ABSTRACT
One of the most striking characteristics of victorian literature is its preoccupation with an ideal of womanhood that we have come to call, after the title of Coventry Patmore’s most famous poem, the angel in the house. As Patmore’s title suggests, the angel brings a more than mortal purity to the home that she at once creates and sanctifies, for which her mate consequently regards her with a sentimental, essentially religious reverence. Historians of Victorian society have accounted for the period’s idealization of woman by examining the century’s religious and economic crises. 1 Religious doubt and the viciously competitive atmosphere of business combined to threaten the stability of many traditional religious and moral values. Experiencing at once the breakdown of faith and the dehumanizing pressure of the marketplace, many Victorian writers relocated those values in the home and in the woman who was its center. It was she who could create a sanctuary both from the anxieties of modern life and for those values no longer confirmed by religious faith or relevant to modern business. Furthermore, the horror that many Victorian writers felt at the crassness of the marketplace, the fear that Philistines, or worse, the populace, were coming to dominate the tone of society, led to a renewed emphasis on a notion of gentility which contained a courtly reverence for women. The need to maintain this reverence appeared even more urgent in the face of social forces that seemed to threaten it: the agitation for women’s rights, the increase in prostitution, even the debilitating influence of French literature.
