Critics
Later feminist writers have had a less positive view of the Angel. Virginia Woolf satirized the ideal of femininity depicted in the poem, writing that "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) She added that she "bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her" (Woolf, 1966: 2, 285). Nel Noddings views her as "infantile, weak and mindless" (1989: 59). Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a short essay entitled The Extinct Angel in which she described the angel in the house as being as dead as the dodo (Gilman, 1891: 200).
More recently, the feminist folk-rock duo The Story used the title in their album The Angel in the House.
Read more about this topic: The Angel In The House
Famous quotes containing the word critics:
“Learn then what morals critics ought to show,
For ‘tis but half a judge’s task, to know.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer ... writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)