The Ideal
Following the publication of Patmore's poem, the term angel in the house came to be used in reference to women who embodied the Victorian feminine ideal: a wife and mother who was selflessly devoted to her children and submissive to her husband. Adèle Ratignolle, a character in Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, is a literary example of the angel in the house.
Another example is in the What Katy Did novels of Susan Coolidge about a pre-pubescent tomboy who becomes a paraplegic. They are based on her own life in 19th Century America. Katy eventually walks again, but not before she learns to become the "angel in the house", that is, the socially acceptable "ideal" of docile womanhood.
In Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Thomasin Yeobright is also described as 'the angel of the house'. Thomasin is the antithesis to Hardy's main female protagonist, Eustacia Vye, who is the opposite of the Victorian female 'ideal'.
Images were also created with this name, including Millais' portrait of Patmore's wife Emily, and Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of an enraptured girl.
Read more about this topic: The Angel In The House
Famous quotes containing the word ideal:
“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things ... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)