“Man must be pleased; but him to please/ Is woman's pleasure,” writes Coventry Patmore in his tremendously influential poem “The Angel in the House.” The meek, submissive Angel of Patmore’s poem (based on his own angelic wife Emily) would come to serve as a model for wifely behavior across England in the Victorian period. In fact, the image of the Angel in the House was so pervasive that in 1931, Virginia Woolf declared that “killing the Angel in the House [is] part of the occupation of the woman writer.” Much current scholarship seeks to complicate the stable notion of “separate-spheres ideology,” which positions women firmly within the home and men firmly without, in the wider world of commerce. This course, then, will examine how the Victorian domestic novel contends with, reproduces and sometimes challenges, conceptions of the household angel. We will begin the course by reading selections from Patmore’s poem, as well as short selections from Sarah Ellis’ political tract Wives of England, Isabella Beeton’s domestic manual Book of Household Management, and John Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens.” From there we will read several novels, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and North and South and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley.
This course will allow you to develop your close reading and analytical skills, as well as providing you with a critical framework for placing novels in conversation with other genres such as poetry, conduct and domestic manuals and essays. Course requirements include a heavy reading schedule, student-presentations and discussion-leading responsibilities. Because this is a W course, you will have the option of writing (and revising) either two 5-7 page papers or one longer 10-15 page paper.

*Course pack, available at Ave Copy Center, will include readings from Ruskin, Ellis and Beeton, as well as secondary criticism by Mary Poovey, Nancy Armstrong and Elizabeth Langland

Texts:

• Gaskell, Eizabeth. Cranford. Penguin Classics; New edition, April 25, 2006. [978-0141439884]
• North and South. Oxford University Press, USA, November 19, 1998. [978-0192831941]
• Bronte, Charlotte. Shirley. Penguin Classics, September 26, 2006. [978-0141439860]