What Does “the angel in the house” mean?
Definition:
The angel in the house refers to a virtuous, subservient, and loyal housewife to her husband and family.
Origin
This idiom alludes to Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem The Angel in the House, first published in 1854. The poem was a romanticized depiction of Patmore’s first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews, whom he thought to be the ideal woman.
Despite the feminist quest for greater equality between men and women, the idea that a married woman, particularly a mother, should be the angel in the house persists.
The phrase is now commonly used to challenge or criticize this concept of femininity as a model. Feminist writers mocked this image of housewives.
Virginia Woolf ridiculed the angel and ideal of femininity portrayed in the poem. She wrote that “she [the perfect wife] was intensely sympathetic… Above all, she was pure.” She added that the angel in the house
“bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her”
Example(s)
The image of the middle-class woman as the angel in the house might easily be exaggerated.
She established an image of herself as the good mother, the generous angel in the house.