Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Killing the Angel in the House: Virginia Woolf,
D. H. Lawrence, and the Boundaries of Sex and Gender
by Susan Reid
Virginia Woolf famously condemned the Angel in the House as the enemy of female
creativity and although it is now a critical commonplace that she killed her
Angel in To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf felt she had yet to solve the problem
of “telling the truth about [her] experiences as a body” (DM 241). While her dilemma
has already received much critical attention, this essay focuses on comparable diffi culties
in the writing of D. H. Lawrence, who also killed his Angel/mother in Sons and Lovers
(1913). Although Lawrence is notorious for writing about the body, his attempts to
convey embodied experience are laden with ambiguity and contradictions. For example,
Woolf herself observed of Sons and Lovers that “bodies become incandescent,” “possessed
of a transcendental signifi cance,” with the eff ect that “stability is never reached” and there
can be no bringing “the separate parts into a unity” (CE1 354). Th is essay will illustrate a
tendency towards transcendence in works by both writers and relate this to the authors’
ambivalence towards the fi gure of the Angel in the House. For despite their disparagement
of the Angel as a fi gure which contained women within an ideal of selfl ess domesticity and
maternity, writers like Woolf and Lawrence remained attracted to her implied sexlessness
and disembodiment and often created a variation of the Angel ideal in their own fi ction.
In Woolf’s case, this has been characterized by Elaine Showalter as a (hotly contested)
“fl ight into androgyny,” “the sphere of the exile and the eunuch” and a response to “feelings
too hot to handle” (285, 286), while in Lawrence’s case, there has been relatively little
exploration of such ideas. Th is essay, then, explores the extent to which certain texts by
Woolf and Lawrence challenge the boundaries of sex and gender but risk leaving behind
the body for a state of transcendence: a state which seems to foreshadow the androgynous
angel of Luce Irigaray’s writings. In particular, how might their troubling revisions of the
Angel ideal, as an imaginative if not physical combination of “male” and “female,” challenge
conventional thinking about the body?
Despite objections that the Angel in the House has also been done to death by literary
critics, her place in Lawrence’s novels has been oversimplifi ed or simply overlooked.
Her importance in Lawrence’s work suggests that the fi gure loomed also over the working
classes and aff ected men as well as women. Confi ning discussion of the Angel in
the House to issues of “female” creativity and emancipation, however important, has restricted
the debate in terms of modernism more generally and of modernist masculinities
more specifi cally. Lois Cucullu’s recent study, Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern
Culture (2004), is a welcome exception. Cucullu’s analysis of Woolf, E. M. Forster and
James Joyce posits a double-sided attack on domestic ideology, which undermines the
usual assumption that male and female modernists were polar opposites and suggests that
the Victorian legacy of separate “male” and “female” spheres was breaking down, allowing
greater fl uidity of “male” and “female” roles. Cucullu concludes that dethroning the Angel
in the House was one means by which modernist writers established themselves as part