Coventry Patmore was a Victorian English poet most known for his poem, “The Angel in the House” published in 1854. Coventry Patmore based “The Angel in the House” on his wife, Emily, whom he thought was a perfect model for his idea on the “ideal feminine”. The Victorian woman as described in “The Angel in the House” is a devoted wife and perfect mother. Patmore’s depiction of the Victorian woman is that she is selfless, obedient, and submissive. Passive ownership is seen throughout the poem. Patmore shows this passive form of ownership in the way he writes about the conversation the speaker is having with his wife. “How proud she always was/ To feel how proud he was of her!”(Patmore lines 73-74), Patmore does not individualize the speaker’s wife instead she is deemed happy as long as her husband is happy with her. “The Angel in the House” did not become popular until after a few years it was published. In a review from The Edinburg Review, Aubrey De Vere explores Patmore’s narrative execution of the ideal Victorian home. “The ‘Angel in the House’ is a tale in verse, the hero of which sings the wooing and winning of his bride. The interest of the poem is studiously rendered independent of vicissitudes; the merit of it consists entirely in its careful and ingenious execution. Such a mode of treatment, while it increases the difficulty of the performance, in proportion as it foregoes the excitements derived from romantic adventure, is doubtless necessitated by the author’s desire to illustrate ordinary, not exceptional, modern life.” (De Vere, The Edinburg Review, p.331).It was evident in De Vere’s criticism that the idea that women should be domesticated was a common way of life in Victorian times.  Natasha Moore’s Article, The Realism of “The Angel in the House”: Coventry Patmore’s Poem Reconsidered,dives into the lack of concern for the “woman question” which she describes as “… the nature of women’s intellect, character and role within society in relation(inevitably) to that of men”. Natasha Moore dives into the criticism of De Vere, “The result is a deliberate and, as de Vere acknowledges, high disciplined blandness of plot…”. De Vere describes the plot of the poem, as an “ordinary” life seeing that the only issue is the lack of creativity in the plot disregarding the of middle-class Victorian women. The 4B movement in Korea takes Patmore’s “ideal” woman and deconstructs her. Korean women have deconstructed the epitome of “The Angel” by rejecting traditional roles. According to an article in The Cut, “ In December of that year[2016], as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman( it has since slid to .78,the lowest in the world)…” (Sussman 2023), women in Korea have clipped the wings of the “Angel” and have started to dismantle the patriarchal society that Patmore has justified.

Work Cited

Primary Source: 

De Vere, Aubrey. "Review of the Angel in the House." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Laurie Lanzen Harris, vol. 9, Gale, 1985. Gale Literature Criticism, link-gale-com.proxy.ulib.uits.iu.edu/apps/doc/HTQPAV672318116/LCO?u=iulib_iupui&sid=bookmark-LCO&xid=4cb7bc40. Accessed 2 May 2024. Originally published in The Edinburgh Review, vol. 107, no. 217, Jan. 1858, pp. 121-133.

Secondary source:

Moore, Natasha. “THE REALISM OF ‘THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE’: COVENTRY PATMORE’S POEM RECONSIDERED.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24577269. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Sussman, A. L. (2023, March 8). A World Without Men: Inside South Korea’s 4B movement. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html