Killing the angel: George Eliot, Virginia Wolff and the angel in the house

Abstract

Both Virginia Woolf and George Eliot have been the subject of a great deal of feminist criticism, and in the process have frequently been attacked for not taking up in their fiction the feminist concerns that both have presented in some of their non-fiction. In examining Middlemarch and To the Lighthouse , this thesis takes the position that Eliot and Woolf in fact did much toward subverting patriarchal conceptions of women particularly through their treatment of the chief ideal of femininity during the Victorian age: the Angel in the House , who was eulogized in Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. The Angel was by definition submissive and selfless or ego-less; lacking ambition and accepting her inherent inferiority to the male, she found her total expression and fulfillment in the family. The question of whether woman was inherently submissive and self-sacrificing and in all ways inferior to man was especially crucial to the female artist , for the Angel was the very antithesis of the artistic character: the Angel's chief characteristic is selflessness; to write at all is to claim a subject position at odds with the notion of selflessness. This thesis contends that through revision , subversion and deconstruction, Eliot and Woolf probe the limits and possibilities of the Angel as an ideal of womanhood, revealing not only commitment to the major feminist concerns of their day, but even subversion of dominant patriarchal constructs. The thesis also explores the ways in which Eliot and Woolf's strategies vary because of the different assumptions about identity and the nature of reality associated with realism and modernism.