MarysLibrary

The Angel in the House

Mrs Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House

First published in 1854, Coventry Patmore's narrative poem, The Angel in the House, hit a Victorian nerve and the woman he described became, as supermodels in fashion magazines are for some of us today, the ideal woman, the woman men wanted for their own.

The Angel was based on Patmore's wife, Emily, who apparently was a very smart and possibly manipulative woman. She had him convinced she lived only for him and was almost abjectly self-sacrificing. Many Victorians, men especially, found this figure of the beautiful, serene, chaste wife irresistible.

Popular as The Angel was in the late 19th century, by the turn of the 20th century this ideal woman was no longer in favor with the literary world. Virginia Woolf: "She [the perfect wife] 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."

It is only because Our Leader at the otherlit online reading group (off-shoot of the Trollope group) asked me to read it and comment that I ever bothered with the poem. Another member of the group knows the poem well and likes it very much, but nonetheless I didn't expect much. So I was surprised at how appealing the narrator is, how much I liked his chosen Angel, and how effective the poem was in making its point that a 19th century woman could be terrifically appealing by being passive. (And of course, knowingly or not, passive-aggressive.)

There is even some humor in Patmore's work. And since it is in the Tennyson manner, it's easy to read, the rhyme and rhythm making it much more approachable than modern poetry. It tells the story of the narrator re-visiting an old friend and falling in love with one of the man's daughters. He courts her and wins her and marries her and lives happily ever after. I actually toyed with giving it four stars, for its combination of enjoyable reading and importance to literary history.

A favorite blog, Anecdotal Evidence

I've been checking in every day or so at the blog, Anecdotal Evidence and it has become one of my favorites. Here's a recent post, fairly typical in its wisdom and apt quotes from wise authors.

The obsession with the new and fashionable is puzzling. The present is a small, provincial, generally backward place as compared to the past, which is vast, generous and filled with the promise of adventure. Who would choose to read Douglas Brinkley or Howard Zinn if Plutarch and Henry Adams are sitting handily on the shelf? Who would choose John Ashbery over Fulke Greville? Foucault over Pascal? Lacan over Burton? My hands are full keeping up with the past. Why fret over the self-consuming present? C.S. Lewis diagnosed the ailment as “this mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones,” and offered this practical advice: 

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should read at least one old one to every three new ones.” 

 

A contemporary of Rogers, William Hazlitt, now a certified author of old books, writes in the same spirit:  

 

“If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

Old Favorites - The Language Wars

Ah the joys of disparaging those who disagree with us about English usage. They seem never to get old. The author of this "History of Proper English," Henry Hitchings, while he tells us repeatedly that he does not take a stand, he's just explaining to us what has happened over the years, is actually quite opinionated. In his opinion there are no valid standards, all standards are artificial (he speaks repeatedly of "bogus" rules), and no one has a right to impose his "standards" on the rest of us. Ebonics, anyone?

On the one hand, this book is so dry I have to keep hand cream by my reading chair. I fell asleep three or four times over the third or fourth page. And if he isn't lively enough in the first few pages to keep even a reader like me awake what can we expect on page 241? On the other hand, there are gems embedded in the sand. I did not know, for instance, that "speakers of Dyirbal in Queensland have traditionally had for all things an everyday word and an alternative one for use in the presence of their mothers-in-law," or that "the Burushaski language spoken in some northern parts of Pakistan distinguishes four genders." (That one threw me a bit. I still haven't worked it out.)

In plugging the value of redundancy, Hitchings contends that "it is the lack of redundancy in mathematics and its teaching that explains why so much maths bewilders so many people." After futzing around for 20 pages he finally defines language. "Language is power." He also says that "'Logic' is often a mask for smugness and jingoism." And that grammatical failings have been associated with moral ones." That last is probably true, but can I trust anything this guy says?

He ticked me off when he stopped his discussion of the validity of using "n't" instead of "not" to lecture America on what he sees as our history of genocide, wars of conquest, imperialism, and I forget what else. (Repetition of these charges tends to do the opposite of convince.) As for the French, Hitchings says that "the main purpose of the Academie Francaise is not to affect the behaviour of French-speakers, but to provide amusement for foreign journalists." Possibly so.

The book is indeed a history of attempts to describe or prescribe grammar and reactions to those attempts and he mostly tells us about the ludicrous mis-statements and frustrated "oughts" and "musts." One grammarian declared in 1762 that "because" was obsolete, and if he's so wrong about that how can he be right to try to standardize spelling and encourage us all to avoid double negatives? There's a name for that illogical assumption but I forget what it is.

I did not know that Joseph Priestly had written a grammar book but as Hitchings implies, why would you listen to a guy who initially called oxygen "dephlogisticated air." He addresses rapidly diverging English English and American English, first mentioned in print in 1663 when it was pointed out that an "ordinary" in America was a tavern whereas in England it was an inn. Things deteriorated from there.

Hitchings is alert for the inconsistencies of people and institutions who/that have taken a position on the descriptive/prescriptive scale. The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, was responsible for untold cases of apoplexy when it came out some years ago with a very lax descriptive edition. If a lot of people use "ain't" then "ain't" is an acceptable word. Here's Hitchings' comment:

". . . it is striking that the editors of The American Heritage Dictionary are responsible for a book with the title 100 Words Almost Everyone Mispronounces. Examples include acumen, chimera and niche. If 'almost everyone' mispronounces them, it follows that almost no one pronounces them 'correctly', so perhaps the supposedly correct pronunciations are close to becoming obsolete." You will be relieved to know that I pronounce them correctly.

Personally, I cringe when people use "whom" when the correct usage (at least for the moment) is "who." When they use "who" for "whom" I don't really care. I answer the phone, "This is she," which usually gets me a moment of silence. I cling bitterly to the difference between lie and lay and a couple of other lost causes, but on the whole I welcome new words from wherever they come (I would be mute without "download," "delta function," "scosh," and "binary.")

But there IS an argument for retaining small distinctions. When "shall" and "will" are interchangeable, "hopefully" is thrown about recklessly, and almost anything can be described as "awesome," we lose subtlety and are less able to communicate fine distinctions. Unfortunately, there are fewer of us trying to do so all the time.

This review was first published back in February of 2012.