Candidate Number: 1804888 To what extent did Victorian women conform to the image of the 'angel in the house'? The image of the 'angel' is more complex than one might initially assume. It would be incor- rect to claim that women were not domestically orientated, yet this should not be immediately asso- ciated with the idea of the 'angel in the house'. The image of the domesticated angel implies inno- cence and exclusion from the outside world, with the only and natural duty of a woman being to permanently commit to providing a comfortable home for her husband and family. For many women of the lower classes, this was not possible to achieve, and for the higher ranks of society, the woman did engage within the outside socio-political realm whilst also fulfilling functions other than household duties. It should not be ignored that women were commonly associated within the home and that the separation of spheres most definitely did exist in certain classes of the Victorian period, however this is no mandate to claim Victorian women as 'angels of the house'. This was a false, traditional view which, in recent years has been frequently contested in historiography, which sup- ports the idea that despite being presented as a domesticated being throughout and after the nine- teenth century, the Victorian women, for factors involving class, wealth and socialisation was most certainly not an 'angel of the house'. To argue that women were mere symbols of domesticity would be an exaggeration. The ide- ology associated with the 'angel in the house' implies the Victorian home as a private haven in which the woman will run the domestic life of the family, thus "opposed to the public sphere of commerce." Contrarily, the reality was that middle-class women actually performed an "extensive" socio-political function within society alongside her domestic duties.1 They were most definitely pursuing a "career of sociability."2 Victorian men were reliant upon their wives to fulfil the ideo- logical task of maintaining the family status from the home. The "domestic sanctuary can be de- coded as a theatre for staging a family's social position" and it was the role of the woman to func- tion as a symbol of the family's social status.3 Women would represent their social ranking through etiquette and dress, by either visiting the homes of friends and acquaintances or attending balls and dinners. Langland discusses how women's control over these "discursive practices" allowed them to possess control over the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about their families and their sta- tus, which led to a middle-class dominance throughout Victorian England. The act of middle and 1 Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 290. 2 Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York: Garland, 1987) p. 302. 3 Nobody's Angel's p. 291. Page 1
Candidate Number: 1804888 upper-class women leaving the domestic sphere for a social reason represents their lack of conform-