The Angel in the House

Virginia Woolf famously said, "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer." But this has, I think, often been misunderstood. I have often seen the phrase "The Angel in the House" interpreted to mean something about submission, but this is not a plausible gloss. For one thing, in the original poem by Coventry Patmore, whose title Woolf is adapting, submission plays virtually no role: the word and its cognates only arises twice in the poem, and in both cases is used merely as a secondary image for the headlong character of being in love, and Patmore also makes use of the common lover's trope that the beloved woman is to be served, so the image moves both ways. For another, this is not at all the point Woolf actually draws out:

You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—–she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel.

Woolf goes on to describe the experience of a woman writing a review of a book by a man. She takes up the pen to be critical, and the Angel slips in behind her and whispers, "As a woman you should be sympathetic, tender, tactful, gentle, etc.; you should be pure, not saying what you think but always saying what you ought." It's not submission but this ethereal, unreal purity that is the reason the Angel in the House must be killed by the woman writer; it is an image of woman that is inhuman and threatens to rip out the heart from any woman's writing. It's an image of woman so unreal that, if taken as a standard, it is dishonest:

For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

And this is why 'Angel in the House' is a good label for what Woolf is trying to describe. There really isn't anything dishonest about Patmore's poetry, but the image of woman presented in The Angel in the House is simultaneously real and mythological. It is Patmore's wife, but it is Patmore's wife pitched to cosmic significance, used as a model for a goddess:

But when I look on her and hope
To tell with joy what I admire,
My thoughts lie cramp'd in narrow scope,
Or in the feeble birth expire;
No mystery of well-woven speech,
No simplest phrase of tenderest fall,
No liken'd excellence can reach
Her, thee most excellent of all,
The best half of creation's best,
Its heart to feel, its eye to see,
The crown and complex of the rest,
Its aim and its epitome.
Nay, might I utter my conceit,
'Twere after all a vulgar song,
For she's so simply, subtly sweet,
My deepest rapture does her wrong.
Yet is it now my chosen task
To sing her worth as Maid and Wife;
Nor happier post than this I ask,
To live her laureate all my life.

There is in a sense nothing wrong with this in itself, or, at least, nothing that Woolf herself would have thought wrong with this: this is literary depiction and trope. The problem arises not with the image, but with an image like this becoming a standard to which women are expected to hold themselves to (and, more than this, a standard to which they hold themselves). For it is a lover's fantasy, a romantic myth, a pretty painting by a man who wants to laud the excellences of his wife; it is not a woman, and it is something no woman can actually be. It's all the difference between serving as a model for a painting of Aphrodite and expecting yourself to be Aphrodite. But Woolf notes that something like this image, not perhaps Patmore's own but something closely analogous, is taken not merely as a picture for which a woman can be a model, but as the standard for what a woman should be. It becomes not merely art that they can inspire but the state to which they are expected to aspire. And no one can hold themselves to such a standard without dissimulation. You should be pure -- more pure by far than any woman can be; and if that's the standard of what a woman is to be, well, what option is there but lies and deceit? It will tear the honest heart out of what you do.

So the woman writer must kill the Angel in the House, this standard of purity whispering in her ear, and be -- what? Woolf doesn't think the answer is easy at all. We'd naturally say that she should just be a human woman. But Woolf thinks this a superficial answer:

I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

After all, we are talking about a standard for what a woman should be. The Angel in the House can't be that standard. But merely take that away and you don't have a woman who is as she should be. You either have a woman who doesn't know what it is to which she can aspire, or who finds herself faced with yet another unreal phantom standard which must yet again be slain:

These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.

Linkable Thinkables

* The 79th Philosophers' Carnival is up at "Possibly Philosophy"

* Timothy Burke analyzes the slow (and in the future, possibly swift) decline of higher education. Miriam Burstein discusses Burke's analysis at "The Little Professor".

* A post with some interesting discussion (incl. in the comments) on perceptions of masculinity and femininity in women, at "Feminist Philosphers": The Doc Marten Vote.

* Bonnie Mann, Beauvoir and the Question of a Woman's Point of View

* An opinion column arguing that network theory is a useful tool for understanding the current credit woes.

* Music and the Enlightenment at "Philosophers' Zone". There was also a recent episode on Frankenstein and Romanticism, although I found that one a bit disappointing.

* A review of Anne Rice's Called Out of Darkness at "Flos Carmeli"

* The ten highest-earning authors

* I don't think it's quite comforting, but apparently academia is a mess all the world over.

Logic-Chopping

As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That is where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could have done, without his knowing the stuff he reels of at table every day: 'a crocodile seized hold of a baby,' says he, 'and promised to give it back if its father could answer'--the Lord knows what; or how, 'day being, night cannot be'; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say somehow or other, till there we are with horns on our heads!

Lucian of Samosata, Hermotimus. In this passage (supposedly a father complaining to a teacher), we see Lucian skewering the Stoic notion of good philosophy, suggesting that it neglects ethical behavior and amounts to nothing more than tiresome logic-chopping, resulting in students are worse than they were before they began to study. This is not really a new charge (cf. Aristophanes's mockery of the Socratics in The Clouds.) The problems identified here, however, are not caricatures: they were really discussed.

(1) The Crocodile Paradox. A crocodile seizes a baby on the banks of a river, but being a sophist says to the mother, "If you can accurately predict what I will do, I will return the child without eating it, but if you guess wrong, I will keep and eat it." To this, the mother replies, "You will keep and eat it." The crocodile says, "Aha! I cannot give the child back, because if I do, you will have predicted falsely. But if you predict falsely, I keep and eat it." "Ah," said the mother. "But you cannot keep and eat my baby, because if you do, I will have accurately predicted what you will do, and therefore you must return the child without eating it."

(2) Day and Night. The Greek is ambiguous between "Since it is day, it cannot be night" and "If day exists, night cannot exist."

(3) Horns. If you haven't lost a thing, you have it. You haven't lost your horns, have you? So you have them.

The complaint, then, boils down to the complaint that people who go to study philosophy end up really learning just how to twist words and arguments. Socrates had complained of the Sophists that they studied rhetoric not because it made them better, but because it gave them power -- the power to bully others. But the study of philosophy, Lucian suggests in the person of the exasperated father, is liable to the same abuse:

[A]nd if his mother asks him why he talks such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the 'stuff' pat off, there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings.

One could, I imagine, provide an updated version of the complaint here. "It would be wonderful if my child actually learned from you how to be a wiser person. But what we get when he sits down to talk with us is just a long list of bizarre science fiction and fairy tales, about splitting people, about rooms that speak Chinese, about places that have water that's not water and you's that aren't you, about people who know everything about colors that they've never seen, and Lord knows what; and if we argue anything, he always twists our argument, and if we say anything, he always squints at us and tells us we need to define our terms because he doesn't understand what we mean. And if we tell him he's talking nonsense, he talks airily of how we lack critical thinking skills, or fail to understand the value of being skeptical of assumptions, or are simply being irrational." And one wonders what the response would be that would be fundamentally different from the rather unimpressive one Lucian has the old teacher say.

Fiat Votes

This weekend I was thinking about the remark I made in my previous post about the popular vote:

But more importantly than this, not all of those votes in that tally were counted the same. And it's impossible for them to be, unless all our states had the same election laws and none of those laws allowed much wiggle room for interpretation by vote-counters. But both of these conditions are empirically false. A vote that would count in Miami might not count in Denver; and a vote that would not count in Los Angeles might have counted in Roswell, New Mexico. We are not using the same ballots. We are not using the same means of voting. Our votes are not counted according to the same laws, nor according to the same methods. And the reason is clear and explicit: we are not voting as a nation, we are voting as a state. In principle, my vote should count the same, to the extent humanly possible, as every other citizen in my state. If it's not, that's a sign that the state election laws need revision. But my vote is, strictly speaking, incommensurable with the vote of someone in a completely different state. We can only be treated as doing exactly the same thing by abstracting from a number of important differences.

Not only do I think this is true, I think it is true for reasons related to a feature of voting that is usually not noted, namely,that what actually gets tallied in a popular vote is not the vote you put in but a unit of exchange. That is, the government, through its election law, establishes by fiat a type of vote that is linked to certain standards of exchange. If this, this, and that condition are met, a punch on a paper ballot gets exchanged for this legal vote. If such-and-such obtains, an electronic entry gets exchanged for this legal vote. And so forth. If a state allows, say, punched paper ballots, electronic entries, and mail-in fill-in ballots, this is entirely arbitrary: it could just as easily deny any of these legitimacy. By allowing them, it says, "If such-and-such conditions are met, your entry gets exchanged for a legal vote, which will be counted in the election"; this legal vote works very much like a specialized kind of money. And it is legal votes, fiat votes, that are counted toward the official tally; and only those that are counted. Your actions in the voting booth receive their power by their exchange value: one mark on a ballot exchanges for one vote of political influence.

Electoral College and the Franchise

In the comments to my last post on the Electoral College, Steven Matheson asked how I would defend the EC against the charge that it is "an arrangement that...is very well designed to disenfranchise about half of the American electorate" and that "the problem is that the votes of the citizens are not equally counted." This is certainly a common complaint against the EC, and would be serious if could be made to stick. I promised to post on the subject again.

However, more and more I'm thinking that I may not understand what's intended by the objection. To be disenfranchised is to have your franchise, i.e., your right as a free citizen, stripped away; in this context the franchise consists in (1) the right to vote as a citizen to contribute to the government; and (2) the right to have that vote counted in a way not discriminatory against my vote, to the extent that this is in fact rationally possible.* But there really isn't any question of anyone's right to vote being stripped away by the EC. So it would have to come down to the question of my vote not being discriminated against. But no one's vote is discriminated against by the Electoral College: the Electoral College doesn't handle the popular vote, the details of which are handled by state election laws (and Congress in the case of DC). Well, one could argue that this is not the case with Puerto Rico and other territories that lack representation in the Electoral College, to the extent that they cannot be represented by the Electors of states, but I take it that this is not the point of the objection. The popular vote is taken; I have the right to vote, my vote is counted equally according to state election law, assuming that the law is not itself discriminatory and is followed, and thus my franchise is preserved.

What is intended must be something else, and it has something to do with conflating the two distinct stages of our election process. We have a popular vote to determine "in such Manner as the Legislature [of the State] may direct" our slate of Electors for the Electoral College. The Electors then choose the President. Now the slate of Electors varies from state to state, since the number of Electors is determined by the number of that state's representatives in Congress. But how this is supposed to affect my franchise, assuming that my state's election laws are not themselves bad, is not something I really see. And if it's my state's election laws that are bad, it's the state election laws that need changing, not the EC.

I suspect that the real complaint here is that my vote is not a direct determinant of the choice of the President. But this is not really a complaint about franchise; one might as well argue that we are disenfranchised every time Congress votes, since our vote (for the representative) didn't directly determine the vote for the particular legislation on the table.

It's possible, too, that there's a sort of illusion created by the fact that the press tallies up national popular vote numbers. If you do that, it looks like all those votes are counted equally. This however is an illusion; and the national popular vote tally is a fiction -- a useful fiction for certain purposes, but a fiction nonetheless. For one thing, the tally ignores the margin of uncertainty in the election, which can be massive. But more importantly than this, not all of those votes in that tally were counted the same. And it's impossible for them to be, unless all our states had the same election laws and none of those laws allowed much wiggle room for interpretation by vote-counters. But both of these conditions are empirically false. A vote that would count in Miami might not count in Denver; and a vote that would not count in Los Angeles might have counted in Roswell, New Mexico. We are not using the same ballots. We are not using the same means of voting. Our votes are not counted according to the same laws, nor according to the same methods. And the reason is clear and explicit: we are not voting as a nation, we are voting as a state. In principle, my vote should count the same, to the extent humanly possible, as every other citizen in my state. If it's not, that's a sign that the state election laws need revision. But my vote is, strictly speaking, incommensurable with the vote of someone in a completely different state. We can only be treated as doing exactly the same thing by abstracting from a number of important differences. And this doesn't affect my franchise, either.

So I suppose I need more information about what the objection is supposed to be. So what is the real issue here?
____
* The qualification is due to the fact that there may be accidents, etc., that are unavoidable. In any sufficiently large popular election there will in fact be a rather massive margin of uncertainty due to accidents; this is not practically avoidable, since there are too many possible causes of accidents. It's possible, for instance, that my vote doesn't register for some reason, by sheer accident (e.g., I didn't punch off enough of the chad, or there was a computer glitch, or the paper ballot got stuck to something and was never discovered, or what have you). My franchise doesn't protect against this, but it does protect against deliberate failure or refusal to register my vote, and it does protect (indirectly) against radical negligence in the registering of votes.

Then the Gods of the Market Tumbled

A word to the wise is sufficient....

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Thrasycles the Philosopher

He has plenty to say in his cups--he is then at his best in that kind--upon temperance and decorum; he is full of these when his potations have reduced him to ridiculous stuttering. Next the wine disagrees with him, and at last he is carried out of the room, holding on with all his might to the flute-girl. Take him sober, for that matter, and you will hardly find his match at lying, effrontery or avarice. He is facile princeps of flatterers, perjury sits on his tongue-tip, imposture goes before him, and shamelessness is his good comrade; oh, he is a most ingenious piece of work, finished at all points, a multum in parvo.

Lucian of Samosata, Timon the Misanthrope