in the Blog

So, the weird things about The Angel in the House are

1) you think that because the phrase "the angel in the house" has come to refer, according to Wikipedia, to "women who embodied the Victorian feminine ideal: a wife and mother who was selflessly devoted to her children and submissive to her husband" there will be a lot of stuff in the poem about how great a wife & mother the Angel is, and that you'll get this very domestic portrait of a Victorian marriage. But really the set of poems published in 1854 and 1856 that is commonly referred to as The Angel in the House is all about courtship, not marriage--but

2) sometimes the title The Angel in the House refers to an even larger set of poems, including Patmore's epistolary sequels "Faithful for Ever" (1860) and "The Victories of Love" (1862), which do deal with life after marriage, including its potential disappointments. So when I said I would read The Angel in the House for my orals, did I mean I would read the 1850s poems? Or all the poems? Or what? I compromised by reading the 1850s poems pretty carefully, and kinda skimming the 1860s ones. And this is what I thought!

• O Muse What's Left to Sing About? Following Milton and Wordsworth and probably Virgil, Patmore situates himself in the epic tradition by refusing the traditional subject matter of the epic tradition: he's not going to write about war, or Olympian gods, or man's first disobedience, or like his magical boyhood or whatever, but instead about the "theme unsung" of love, "the first of themes, sung last of all." Milton may disagree that (human) love is the first of themes, and a lot of people may argue that poets have been writing about love long before 1852. But what Patmore means is that no great epics have been written just about love and courtship; while getting the girl is part of the chivalric tradition, so is killing a dragon etc. And early in the poem, he emphasizes the humble, domestic, everyday qualities of his theme: Vaughan, the poem's main character, and the ostensible writer of the lyric/narrative sequence that follows the framing-story prelude, explains that
  
  Mine is no horse with wings, to gain
  The region of the spheral chime;
  He does but drag a rumbling wain,   
  Cheer'd by the coupled bells of rhyme.
  
  So Patmore's claiming there's something rustic, non-cosmpolitan, about his subject matter, as well as about the poem's formal qualities. As you can see, the poem is in iambic tetrameter, a kind of humble, folky meter usually used for ballads or little songs, put into rime croise quatrains, which is also quite ballad-y. So the verse is more singsongy and predictable, and less majestic and stirring, than Milton's or Wordsworth's highly-enjambed blank verse, or even Tennyson's In Memoriam stanzas, which are pretty similar except that the rhyme is embrasse (abba) and not croise (abab), which many critics argue creates a sense of mystery or distance of loss, since you start to forget about the a rhyme by the time it shows up again.  I'm not sure I agree about this sense of loss--really? you guys really forgot about the first line after three lines?--but if you compare the In Memoriam stanza with Patmore's you do feel a difference, and the difference is that Patmore's are more cheerful, homey, predictable. The emphasis on the rumbling wain also suggests a class location for this poem--we suspect this might not be a poem about aristocratic love, but will instead promote those middle-class Victorian values that everyone's always harping about--but this idea is complicated a little by the fact that Vaughan appears to be a totally loaded landowner. It's easier to say that the wain represents an anti-urban perspective, possibly a nostalgia for the cheerful cooperation between landowners and agricultural workers in the face of industrialization that English writers always seem to think existed, and that Elizabeth Gaskell questions in North and South.
  
  There's also a suggestion that the time for writing epics about war is over--war used to be noble, but now that there's the Crimean War we realize war is meaningless and stupid and we should become more peaceful and domestic in both our policy and our poetry:
  
  Too late for song! Who henceforth sings,
  Must fledge his heavenly flight with more
  Song-worthy and heroic things   
  Than hasty, home-destroying war.
  
  So, as in "The Princess" when Tennyson talks about the fossilized mammoth-body of Mars, there's a sense that humanity is progressing beyond war toward peace, but also that sense of belatedness that seems to plague all Victorian poets (but not its novelists; they are the masters of their form)--I kind of want to write a war epic, maybe, but the time for war epics is OVER. I missed it. 
• Anti-feminist or what? Throughout the twentieth century, feminist critics have expressed exasperation and rage and dismay at the idea of the Angel in the House; Virginia Woolf talked about the need to kill the angel in the house, and other feminist writers have taken up that call to arms. You can certainly imagine why--the unselfishness and purity of the ideal Victorian wife also means disenfranchisement and repression and the sexual double standard, and those things are bad. But when I started reading The Angel in the House I wondered how much of the unselfishness and purity Woolf talked about ("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") would really be there. And it is there--a page on the CUNY Web site on Patmore (bizarrely hosted in a directory about Thackeray and Vanity Fair) cites this passage
  
  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.
  
  (it goes on in this vein) but in general I found the antifeminism, or sexism, or whatever you want to call it in Patmore to be pretty complicated. In particular, his continued emphasis on the fact that this subject is worth discussing reminded me of the weird phases feminism has to go through, or--to use a less teleological model--of the ways in which valuing something/someone in one way can devalue it/her in another way, the ways in which we vindicate an underappreciated group or a person or an idea only in order to limit or imprison it. In idealizing women Patmore and his contemporaries are saying that women and the world they inhabit and the things they do and think about are worth writing poems about--not just angsty love sonnets but epics. Honoria (the "angel") and her sisters are worth hanging out with, even if they haven't had an Oxford education and even if they don't have traditionally masculine talents and interests. It's patronizing--Jane Austen probably does more work to vindicate that world just by making it interesting to us, and by making her female characters human rather than by preaching to us about how pure and beautiful Elizabeth Bennett is--and it relies on a separate spheres model that only allows women to be interesting because they're Other, and therefore never allows them to participate in the male sphere--but it's part of the puzzle.
• Structure. Every canto made up of two or three lyric preludes, one of which is often a single, epigrammatic quatrain, treating general topics of love, often totally unrelated to the main narrative, followed by a narrative section that moves the "plot" along. This is actually pretty fun, and it allows Patmore to be annoyingly didactic in some sections, which he must have enjoyed, and to treat some of the problems that accompany love, which he doesn't really do in the narrative sections because Honoria is the perfect woman and their relationship is so great and there is basically no conflict. So interestingly the conflict seems to develop instead in the non-narrative sections, in these lyric or didactic or slightly wicked epigrammatic poems in between the action, which is actually pretty unusual, I think. We think of narrative as the place where conflict develops, but if it's just suggested by these static paratexts, that changes the way we think about "drama" and "conflict" and narrative itself. Way to go, Coventry P!
• More later!