There is a poem titled “The Angel in the House” by the Victorian writer Coventry Patmore. It describes the 19th-century ideal of womanhood, and it’s been mocked mercilessly by everybody, starting with Virginia Woolf, for how limiting this way of being a woman is.
The battles over the angel in the house are no longer interesting to anybody, but what I find very entertaining is that the Victorian woman in Coventry Patmore’s poem is gigantically more agentic, self-sufficient, and active than what female characters tend to be today. Yes, she only has the domestic sphere open to her, and that’s bad, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I can list three dozen contemporary Spanish novels on the spot where female characters are not managing to keep their own living space clean or livable, have no control over their own mental disposition, let alone anybody else’s, and aggressively mutilate themselves physically and symbolically to be abjectly subservient to men in ways that The Angel in the House would never agree.
And it’s not a fluke. In Spain, novels about women who want to be little girls forever and hate such demands of adulthood as having a job, raising a child, and not living in a pigsty have been published in large numbers for over 30 years. That trend continues unabated with younger writers.
If you take my favorite Victorian novel, Vivien, by W.B. Maxwell (which is chronologically Edwardian but Victorian in everything else), and contrast the female protagonist with the characters of novels about women today, the result is extraordinary. Vivien goes to extreme lengths and demonstrates unimaginable heights of agency to preserve her morality and sexual purity. She makes a living in very harsh conditions, when today’s female characters whine incessantly about the terrible hardship of having to show up at the office by 10 am twice a week. Vivien doesn’t allow any man to mistreat or disrespect her, while today’s female characters plunge into depths of self-abasement over every chance dude who deigns to look in their direction.
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