The Angel in the House

The title is taken from a popular poem, a panegyric to marital bliss from the Victorian male's perspective, written by Coventry Patmore and first published in 1854. (It was reprinted in 1896 and its popularity--second only to Tennyson's "Idylls of the King"--was in part a response by conservatives to the growing feminist movement.) The wife is described as "devout/Her countenance angelical.../Her modesty, her chiefest grace.../In mind and manners how discreet.../How amiable and innocent.../Her will's indomitably bent/On mere submissiveness to him."

For me, this describes Mrs. Ramsay.  I don't know that Woolf consciously meant to portray Mrs. Ramsay as the Angel however. In a paper she read to the Women's Service League on January 31, 1931, titled "Professions for Women," Woolf describes the Angel in the House, in part as a parody of Patmore's poem: "She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily...Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel."

Woolf's problem as a writer was that this "phantom" got in the way and tried to guide her writing, whispering to her: "'My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.'"  Woolf's solution to the problem was to kill the Angel: "I took up the inkpot and flung it at her." "Had I not killed her she would have killed me."

In Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay's daughters want to rebel against the Angel's philosophy (chapter I, page 7): "She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severly about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose--could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other."

In the next sentence, however, her daughters honor their mother's "strange severity, her extreme courtesy."  Woolf is portraying the complicated relationship between mother and daughters, representing the Victorian generation and the Modern generation. This portrayal is another theme that Woolf is suggesting from her post World War I perspective. Many of her generation blamed their parents' generation for that war. However, they also recognized the strengths of the Victorians and we'll see many examples of this conflict in the novel.