Commonplace 150 George & The Man Who Gave Us The Angel In The House. PART ONE
Brooklyn Beckham and Chelsea Clinton can always be proud that their names are associated with celebrated places. But we can assume Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), a particularly dull windbag of a poet touched by the logorrhea stick, was not conceived in that titular West Midlands city forever proudly associated with Lady Godiva click. He might have displayed more humour if he had.
Probably his most remembered work is the epic poem 'The Angel in the House' a song of praise to his ideal woman - wife number one, Emily. Here is a picture of that concept captured in oil paint by friend to the Patmores, John Everett Millais; you can she that she probably was an angel. An angel whose face is much in need of a smile. It is probably worth remembering Satan was an angel, too, and I think I know which one I'd rather have round for tea. That is, as long as he didn't leave sulphur stains all over the Chesterfield.
The Angel In The House was first ejected from Patmore's poetical womb in 1854, but took another eight years to fully form as a finished entity. Which gives you some idea about how tedious it is. Only someone with a massive ego could think their work demanded eight years to finish, especially as it was written with a pen on paper. Not exactly the Sistine Chapel or the Pyramids. Anyhoo, Patmore was a poet who loomed over the nineteenth century. You can tell from his portrait what a good portraitist John Singer Sargent is, and that Patmore feels entitled to his position in the social order which recognises him as a person deserving of a study from the most eminent portraitist of his age. Patmore considered himself an authority on all things Art, particularly poetry, but the visual Arts were not safe from his musings. More of this in PART TWO.
We turn to Jerry Hall (the future Mrs Rupert Murdoch, may her soul rest in peace when she goes) for help here.
Patmore was of the opinion the best way to keep a man was to be an angel in the living room, and angel in the kitchen and an angel in the bedroom. Here is the Wikipedia page for the poem which will, if you so desire to go there, shed some light on it click. And, here is an extract:
The Wife's Tragedy
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| Lady Godiva by John Collier 1897. (Why the horse white? click) |
Probably his most remembered work is the epic poem 'The Angel in the House' a song of praise to his ideal woman - wife number one, Emily. Here is a picture of that concept captured in oil paint by friend to the Patmores, John Everett Millais; you can she that she probably was an angel. An angel whose face is much in need of a smile. It is probably worth remembering Satan was an angel, too, and I think I know which one I'd rather have round for tea. That is, as long as he didn't leave sulphur stains all over the Chesterfield.
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| The Angel, personified. |
Patmore's Angel arrived at a time when the social order was about to be, if not overthrown, then modified. Most men were understandably rattled by the possibility of being in free and open competition with women's minds. That they were physically stronger, there could generally be no doubt, but men knew that women's intellects had never been extensively unleashed on the world before, and Patmore was one of a band of reactionaries who thought women's emancipation would have a negative effect on the lives of men and children. Femininity, he believed, would be transformed into a butch and unsexy variant of monstrous oestrogen wrapped in human ham if women ever got their emancipated rights.
How it must have terrified the Victorian middle class male when he realised he wouldn't stand a chance against the average female mind, especially where the Arts are concerned. George's New Grub Street's Edwin Reardon is a mostly mediocre writer whose wife is well aware of that fact. He suffers writers' block, obviously a metaphor for sexual impotence. But Reardon would prefer her to be blissfully unaware of this fact, or at least, to pretend she is. As with George, it becomes imperative for Edwin to shove the responsibility for his state of mind onto the shoulders of his wife. Amy Reardon thus becomes a ball-breaker of a harriden - well, George's stilted version. He portrays her as a woman too much in love with socialising and with some sort of abnormal, weird love of money and status - as if these two were not the basis of all creative human activity. Alma Frothingham from The Whirlpool suffers the same slow death by George's rampant misogyny. Because, it's all right for a man to want to be wealthy and at the top of the tree, but when a woman wants to be surrounded by nice things and have a financial cushion to fall back on, yet is dependent on a man for her livelihood, then she is seen as a gold-digging shallow spendthrift. George is one of those men who blame a man's failures on a woman. If Amy was a ball-breaker (and to more or less quote Basil Fawlty - she would have had to stitch them back on before she ripped them off) Edwin Reardon wallowed in masochistic misery quite happily, because it wasn't his fault, it was Amy's. Much as George did with both his first and second wives.
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| Evening by James Tissot 1885 |
That is the tragic element here: it's not that Edwin and George lost their creative mojo. It is that both equate creative power with machismo. To lose this is to lose sex superiority. NGS is really George crying out for that dreaded sympathy he craved so forcefully, saying to Edith (his second wife, who may have read the MS ) 'Behind every great man should be an Angel In The House'. . . support me in my genius, you low, witless cow. After all, I pay the bills'. Edith no doubt had the measure of George's work as did Mrs Reardon, but was probably tempted to use the MS to start a fire in the hearth haha ! And Edith seems to be the one with the cojones in their relationship, with George only having the upper hand because of the social bent of the times towards patriarchy and his capacity for earning money - the same two determinators in our own time. Part of his hatred towards her was rooted in the fact she was more of a man than he was!
Women, as we all know, are the carriers of language and culture, and men are the carriers of heavy things; women are good at engaging with the human race and men are good at opening jars. It's the same the world over. Over thousands of years, much energy had gone into suppressing women - and the thought of transferring that energy into something more creative put the willies up the average Victorian man, George and Coventry Patmore, included. In more than one way, the two share quite a bit of common ground. Patmore once wrote:
I have written little but it is all my
best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour
to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity
which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.
George might well have written these words.
We turn to Jerry Hall (the future Mrs Rupert Murdoch, may her soul rest in peace when she goes) for help here.
Patmore was of the opinion the best way to keep a man was to be an angel in the living room, and angel in the kitchen and an angel in the bedroom. Here is the Wikipedia page for the poem which will, if you so desire to go there, shed some light on it click. And, here is an extract:
The Wife's Tragedy
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
And whilst his love has any life,
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
The way he has of treating me
As if 'twas something fine to be
A woman; and appearing not
To notice any faults I've got!
Well, not every house. Woolf is really only speaking about the middle classes. Many of George's novels are about trying to instil/shove/beat this concept of the pure Angel into lower class women. For George, the labouring poor female was alluring in her feistiness and raw sexuality, but she was useless in her very untamed raw energies when introduced into middle class company. Not that he tried to, because he kept both Marianne aka Nell and Edith from meeting too many of his friends and family. In fact, his first two marriages were wrecked on the shallows of this shore, as he tried to bully them both into complying with his stance on how they should behave. Marianne and Edith were reared in a world where women could not afford to be Angels in the Patmore sense, because they ran a great risk of being exploited and taken advantage of. Ironically, it was exploitation that George brought with him to all three of his marriage beds, not love. Wives 1&2 were women who suited his purpose - Marianne because he wanted to trade on having married a working class woman and therefore, demonstrating his bohemian credentials; and Edith, because he was sex-starved, and also needed a whipping post. Wife 3 was George's last ditch attempt at finding a nurse for his final days.
Angels, you see, are delicate and sensitive creatures easily tarnished and ruined by harsh and cruel treatment - that's why they live with god in heaven and rarely come to Earth to mix with men.
JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE COVENTRY PATMORE'S VIEWS ON WILLIAM BLAKE, ROSSETTI, KEATS AND SHELLEY.
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
And whilst his love has any life,
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
And, this:
Mother, it's such a
weary strainThe way he has of treating me
As if 'twas something fine to be
A woman; and appearing not
To notice any faults I've got!
Which is the nub of the problem. On superficial reading, Patmore's poem might seem to be a celebration of women. In reality, it is a means of exoticizing us as unlike men, and inferior to them in all ways except as the role men establish for us. To be feted as mythical - angels, are not real - is insulting. Virginia Woolf, too, had a problem with the sort of female Patmore suggests should be an ideal aspiration for fellow females. Here click, Ms Woolf is quoted as saying of this Angel:
intensely sympathetic.
. . . immensely charming. . . . utterly unselfish. She excelled in the
difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was
chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was
so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to
sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say
it— she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes,
her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its
Angel.
Well, not every house. Woolf is really only speaking about the middle classes. Many of George's novels are about trying to instil/shove/beat this concept of the pure Angel into lower class women. For George, the labouring poor female was alluring in her feistiness and raw sexuality, but she was useless in her very untamed raw energies when introduced into middle class company. Not that he tried to, because he kept both Marianne aka Nell and Edith from meeting too many of his friends and family. In fact, his first two marriages were wrecked on the shallows of this shore, as he tried to bully them both into complying with his stance on how they should behave. Marianne and Edith were reared in a world where women could not afford to be Angels in the Patmore sense, because they ran a great risk of being exploited and taken advantage of. Ironically, it was exploitation that George brought with him to all three of his marriage beds, not love. Wives 1&2 were women who suited his purpose - Marianne because he wanted to trade on having married a working class woman and therefore, demonstrating his bohemian credentials; and Edith, because he was sex-starved, and also needed a whipping post. Wife 3 was George's last ditch attempt at finding a nurse for his final days.
Angels, you see, are delicate and sensitive creatures easily tarnished and ruined by harsh and cruel treatment - that's why they live with god in heaven and rarely come to Earth to mix with men.
JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE COVENTRY PATMORE'S VIEWS ON WILLIAM BLAKE, ROSSETTI, KEATS AND SHELLEY.
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